Virginia Woolf and literary objects: description, philosophy, and affect

This thesis offers a philosophical and affective history of the subject-object encounter in Virginia Woolf’s writings, examining how she negotiates the relationship of the (writing) subject to objects. It extends recent literary materialism(s) that emphasise how thoughts and subjects are entangled with things. The desire for such intimacy emerges in pertinent trends in Woolf’s intellectual milieu – the late-Victorian and Edwardian approach to objects as signifiers of personality, continental theories of empathy, and the continuing allure of Romantic unity between self and world. However, Woolf is ambivalent about subject-object intimacy because objects tacitly inculcate a doctrine of the “real” by reifying social forms; furthermore, many traditions of subject-object intimacy cloak a radical subjectivism that threatens the object qua object by defining the object as a private sense-impression. Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, powerfully summarised how eighteenth-century empiricism’s emphasis on psycho-sensory privacy led to a rejection of mind-independent objects that, in turn, ultimately attenuates language, time and intersubjectivity. I argue that empiricism’s lonely worlds of experience and subject-object intimacy both raise the problem of radical subjectivism. Skilfully negotiating this dilemma, Woolf replaces subject-object intimacy with impersonality, suggesting that the ontological autonomy of objects is necessary to intellectual freedom, acknowledgement of otherness, and the alleviation of human loneliness. Distance and difference between subjects and objects becomes the ground of Woolf’s ethics, as shared attention to objects becomes a synecdoche for a shareable world. Subjectification and art itself are reformulated in terms of a non-appropriative “pointing towards” that recentres and demythologises the artist’s role by gesturing at the limits of description. This study uncovers complex dialogues with contemporary authors, theorists, and philosophers and illuminates the significance of objects to larger modernist preoccupations. Furthermore, it foregrounds the difficult relationship between materiality, language, and representation, contributing towards a theoretical reappraisal of objects in fiction.