The Politics of Space and Place in Virginia Woolf’s \u3cem\u3eThe Years\u3c/em\u3e, \u3cem\u3eThree Guineas\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eThe Pargiters\u3c/em\u3e

A critique of the social construction of space was fundamental to Virginia Woolf\u27s overall feminist project of decentering patriarchal and imperial values. In A Room of One\u27s Own (1929) Woolf famously emphasized that financial independence and a private space were vital to female creativity. But Woolf was concerned with the politics of space throughout her writing, an aspect of her thought that has not been widely addressed. My thesis examines Woolf\u27s ongoing preoccupation with spatiality in two closely related works of her late career, The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). In these texts, Woolf interrogates the cultural construction of private and public realms as mutually exclusive, with domestic space being women\u27s proper place and public space as the territory of men. Some critics stress Woolf\u27s portrayal of the imbrication of urban space and individual consciousness in The Years, but tend to overlook the action of the English countryside and its influence on subjectivity. Also overlooked by critics is the way that the deployment of textual space in Three Guineas, and the intertextual connections between The Years and Three Guineas-which were originally conceived of as one text entitled The Pargiters-develop Woolf\u27s critique of the politics of space. My argument draws on key texts of sociology, geography and cultural theory that address the construction of space and place. Henri Lefebvre\u27s The Production of Space (1974), Doreen Massey\u27s Space, Place and Gender (1994), and Susan Stanford Friedman\u27s Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998) frame my discussion and help to show how The Years and Three Guineas unsettle dominant spatial dualisms: public/private, here/there, home/abroad, and inside/outside. In doing so these works foreground the relationship between subjectivity and space and demonstrate how space is produced through ideology and practice. In addition I show how Woolf\u27s dramatization of social spaces as mobile and interpenetrating illustrates the interface between constructions of family, nation, and empire