Merging the female into the male, in the language of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The case of The Waves and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This article explores the suggestion made by some scholars and researchers according to whom it is more appropriate to speak of gender-preferential rather than of gender exclusive features in the use women and men make of language, since members of both sexes are endowed with the same neuro-cognitive apparatus to acquire it. By comparing passages from two modernist novels, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the article discusses whether and how features usually associated with female authors may merge with those preferentially associated with male ones