Abstract

This study identifies Virginia Woolf’s manifestation of literature that the “masterpieces are not single and solitary births” as a concept of literary associative aesthetics. In the process of interpreting Woolf’s progressive perspective in A Room of One’s Own, this article reads her representative novels that embed the principle of the organic unity of literature by exploring the formatively hermeneutic study of the keywords such as ‘rooms’ and ‘short-sighted.’ This conceptualization of reading literature as an organic unity presumes literary historicity in which the contextual framework becomes the horizon for analyzing connective meaning in the texts, particularly in its relationship between Woolf’s literature and the 19th century female writers such as Jane Austen and George Eliot. In reading Mrs. Dalloway in the context of examining a room as a public sphere, this article confirms mothers’ lives in rooms as the very demonstration of valuable social activities. In the second half of this article, Woolf’s notion of literature as an organic unity will be discussed through the relational examples of George Eliot’s short-sighted Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch and Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse by interpreting the female characters’ weaker eye-sight as an allegorical social vision. The article concludes that the reader who owns literary intuition that can discover the symbolic keywords which function as a pivotal role in achieving the literary totality that connects each masterpiece.

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