초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper seeks to explore Virginia Woolf’s idea of shells, one of the most intriguing images inscribed in her works. Woolf’s fiction exhibits a handling of shells, visible materials that externalize the mental process of aesthetic activity, daydreaming, a temporal detachment from one’s immediate surroundings. While political activists tend to dismiss daydreaming as a mere apolitical activity that blurs a person’s contact with reality, Woolf considered it absolutely central to an artist’s pursuit of creation. In fact, Woolf’s making of a variety of shells might help her present the process of developing a daydreamer’s artistic capacity for imagination and creation. By drawing to The Poetics of Space, a 1958 book by Gaston Bachelard, whose phenomenology of shells provides a way of understanding Woolf’s imagination by means of shells, this paper attempts to examine various forms and contents of shells within Woolf’s writings. This paper then focuses on a particular form of a shell in Woolf’s The Years (1937), and eventually argues that such a shell functions to embody Woolf’s critique of war, identified by her as a destroyer of daydreams.
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Virginia Woolf, the image of shells, a daydreamer's imagination, The Years, the spirit of war
