Abstract
Motherhood was a charged issue both before and during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime. Victorian women, emerging from domesticity, employed the politics of ‘maternalism’ (as identified by Seth Koven and Sonya Michel) to influence healthcare initiatives and social policy. The aftermath of the Great War, popularisation of science, expanding female workforce and changing class structure, all affected how mothers were perceived and valued. At the same time, contraceptives and family planning changed the practicalities of motherhood, feeding public debates about population decline, reproductive choice and civic duty. Woolf engaged with themes of motherhood as a socially and politically motivated writer and a woman. The premature death of her mother, not having children, and the competition she felt with her sister Vanessa can also be traced in the links she draws between maternity, femininity, self-worth and the creative process.Adopting a methodology that combines close readings of her fiction, essays and personal writing with biographical and historical research, this thesis explores how public and personal matters of motherhood informed Woolf’s work. The first chapter, about pacifism and war, will examine how Woolf employed matronly characters to critique wartime nationalism. The second, on the eugenics movement, investigates how Woolf echoed contemporary maternal discourse – engaging with Marie Stopes’ utopian maternity in A Room of One’s Own to make a point about how artists create. The final chapter will consider how Woolf linked the themes of motherhood and food, using alimentary practices to probe the persistent questions of class that pervaded her writing.
| Date of Award | 1 Jul 2020 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Anna Snaith (Supervisor) & Clara Jones (Supervisor) |