1928–31: Androgyny and the End of the Novel

Abstract

Having rejected the ’materialism’ of the Edwardian novel, what had Virginia Woolf put in its place? Her novels turned away from those aspects of life and personality which had seemed to most previous writers to be of greatest importance. Forster, for example, for all his appreciation of her novels, was unsure about her ability to portray character.1 In Forster’s novels the focus is on moral development and moral agency, all those aspects of personality that are involved in learning how to behave, to deliberate and choose, to conduct oneself wisely among other people. His characters are in the midst of practical life. These aspects of personality are more or less entirely absent from Virginia Woolfs fiction. She represents people as held in place by the invisible forces of social life (patriarchal family, gender roles, empire, militaristic culture, and so on). She does not emphasise moments of moral enlightenment or decisive choice, and the way that these develop character. Instead she turns her attention in two different directions, towards the unconscious and towards the transcendent. Through her fiction the world is viewed with this ’dual vision’ (a phrase that Woolf used in characterising the work of Proust).