Abstract
Many of the earliest critical discussions of Virginia Woolf suppressed her antifascist politics and polemical feminism, charging her with elitism and a fondness for the ivory tower. In an effort to counter such a limited portrait, much “second-wave” feminist discourse since the mid-1970s has, conversely, celebrated Woolf’s progressive political views without spending sufficient energy interrogating their lacunae. In this essay I hope to join current efforts toward more nuanced inquiry into Woolf’s often conflicting and sometimes troubling political positions.1 In particular, this essay offers a corrective to a lingering critical reluctance to investigate Woolf’s antisemitism.2 Such reluctance may result in part from an unexamined assumption, common in post-Holocaust conceptualizations of the early twentieth century, that those who protested fascism must also have harbored steadfast sympathy with Jews. It may also be the case that because Eliot’s clear distaste for Jews and Pound’s virulent antisemitism are more obviously germane to their work, Woolf’s less dramatic antipathy has seemed incidental. A willingness to study Woolf’s antisemitism, however, is essential for understanding her intellectual and political concerns in the 1930s. Analyzing antisemitism’s role in these concerns will allow us to map rich intersections among Woolf’s anxieties about Jews, her worries about social, intellectual and imaginative freedom, and, indeed, her antifascist commitments.
Date of this Version
2002
Recommended Citation
Linett, Maren, "The Jew in the Bath: Imperiled Imagination in Woolf's The Years" (2002). Department of English Faculty Publications. Paper 13.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/englpubs/13
Comments
This is the author-accepted manuscript of Linett, M. (2002). The Jew in the Bath: Imperiled Imagination in Woolf's The Years. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48(2), 341-361. Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press, the version of record is available at DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2002.0031.