Date of Graduation

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MA

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

English

Committee Chair

Lisa Weihman

Committee Member

Marilyn Francus

Committee Member

Adam Komisaruk

Abstract

A moment that fills a person with awe, terror, agony, and silence is the simplest way to describe Edmund Burke s conception of the sublime, which stems from the Greek rhetorician, Longinus, and undergoes philosophical critique by Immanuel Kant. The male poets of the British Romantic period, like William Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley, and John Keats, created a literary conversation critiquing Burke s binary of the beautiful and the sublime. Although the sublime is often grounded among these poets, the contemporary critic, Anne K. Mellor, argues for a feminist reading of the sublime, which centers around female writers of the Romantic period particularly those writing the gothic novel. In this thesis, I expand upon Mellor s theoretical reading of the feminine sublime by exploring its presence in Virginia Woolf s modern novel Between the Acts. I argue that Woolf s novel critiques the masculine Tradition of Letters in British culture through the representation of three female characters Isa Oliver, Lucy Swithin, and Miss La Trobe. Woolf employs this critique by bringing the ultimately feminine myth of Philomela and the nightingale into conversation with the masculine co-optation of the feminine nightingale s voice through John Keats s Ode to a Nightingale and Algernon Charles Swinburne s Itylus. I assert that Woolf s Between the Acts comments on the inability of female artists to produce art because of a reliance on a masculine literary tradition, which is specifically explored through the use of a feminine sublime in relation to Miss La Trobe and the pageant s matriarchal reading of a patriarchal history. In the i end, I argue that Woolf deconstructs both the matriarchal and patriarchal readings of history and their relationship to the sublime in order to emphasize an alternate solution one that exposes a reliance on neither tradition in favor of a androgynous literary form.

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