Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Bodily Territories: Lust, Landscape And The Struggle For Female Space In Woolf's The Voyage Out And Atwood's Surfacing, Tealia Deberry

Graduate English Association New Voices Conference 2007

In her lengthy critical essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf inquires into the absence of the female genius in the literary canon. As she mourns this lack of feminine representation on her own bookshelves—“looking about the shelves for books that were not there”—Woolf questions the opposition between what she refers to as the lyrically “suggestive” female sentence, and the dominant, subject driven, “I” of the male sentence (AROO, 45, 98). Woolf carves out a creative space for feminine narrative and focuses primarily on the landscape that is dominated by the “I”. This “I” representing both the masculine epic …