The Imperial Politics of Youth and Age in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room

Abstract

My article addresses the question of youth and age in Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), which is her modernist rewriting of the conventional Bildungsroman. Woolf’s presentation of her protagonist’s short life is specifically limited to his adolescence and young adulthood, both of which unfold within the early twentieth-century context of British imperialism. By explaining how Jacob Flanders’s adolescence and young adulthood are portrayed as far from developmental, I discuss the gap between Jacob’s chronological youth and symbolic age. The novel characterizes him as young and old at once and therefore makes a connection between the two seemingly contradictory age categories in its attempt to question the ways in which the traditional Englishness has been constructed and preserved in the modern era. In order to explicate the symbolism of Jacob’s youth that ends too early, I take a psychosocial approach to see what lies behind this young man’s quick demise. Specifically, in shedding light on the prewar context in which a young man’s youthful energy was regarded as the best catalyst for the British Empire’s continued progress, I argue that in this anti-developmental narrative, Woolf makes it impossible for her young male protagonist to live forward, letting him lead a life in stasis and age unnaturally from his late teens to twenties. As such, Woolf shows that the harmonious relationship between individual aging and imperial advancement is not possible in a modern world that obsessively measures one’s remaining potential for linear progress.