My reading of Hotel du Lac focuses on the relational basis of identity of the heroine who obsessively is in conflict with her double desires of "the need for autonomy" and "the need for connection". Edith Hope, the central character, is herself a writer of romances and already possesses 'a room of one's own' and 'money' enough to support herself, only she hasn't been through the rite of passage of marriage. She asks Virginia Woolf, who is unseen but acts as an influential presence, the reason why one thing is not compensation for the other. Ostensibly, the book explores the mystery and subtlety of human relationships among men and women, parents and children, women and women and, among other things, a room of one's own and marriage. However, the forte of the book lies in the fact that the surface microcosm of relationships expands to a macro-discourse of modernity and self-identity including issues of gender, culture and the connection between literature and life. To clarify my point, I borrowed some of Anthony Giddens' arguments from his book Modernity and Self-identity, which offers an appropriate and effective frame of reference for a discourse involving multiple narratives of specific social and cultural functions in the milieu of modernity. Through her recent wedding fiasco, Edith's repressed recognition that a marriage without love ultimately cannot satisfy her own intellectual and emotional needs is revealed, and she was sent to Hotel du Lac where she met some exiled women like herself. Just as Edith was marginalized by her insecure single status, so the women she met in the hotel were also marginalized and were thrown away from their homes by their deficient status, infertile or old. In this way, Hotel du Lac is a fine gallery of portraits showing raw materials of multiple narratives, such as the narratives of self, the narratives of writing, and the narratives of lifestyle. By observing them, Edith asks "the question of what behaviour most becomes a woman" and reluctantly registers the changing social roles of women, only to find herself deluded. She realizes that marriage is not a cure for loneliness and longing, and that her ultimate bulwark is her writing. Throughout the book, Woolf plays an ironical role as Edith's personal and social forms of identity, and her identification with Woolf is partly justified by the end of the novel as her writing is certainly an instrument for her narratives of self-creation and self-understanding.

My reading of Hotel du Lac focuses on the relational basis of identity of the heroine who obsessively is in conflict with her double desires of "the need for autonomy" and "the need for connection". Edith Hope, the central character, is herself a writer of romances and already possesses 'a room of one's own' and 'money' enough to support herself, only she hasn't been through the rite of passage of marriage. She asks Virginia Woolf, who is unseen but acts as an influential presence, the reason why one thing is not compensation for the other. Ostensibly, the book explores the mystery and subtlety of human relationships among men and women, parents and children, women and women and, among other things, a room of one's own and marriage. However, the forte of the book lies in the fact that the surface microcosm of relationships expands to a macro-discourse of modernity and self-identity including issues of gender, culture and the connection between literature and life. To clarify my point, I borrowed some of Anthony Giddens' arguments from his book Modernity and Self-identity, which offers an appropriate and effective frame of reference for a discourse involving multiple narratives of specific social and cultural functions in the milieu of modernity. Through her recent wedding fiasco, Edith's repressed recognition that a marriage without love ultimately cannot satisfy her own intellectual and emotional needs is revealed, and she was sent to Hotel du Lac where she met some exiled women like herself. Just as Edith was marginalized by her insecure single status, so the women she met in the hotel were also marginalized and were thrown away from their homes by their deficient status, infertile or old. In this way, Hotel du Lac is a fine gallery of portraits showing raw materials of multiple narratives, such as the narratives of self, the narratives of writing, and the narratives of lifestyle. By observing them, Edith asks "the question of what behaviour most becomes a woman" and reluctantly registers the changing social roles of women, only to find herself deluded. She realizes that marriage is not a cure for loneliness and longing, and that her ultimate bulwark is her writing. Throughout the book, Woolf plays an ironical role as Edith's personal and social forms of identity, and her identification with Woolf is partly justified by the end of the novel as her writing is certainly an instrument for her narratives of self-creation and self-understanding.

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ultra-feminine, romance novel, Modernity, self-identity, multiple narratives, lifestyle, Virginia Woolf