Modernist Aesthetics of "Home" in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier

LIST OF LITERATURE

1. 
   Auden, W. H. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1989.
   
2. 
   Blair, Emily. Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2007.
   
3. 
   Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Uncanny. New York:
   
4. 
   Routledge, 1992.
   
5. 
   Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
   
6. 
   Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns
   
7. 
   Hopkins UP, 1996.
   
8. 
   Cohen, Deborah Rae. Remapping the Homefront. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2002.
   
9. 
   Collins, Jo, and John Jervis, eds. Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties.
   
10. 
    Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
    
11. 
    Dickinson, Emily. “To the bright east she flies.” 10 Sept. 2009. .
    
12. 
    Ellis, Steve. Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.
    
13. 
    Ellison, David. Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
    
14. 
    UP, 2001
    
15. 
    Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
    
16. 
    Finch, Anne. “To the Nightingale.” 17 August 2009 < http://www.poetryfoundation.org/ archive/poem.html?id=177124>.
    
17. 
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    Palgrave, 2002.
    
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    Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
    
20. 
    Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1961.
    
21. 
    Frye, Northrop. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1970.
    

22. 
    Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.
    
23. 
    Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
    
24. 
    Glendinning, Victoria. Rebecca West: A Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.
    
25. 
    Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Trans. Roy Sellars. 10 March 2009
    
26. 
    .
    
27. 
    Joyce, Simon. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2007.
    
28. 
    Lassner, Phyllis. “Rebecca West’s Shadowy Other.” Rebecca West Today. Ed. Bernard
    
29. 
    Schweizer. Newark, NJ: U of Delaware P, 2006.
    
30. 
    Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1996.
    
31. 
    Levenback, Karen L. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1999.
    
32. 
    Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.
    
33. 
    Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. 15 September 2009
    

1 “νóστοιο τελος γλυκεριο” (22.323). The phrase suggests both a general return and a homecoming from battle (in the original, the Trojan War), particularly one that promises to be “sweet met.” See Liddell and Scott.

2 Implicit in the invocation of “green England” is Northrop Frye’s figurative “green world,” which bridges the literary and historical “unity of man and physical nature” (Frye 130). What in Shakespeare suggested “magic, sleep and dreams, and enchanted forests or houses” represented for Blake, Shelley, and later Romantics “Eden in the unfallen world . . . the same place as England’s green and pleasant land where Christ also walked” (211-12). ³ See Lee, et al.

3 A recurrent example is Auden’s “Out on the lawn I lie in bed,” which progresses from consolation in Arcadian spaces to anger at their inadequacy. Rae writes, “We see [Auden] in the end indicting the escape into pastoral he had anticipated protecting him. He criticizes the ‘creepered wall’ of the garden and the ‘river-dreams’ that distract the privileged classes from ‘wretchedness.’ He envisions pastoral ‘privacy’ ceding to the floodwaters of social revolution” (227).

4 “The political meanings of women’s writing cannot be theorized in an a priori fashion, by appealing to an inherent relationship between gender and a specific linguistic or literary form, but can be addressed only by relating the diverse forms of women’s writing to the cultural and ideological processes shaping the effects and potential limits of literary production at historically specific contexts” (Felski 48)

5 “Fashioning what she is, / Fathoming what she was, / We deem we dream – / And that dissolves the days / Through which existence strays / Homeless at home” (Dickinson 1).

6 For a history of the romantic relationship between West and Wells, see Ray.

7 A Turkish mercenary (OED). Misspelled “Bashibagonk” in the original letter. See Malcolm.

8 West was immensely influenced by Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and her 1915 review of the novel in the Daily News was “virtually a sketch of [The Return of the Soldier].” See Rollyson, Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, 24-8.

9 For information about Woolf’s activities during the war, see Lee; for West, see Rollyson and Glendinning.

10 Caruth is responding primarily to the third and fifth chapters of Jacques Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.