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Virginia Woolf's Response to the Female Artist Confronting the Patriarchy

Callender, Kristin
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1702420050808517

Abstract Details

2023, Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.
With her body of work, Virginia Woolf joins a host of female novelists decrying the lack of power that women in general wield in a patriarchal society. Specifically, her novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando provide a hopeful response to the dismal depiction of the female artist in Victorian literature, namely Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Because of its subject matter of domestic abuse, unfortunately the experience of too many women in a society in which husbands are given too much power, Tenant was not regarded with respect in Brontë's lifetime. The novel so obviously portrays a woman without power in such dire circumstances it is indeed unsettling for most audiences. However, in her novel, Brontë’s inventive techniques of using embedded and nonlinear narration to bring this mistreatment to light illustrates how the unbalance of power debilitated the expression of the female artist in her character Helen Graham. Although there is no direct evidence that Woolf read Anne Brontë’s novel, Woolf responds to this hopeless depiction with modernist experimental and more nuanced strategies such as free indirect style and interrupted narration to paint a much more hopeful picture of the possibility of the female artist confronting the power of the patriarchy with success and freedom of expression. In doing so, she upends Victorian tropes and expected narrative structure to provide a scathing critique of the Victorian patriarchal culture in which she, herself, was raised.
Rachel Carnell (Advisor)
Frederick Karem (Committee Member)
Adam Sonstegard (Committee Member)
72 p.
Literature; Modern Literature
Virginia Woolf; Anne Brontë; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; To the Lighthouse; Orlando; Patriarchy; Artist; Angel in the House; Free Indirect Discourse; Free Indirect Style; Victorian; Modernist

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Callender, K. (2023). Virginia Woolf's Response to the Female Artist Confronting the Patriarchy [Master's thesis, Cleveland State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1702420050808517

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Callender, Kristin. Virginia Woolf's Response to the Female Artist Confronting the Patriarchy. 2023. Cleveland State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1702420050808517.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Callender, Kristin. "Virginia Woolf's Response to the Female Artist Confronting the Patriarchy." Master's thesis, Cleveland State University, 2023. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1702420050808517

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

csu1702420050808517
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© 2023, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Cleveland State University and OhioLINK.