Graduation Year
2022
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Reader 1
Aaron Matz
Reader 2
Tessie Prakas
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2022 Ella M Gardner
Abstract
Woolf believed that there are “two spheres: the novel; and life,” and her “great difficulty is the usual one—how to adjust the two worlds” (A Writer’s Diary 203, 208). But with this “great difficulty” comes great possibility; by pointing to the separation of these two spheres within and throughout her works, Woolf finds ways to create meaning from this border. Even as Woolf’s novels deal with the tragic restrictions of social conventions, the insurmountable barriers to communication and intimacy, the petty insignificance of human life and death within the context of an uncaring universe, the abstraction of both their form and their content holds out the possibility of consolation—for the characters, for the author, for the reader.
Recommended Citation
Murdock Gardner, Ella, "Virginia Woolf and the Consolations of Abstraction" (2022). Scripps Senior Theses. 1943.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1943
