Virginia Woolf's modernist narratives and cosmopolitanism focused on Three Guineas and Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

The ideal of a cosmopolitan person’s being a ‘citizen of the world’ is multifaceted encompassing both conflicts between individuality and universality, affiliations to community, family and conflicts, plus displacements from home to home. This paper attempts to analyze Woolf’s feminist and modernist works Three Guineas and Mrs. Dalloway in the context of cosmopolitanism. Among the inconsistencies and contradictions in Woolf’s works, the question of how her cosmopolitanism can be compatible with her Englishness requires also a reexamination of related topics such as her alleged anti-Semitism and patriotism. Firstly, in order to advance the study of cosmopolitanism in Woolf’s modernist literature I will compare the speculations of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s rooted cosmopolitanism and Martha Nussbaum’s Stoic cosmopolitanism. Secondly, attentive especially to her eloquent statement in Three Guineas , “As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world”, I will analyze the significance of Woolf’s contentions as to how marriage, nationality, and patriotism relate to the desire for world citizenship. Finally, in Mrs. Dalloway, focusing on the daily lives of immigrants, expatriates and foreigners living in the cosmopolitan city, London, I will interpret Woolf as being inseparably associated with feminist and pacifist patriotism and performing the ethical practice of cosmopolitanism—doing kindness to strangers—through her modernist narrative techniques and strategies.