Folded in this triple melody : intercorporeality in the work of Virginia Woolf

Abstract

This thesis explores representations of intercorporeality in a selection of Virginia Woolf’s fiction and non-fiction, in conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on phenomenology and ontology. This study offers a counter to readings of Woolf as a writer who prioritises interiority, and instead considers underlying patterns of relationality that are grounded in embodied experience. I discuss three main areas of focus: visual perception in an interpersonal world, the grounding of artistic creation in an openness to the human and nonhuman world, and an intercorporeal relationality expressed through narrative and textual kinships. The study provides a brief overview of connections which may be drawn between Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and Woolf’s writing in Chapter 1. The main spheres of discussion are then investigated in three further chapters: through close readings of some of Woolf’s short stories and Mrs Dalloway alongside Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Chapter 2); both writers’ essays on aesthetics and Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay’s relationships with each other and the environments they inhabit in To the Lighthouse (Chapter 3); and finally, Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible and Woolf’s The Waves (Chapter 4). Although the chapters of this study are delimited by textual focus, they trace an evolution and gradual intensification of the three thematic threads. In doing so, I highlight an enduring interest in the conceptualisation of intercorporeality as an open and evolving interweaving of perception and expression that may enable an ethical framework celebrating a simultaneous unity and difference of all beings.