본문 바로가기
  • Home

Rereading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway through the Subaltern Concept of Gayatri Spivak

최상이 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examines foreclosure of a Native Informant and a subaltern as discussed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present and rereads Mrs. Dalloway through her reading of Jane Eyre and its criticisms. Spivak notices the Native Informant who should be foreclosed in the process of Sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Also she points out the same pattern in the bourgeois feminist critiques that celebrate Jane’s achievement as an individual female. According to Spivak, Jane is accepted into the patriarchical family law through Bertha Mason who is a foreclosed subaltern female by madness. She accuses the feminist critiques for being complicit in imperial axiomatism, not discussing the relation between Jane and Bertha. While there is no third-world character in Mrs. Dalloway written by a first-world female author, Virginia Woolf is deeply related to imperialism. I attempt to apply the Sublime in reading Mrs. Dalloway, especially focusing on the double discussion between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. I claim that Clarissa contemplates Septimus’s suicide through the dynamic of Sublime and that Septimus, a shell-shocked veteran, is not simply a Clarissa’s double, but rather a foreclosed subaltern. Therefore, this study reveals the comparability between the double discussions in Mrs. Dalloway and Spivak’s subaltern argument.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.