The Shadows of Woolf’s Universe: Physics, Rhetorical Pattern-formation, and Inclinations toward Pantheistic Idealism in the Novels of Virginia Woolf

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship between mathematics, physics, rhetorical strategies, and pantheistic tendencies in expression in Virginia Woolf’s novels. I argue that the regularity and consistency of the world that was being comprehended by science and mathematics was embodied in rhetorical pattern-formation in the discourse of Woolf’s novels. The introductory chapter explores prior Woolf scholarship and sets forth how scientific, mathematical, and religious influences shaped Woolf’s writerly practice. In the second chapter, I argue that Woolf’s novels possess a powerfully apophatic dimension, overdetermining sites of sublime and metaphysical experience through semantic anomalies. In the third chapter, I argue that what I call energetic channeling of emotive frequencies, along with Woolf’s embodiment of such emotive energy in tropes of light and luminosity, contribute to her impulses to express pantheistic ideals. It emerged out of the convergence between modern physics and the legacies of Christian mysticism. In the fourth chapter, I argue that Woolf’s appropriation of the Homeric simile allows her to dampen the narrators’ perceptions of the diegetic worlds. In doing so, she draws attention to the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of human experience. In the fifth chapter, I analyse patterns in the rhetoric of Woolf's novels, in the form of repeated proximities, and quantify them with sample proportions. Woolf holds religious, scientific, and mathematical discourses in a tense equilibrium in her mind and I claim that those discordant ways of thinking made their way into Woolf’s rhetoric, as semi-conscious thematic concerns with pantheism.