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Virginia Woolf in the house of love: Compulsory heterosexuality in the years

1997; Routledge; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09589236.1997.9960669

1465-3869

Clare Hanson,

Irish and British Studies

Abstract This paper argues for a re‐reading of one of Woolf's most neglected novels, The Years, in the light of recent theoretical work on the performance of gender. It is suggested that in The Years, Woolf offers a powerful analysis and critique of the production of gender identity within the matrix of family life. Using Sophocles’ Antigone (itself a meditation on the relationship between the individual and the polis) as an intertext, Woolf dramatises what Judith Butler has described as the melancholy rite of passage whereby (hetero)sexual gender identity is constructed through a mapping onto the body of an ‘other’ whose existence is in a sense disavowed. This identity can only be subverted by parodic repetition of dominant discourse, seen in The Years in the speech of Sara Pargiter.