I am going to paste different paragraphs that I’ve written. I want you to analyze and learn writing style and tone.                                                                                           
                              Virginia Woolf’s contemporaries often highlight characterization as a flaw in her writing practice. This common critical trope accompanies the publications of all her novels, starting with the very first, The Voyage Out (1915). An unsigned review in the Nation, for example, declares it “hardly a work of art. Partly because of its form, partly because it is too passionately intent upon vivisection.”Footnote1 Despite offering generous praise for the execution of nearly every other aspect of the text, E. M. Forster finds that the “characters are not vivid. [ … ] they do not stroll out of their sentences, and even develop a tendency to merge shadow-like.”Footnote2 Woolf’s reactions to such comments were initially confined to her diaries and personal correspondence and ranged from frustration to acquiescence. Towards the end of the 1910s and early 1920s, however, they began to take a more distinct and public shape as a loose theory of modern fiction, developed in celebrated essays such as “Modern Novels” (1919), “Reading” (1919), “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1923/4), and “Character in Fiction” (1924).Footnote3

The clamor of voices decrying the insufficiencies of modernist characters was a common feature in the critical landscape of the day, particularly when discussing novels of development and education, like The Voyage Out. As Jed Esty argues modernists often tried to circumvent the Bildungsroman’s “generic dictates or to revise them out of recognition.”Footnote4 As a result, their modifications of the traditional developmental trajectories followed by its protagonists, associated with a process of learning and successful adaptation to social norms, tend to “block or defer the attainment of a mature social role.”Footnote5 For Esty, Woolf’s novel accomplishes just such an intervention through the workings of its plot and setting, which position its characters firmly within the histories of colonial contact, displacement, and migration.Footnote6 Susan Stanford Friedman also focuses on the text’s challenges to the “orthodoxies of representation” and its defiance of the “boundaries of expectation as these have been erected by literary tradition.”Footnote7 This reading concentrates explicitly on the function of women in the successful execution of the marriage plot and raises important questions about the role of gender in conventionally constructed narratives of development. The category of the “female Bildungsroman,” under which The Voyage Out was classified by early critics, has been in feminist critical parlance since at least the 1970s, chiefly occupying itself with investigating how women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represented “the suppression and defeat of female autonomy, creativity, and maturity by patriarchal gender norms.”Footnote8 In their well-known study in this tradition, Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, argue that the traditional Bildungsroman excludes gender “as a pertinent category,” an omission that has had direct effects on the dominant models for its “narrative structure,” “psychology,” and “representation of social pressures.”Footnote9 What is more, reading the history of the Bildungsroman as a document of the development of modern subjectivity, “one could be tempted to conclude that the gender of modernity is indeed male,” an impression, which, as Rita Felski states, calls for a sustained critique of the “idealized representation of the autonomous male subject.”Footnote10

As I will argue in what follows, Woolf’s first novel engages in performing precisely this task and in doing so exhibits the development of a related interest in Woolf’s thought. That is, the representation of women in fiction as a political problem, which is brought to bear on the aesthetic strategies of character construction and the hermeneutic practices employed to interpret them. Consequently, this article places emphasis on character, rather than plot formation, in order to bring to light Woolf’s early insight into the regulatory power of reading norms. While the Bildungsroman plot in The Voyage Out allows Woolf to formulate a direct challenge to the narrative of development, as it relates to women’s lives, her concerns go beyond a criticism of the limited social positions they are allowed to occupy.Footnote11 Directing her critical focus towards traditional models of characterization, heavily underwritten by the ideal of self-determination, shows that she identifies the very construction of the subject, in and through the normative conditions of power relations that shape our experiences as gendered and embodied agents, as a site of contention, anticipating much contemporary feminist theory on the topic. Furthermore, it lays the foundation of her critique of institutionalism and the forms of knowledge it engenders and propagates, which she elaborates more completely through her essays and novels of the 1920s and 1930s. As stated by Stephanie J. Brown in a recent essay, feminist approaches to Woolf’s writing have been successful in instilling the importance of attending carefully to her “growing conviction that existing institutions are structured by an ineradicably patriarchal logic, and therefore inadequate to the needs of women and to the requirements of a just society.”Footnote12 Elucidating the ways in which Woolf sees this inadequacy as functioning through the narrative and hermeneutic norms which govern the literary representations of personhood, is the main objective of this article.

To begin this discussion, I would like to return to the term “recognition,” used in passing by Esty. Despite playing an important role within larger histories of ideas associated with personal autonomy and democratic social organization, the concept of recognition has been insufficiently developed in literary studies, as Felski has recently observed.Footnote13 Some consideration of recognition has taken place, mainly as a principle of poetics, derived from the Aristotelian notion of anagnorisis, which is generally understood to signify a moment of transition from ignorance to knowledge.Footnote14 These reflections have largely taken place within a framework of realist forms of representation, which tend to rely on a narrative logic of an inevitable revelation of purpose and meaning, a feature very much in operation within the Bildugnsroman, and one, which, as outlined above, the modernist novel of this kind tends to undermine. Hence, recognition in this sense, despite its customary operation as a principle of identity construction, has been deemed largely immaterial for modernist criticism in general, and feminist modernist criticism in particular. The larger political point encoded within the problem of recognition as an organizational device in fiction, which often evades detection, is brought into focus by Woolf’s narrative of her young protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, who undertakes the task of becoming a socially recognizable individual within the context of a patriarchal economy of knowledge.Footnote15 The novel stages Rachel’s engagement as the culmination of this educational process, the narrative and hermeneutic end of the literary imagination, followed by the young heroine’s death. In a sense, this is the highest form anagnorisis can attain and its ultimate limitation – fiction constructed on this model, cannot see beyond that which is knowable, or even that which is known. As Ben Parker observes, it is at the point that the Aristotelian notion begins to acquire Hegelian echoes. “The logic of recognition,” he writes, “presumes an ultimate knowability: the truth of subjectivity requires a detour though otherness,” a detour obstructed under the conditions of capitalist modernity and the norms of identity development it espouses.

Contemporary political theories of recognition also trace back to Hegel. His concept of Anerkennung as developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is concerned with the constitution of knowing subjects, which he sees not as an isolated activity, but one which must be performed in communion with others: “[s]elf-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another self-another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”Footnote17 This process upholds for Hegel the infinite nature of this two-fold exchange in dialectical opposition to the determinateness of self-consciousness. In other words, the subject has to be recognized by others and have its claims to personhood validated through intersubjective acknowledgement within the social sphere in order to escape the laws of its own determination. This also leads to establishing an autonomous sense of self and the creation of ethical obligations for the treatment of others. However, receiving and granting recognition under conditions of social inequality raises questions about the hierarchies of value generated by this exchange. Feminist philosophers continue to dispute the usefulness of recognition as a formative principle for democratic social structures, within which women can find emancipation. A significant voice in these debates is Judith Butler, whose concerns regarding the concept and its relationship to oppression are deep and persistent, as further discussion below will demonstrate. The benefits of reading Woolf in tandem with Butler have been brought into sharp focus by Elsa Högberg, who examines the practice of recognition as an ethical counterpart to the problem of violence in the work of both authors. While Högberg’s study focuses on the interwar novels, from Jacob’s Room (1922) to The Waves (1931), my analysis locates Woolf’s interest in constructing new “aesthetic strategies for reconfiguring individuality” at an even earlier moment, in her debut novel.Footnote18 It also explicitly takes up these strategies’ gendered dimensions, focalized in The Voyage Out through Rachel’s course of development towards acquiring a recognizable form of personhood in keeping with the limitations imposed by her social position as a young woman.