Generic images, gendered responses: Virginia Woolf and the representation of belligerent violence

Abstract

In Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf voluntarily discusses images of the Spanish Civil War in generic terms. Susan Sontag famously criticized Woolf’s position, claiming that her decision to generalize ‘dismisses politics’, preventing the adoption of a clear anti-fascist stand on the Spanish conflict. I argue, on the contrary, that Woolf’s recourse to the generic turns the spotlight away from the Spanish front in order to make a very political point about the violence of patriarchy that structures the British viewers’ own society. Woolf does this by highlighting the role gendered experiences of the past play in shaping the viewer’s present perception of, and affective reactions to, images of warfare. This allows readers of Woolf’s fiction to more clearly identify the feminist thrust of her depictions of World War I’s impact on the domestic sphere in her novels of the 1920s, To the Lighthouse in particular.