Corporate Personhood and Modernist “Impersonality”: Woolf's Drama

Abstract

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, corporations rapidly multiplied and grew in power. On the strength of their legal “personality,” the nature of which was the object of much anxious debate (was it derivative or free-standing? fictional or real?), they were granted startling new rights and privileges. Meanwhile, artists withdrew in droves into cults of aesthetic “impersonality.” While the cults relatively swiftly passed away, the flag of “personality” flies higher than ever over the corporate world today, thanks to Citizens United and a host of other cases. Indeed, when it comes to the cults, there was never any contest, as the orthodox version of modernist impersonality finally only confirms the terms it reverses. But the orthodoxy is not the whole story. This article works out a non-personalist line of response to corporate personalism through readings of some of the idiosyncrasies of Virginia Woolf's version of modernist impersonality (in particular, the twist that she gives to the widespread modernist association of impersonality and drama).