Date Thesis Awarded
5-2018
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
English
Advisor
Robert Mulcahy
Committee Members
Christy Burns
Francesca Sawaya
Suzanne Raitt
Alexander Prokhorov
Abstract
In her seminal 1929 feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf bemoans the lack of a utopian “woman’s sentence” vis-à-vis the “men’s sentence” that has dominated literature and from which no woman writer has successfully managed to free herself. Indeed, the aforementioned quotes illustrate a yearning for a nonexistent, or long-forgotten, language that expresses the linguistically inexpressible. In my thesis, I propose that both the English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf and the Russian poet and artist Elena Guro establish the optimal creative state as independent of the burden of masculine language. In their respective works The Waves (1931) and The Little Camels of the Sky (Nebesnye verbliuzhata) (1914, hereafter referred to as Little Camels), Woolf and Guro challenge the authority of the masculine sentence and propose a means of reclaiming language by estranging the linguistic subject, deconstructing feminine archetypes, and ultimately, by anticipating the French feminist idea of l’écriture féminine.
Recommended Citation
Orr, Bailey, "The Forgotten Beauty of the Feminine: Elena Guro’s The Little Camels of the Sky, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and the Holy Grail of the “Woman’s Sentence”" (2018). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 1259.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/1259
