Reading Party as Space: A Study of Virginia Woolf's Select Short Stories

Abstract

This paper aims to address a conceptual gap in the understanding of 20th-century modernist literature where on the one hand, it was associated with a sensibility of death, frustration, crisis, and social dissonance. On the other hand, the literature of the times was proliferated with social spaces and public gatherings which not just acted as spaces of leisure but had a politics of their own. By developing on this inherent contradiction, this paper studies the impact of the built environment of the party space on the construction of the modernist subject through urban theorist Henry Lefebvre’s idea of the “lived space.” Party here is a reference to any social gathering, a celebratory occasion, and does not have any political affiliation. Through this theoretical framework, the paper identifies space not as a physical structure or a medium but as a milieu formed through human actions and interactions with each other and the surroundings. Moreover, to study the ambience of the modernist party the paper draws inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s idea of “party consciousness” which elucidates the impact of the imping of spatial consciousness of the party through its developments which either “make things much more real or much less real.” Through this understanding, the paper studies Virginia Woolf’s short story collection Mrs Dalloway’s Party (2012) wherein the ideological binaries of race, class, and gender collapse to reveal party as a third space of open-ended possibilities. In a larger context, this study recognizes humans as inherently spatial beings made and re-made continually through socio-political and economic factors. Therefore, the impressive impact of city life which has stirred multiple consciousnesses and has realized the significance of leisure time makes it a relevant study in the present times.