Date Thesis Awarded
5-2018
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
English
Advisor
Simon Joyce
Committee Members
Colleen Kennedy
Suzanne Raitt
Eliot Dudik
Abstract
Though photography offers a claim to objectivity that writing and painting cannot ostensibly equal, Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and Orlando: A Biography argue that the camera is not an unmediated form of documentation.Three Guineas’ images of a patriarchal society and Orlando’s more personal portraits reflect their photographers’ inherent subjectivity, and the photographs’ placement in and relationship with the texts further question the veracity of representation. Whereas Three Guineas derives its power from the contrast between reproduced and described photographs, Orlando uses images to present a counter-narrative contradicting the purported reliability of biographical accounts.
Recommended Citation
Solly, Meilan, "Virginia Woolf and the 'Objective' Camera: The Relationship Between Text and Image in Three Guineas and Orlando" (2018). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 1166.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/1166
