"Nothing New Under the Sun": Woolf and Joyce, the New Woman and the New Man

The answer to the first of the Sphinx's riddles — "which two sisters are born, the first to the second and the second to the first?"— is also the title of Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day. The parallactic structure of the riddle is duplicated in the composition of the text itself, which emphasizes a triangular structure of meaning. Poised on the threshold of modernism, James Joyce's Ulysses also stresses a parallactic structure of meaning, the necessity of seeing together, seeing the past in the present with the future. In texts published at the end of the Great War and set in the prewar period, Woolf and Joyce expose the oppressive nature of the fictions that human interactions revolve upon in order to sever the wounded attachments of the reader and writer to these past fictions, introduce new possibilities of meaning, and thus alter the trajectory of social narratives. The figures of the New Woman and New Man in these threshold texts serve as allegories of the struggle of the modernist writer to break from the tyrannies of the literary andsocial past, signified by the glaring sun of the Day, and step into an unwritten future, the Night. The ambivalence of the artist poised above reductive binarisms is portrayed in the failed connections between characters, the frustration of the New Woman and new womanly man, and the ambiguous conclusions of both texts. The parallactic visions of these texts ultimately suggest that literary and social change are as interdependent as night and day. In their critique of heterosexual romance and Oedipal quest fictions, both texts insist upon parallax — holding two conflicting visions simultaneously without absolutely bridging the visions, thus leaving open a space of possibility.Woolf and Joyce particularly invoke the New Woman in order to emphasize how nostalgia for romance fictions and the absolutism of realism obscure alternative trajectories of human relations. Their re-visions of the New Woman (or new womanly man) and New Man, set against explicit evocations of New Woman fiction, Henrik Ibsen's drama, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's romanticism, depict the frustration of feminists, socialists, and artists of the First World War period. In addition to designating a liminal space marking the possibility of change, a threshold may signify a stumbling block, and in a period of tragic disappointments for feminism and socialism, Woolf and Joyce depicted how nostalgia for romance fictions and the appropriation of the New Woman and New Man by patriarchal discourses proved a stumbling block that threatened to trip the artist into a revivification of these fictions. The New Man in these texts signifies a threshold in terms of an obstacle rather than a liminal space of possibility; he is depicted as bound by romantic and masculinist notions of the solitary artist, thus perpetuating women's objectification as muse and monster. A maternal figure, representative of the patriarchal cult of domesticity that entraps men and women in nostalgia for gender conventions, colludes with the New Man. In Woolf's text, the mother and the New Man revivify the heterosexual romance plot; in Joyce's text, an avenging angel in the house haunts the New Man and revivifies the Oedipal quest plot. The New Woman and new womanly man of these texts, in seeking and feeling sympathy across differences, are figures of possibility that cross boundaries in order to connect.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Womens Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

2001

Author dc:creator

• Hindrichs, Cheryl Lynn

Contributors dc:contributor

• Knowles, Sebastian

• Womens Studies
• Literature

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1363854562

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1363854562