“Listening to the zoom of a hornet”: Virginia Woolf’s feminist reflections on the sounds of military weapons and war violence

Abstract

In her diaries, novels, and essays, Virginia Woolf records the psychological trauma the British people suffered from in the soundscape of military weapons during the two world wars and describes its delayed effects on the populace after the wars. Drawing upon the notions of the soundscape and Johan Galtung’s violence triangle, this paper explores how Woolf’s works portray the traumatic experience brought by the soundscape of military weapons to soldiers and ordinary citizens during the two world wars and discusses how the roar of cars and planes in her works induces the public’s traumatic memory after the wars. Then, through a close study of her essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”, this paper contends that the soundscape of German air raids compels Woolf to contemplate the roles of feminism in opposing the wars and healing war trauma.