Frames, Shapes and Selves: Towards the Idea of Space in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction
Frames, Shapes and Selves: Towards the Idea of Space in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses affinities between physical and mental spaces in selected works of Virginia Woolf in connection with the main philosophical and aesthetic problems posed by the changes in modernist representation of character with respect to space and place. In doing so, the argument assesses Woolf ’ s in-human humanism in short stories like “Kew Gardens,” “The Fascination of the Pool” or “A Simple Melody,” assessing the interrelation between states of mind and the material universe, the way in which consciousness accommodates various material “admixtures” and how subjectivity “escapes” from subject to its own outside. Using the post-Cartesian aspects of Henri Bergson ’ s philosophy (pure perception, role of memory, philosophy of space and duration), Gaston Bachelard ’ s thought on the “cogito of the dreamer,” and Miroslav Petříček ’ s theory of framing and frames, the argument examines how the instability of these newly constructed cavernous subjectivities enables interaction with space, place and materiality. This interaction challenges traditional ideas of unity of self, personal identity and autonomous agency, resulting in new, essentially modernist representations of reality. Drawing on a number of themes from visual arts, the discussion connects these psychological factors with the notions of solidity and fluidity, stability and instability of material reality and individual objects, moving bodies or things in space.

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