Études Britanniques Contemporaines (Mar 2020)
Woolf’s Exploration of —Combinations: Feminism in Night and Day
Abstract
Night and Day (1919) has been neglected by both readers and critics, especially if the reception of the novel is compared to that of other Woolfian writings. Despite recent revaluations of Woolf’s less canonical works, it has continuously been read as a second-rate novel. Marriage is the object of the heroines’ concern and the demanding principle of the novel’s structure. One is even more surprised perhaps that the novel features very infrequently in Woolf’s feminist criticism, the seminal work by Rachel Bowlby for example referring to Night and Day only in passing (Bowlby). And yet, Night and Day is the only novel in which the main character is involved in the Suffragette movement, despite the fact that Woolf’s own contribution to the movement is well-known and could have been expected to represent a more significant bulk in her fiction. If some of the critics’ reservations have been re-discussed recently, such as the place of the Great War (Briggs; Pelan), all critics seem to agree that the structure of the novel, if not its material, is traditional, disappointing, and ultimately not feminist enough. So what is it that resists feminism in Woolf’s novel and why is exception construed as negative rather than positive? This paper argues that Woolf’s novel exposes contradictions that are not judged feminist because they do not reflect a solid political engagement in which the heroines would be regarded as spokeswomen for the cause. However, these contradictions are very much feminist if feminism is understood as a question, instead of being a solution, posed to the possibility for women to be involved in some collective action, and if feminism lies in finding a way of defining woman outside the patriarchal norms. This reverberates back to the question of the inclusion of Woolf in the tradition of realist writers, and women’s writing.
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