Literature and Politics

From the perspective of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, place allows for the “very possibility of being the sort of creature that can engage with the world, that can think about the world, and that can find itself in the world.” Based on lived everyday experience, place becomes a centre of meaning as opposed to a geographic co-ordinate.  For the modernist writer, Virginia Woolf, place is an intersubjective and “culturally defined” site that both reflects and reinforces societal constructs such as those relating to gender and class. In this paper I will suggest ways in which Woolf uses place—particularly the public and private within the city of London—as a means by which to examine and interrogate the binary opposition of insider/outsider.  Throughout Woolf’s writing, architectural features such as buildings, rooms, objects, and doors become tools that highlight this dichotomy.  Jacques Derrida proposes that, “in order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world. There is no house or interior without a door or windows.” Fundamental to the thinking and re-thinking of notions of the insider and outsider is an understanding of home, an idea that also incorporates temporally and culturally fluid understandings of public and private space. In Being and Time, Heidegger suggests that the subject’s primordial state is one of homelessness, that is, a sense of displacement and alienation. Hana Wirth-Nesher argues that, within the modern urban novel, setting “serves as counterpart for character, representing the character’s search for his or her ‘true’ identity, for an appropriate ‘home’.”

Emma Simone is a third year PhD candidate in the Department of English at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research involves an interdisciplinary approach to the work of the British modernist writer, Virginia Woolf, and focuses on affinities between Woolf and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger.