‘A tear formed, a tear fell’: Virginia Woolf’s Elegiac Landscapes
This paper discusses the relation between landscape and affect in the works of Virginia Woolf, by tracing the influence of pastoral elegy in her writing. The most beautiful pastoral elegies in the English language echo throughout her works: ‘Lycidas’ in the first section of A Room of One’s Own; ‘Ado...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2018-12-01
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| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/4553 |
| Summary: | This paper discusses the relation between landscape and affect in the works of Virginia Woolf, by tracing the influence of pastoral elegy in her writing. The most beautiful pastoral elegies in the English language echo throughout her works: ‘Lycidas’ in the first section of A Room of One’s Own; ‘Adonais’ in The Voyage Out and Mrs Dalloway; ‘Thyrsis’ in The Waves. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf drew on and reinterpreted some of the conventions of the genre to redefine the landscape/soundscape as a poetic medium for the circulation and metaphoric capture of affects, transitory states of being, abstract blocks of sensation, unattached to any specific subject, but related to fragments of the traditional landscape of elegy and tapping into the figurative pools of collective memory. Seasonal changes, which mark the passing of time and the work of mourning in pastoral elegies, are transposed in Virginia Woolf’s novel as micro-variations in light and shade, gradual changes in the weather, the quality of the air, or the intensity of colours, which convey an image of the elegiac landscape, not as a fixed pictorial frame, but as process, the process through which the conversion of loss into artistic creation can be effected. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |