Pursuing the Phantom in Woolf’s Aesthetics of Survival

Abstract

By reading the phantoms and survivors of Virginia Woolf’s novels of the 1920s and early 1930s, Chap. 4 of Haunting Modernisms argues that speaking to ghosts became increasingly central to Woolf’s representation of continuous mourning and surviving after loss. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the thwarted conversations between the shell-shocked Septimus and the apparition of the hallucinatory ghost of Evans are argued to resonate with T.S. Eliot’s exorcism of the ethical visitant in The Waste Land (1922). In To the Lighthouse (1927) the relationship between mourner and the departed is more nuanced: an attitude to loss that is particularly evident in the artist Lily’s prolonged and ethically aware mourning of Mrs. Ramsay. Resonating with Derrida’s understanding of impossible or interminable mourning both Lily and Bernard of Woolf’s later novel The Waves (1931) can be read as modernist survivors who are sensitive to the ethical registers and transformative potential of haunting. Woolf’s haunting modernisms develop to reflect both her attitudes to art and her fiction’s handling of surviving after loss.