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Abstract Virginia Woolf's Reading History and Writing Herstory Lim, HyunJoo This dissertation focuses on Virginia Woolf as a modernist feminist. Woolf Criticism is generally polarized between modernism aesthetics and feminism politics. This dissertation aims to interpret Woolf's writing as interwove...

Abstract Virginia Woolf's Reading History and Writing Herstory Lim, HyunJoo This dissertation focuses on Virginia Woolf as a modernist feminist. Woolf Criticism is generally polarized between modernism aesthetics and feminism politics. This dissertation aims to interpret Woolf's writing as interwoven feminism politics and modernism aesthetics. Woolf's two essays, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" and "Modern Fiction" are read as a kind of modernist manifesto. In fact, Woolf had been appreciated as a canonized female modernist until 1970s. Given that modernism is a challenge to Victorian patriarchal norms, Woolf's modernism can also be considered as an experimental attempt to free the novel from the Victorian conventions. Woolf's modernist writing shows her effort to capture the inscrutable minuteness within the mind. Woolf reveals her characters' elusive mind with infinite subtlety in her novels. We can find irresistible fascination in Woolf's writing of multiple and complex landscape of the mind. Despite Woolf's obvious position as a modernist, Woolf is different from other male modernists. Woolf always pays great attention to the position of women in society. This interest is equivalent to Woolf's recognition of the difficulty in establishing her own identity as a female writer in/against the patriarchal tradition. Woolf's insightful analysis of the male-centered culture originates with her personal experience. Woolf describes her individual experience as not only a private memory but also a continuum of collective experience thousands of women in history share. Woolf's criticism on the male-centered culture leads to reading history as his story, man's story. Hence the necessity of writing herstory as woman's story. Woolf's effort to write herstory puts an emphasis on re-reading/writing history. Woolf's writing herstory as rewriting history attempts to resuscitate the lost tradition of women's culture. So Woolf dreams of the resurrection of Judith Shakespeare in A Room of One' Own and expresses her faith in the female community, what Woolf calls "the Outsiders' Society" in Three Guineas. While A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas are representative essays to show Woolf's feminism politics, Woolf's feminism can also be found in early short stories. This dissertation tries to search for the root of Woolf's feminism from her early short stories. Woolf's early short stories, "Phyllis and Rosamond", "Mysterious Case of Miss V.", "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn" are the proofs that Woolf tried to write the untold history of obscure women's lives from the beginning of her writing. In Woolf's posthumous autobiographical essay, "A Sketch of the Past", reconstruction of memory means not merely personal memory but historical reconstruction of omitted and forgotten women's lives in history. The journey of searching for lost time stands for Woolf's personal longing for her lost mother and the resurrection of the forgotten women's lives. So her search for lost time is the symbol of Woolf's feminism. When we consider Woolf's feminism as writing herstory, we can also find her feminism in reading history. Woolf's reading history is not only a personal reading but also a culture criticism. For Woolf, history can be a re-read/written fiction and a constant dialogue between past and present. It seems to Woolf that writing history is rarely different from making fiction, for history itself is not the objective representation of the past events but the interpretative representation of the historian. Therefore Woolf's identity as a woman writer can be found in writing herstory. Woolf's search for herstory and woman's language is the common interest and struggle repeated in her writing.