Woolf’s Short Story as a Site of Resistance

Abstract

In the two previous chapters, conversation has been shown to be the form of Woolf’s short stories and its aesthetic and ethical components have been examined. As a space designed to welcome the other, conversation allows for debate between the self and the other as characters or reader and writer. It is both an open space, as the analysis of “A Haunted House” pointed out, and an agonistic space, as the analysis of the tension between fragmentation and totality or the study of “A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus” showed. It could certainly be described in Bakhtin’s terms as a dialogic space, a space thriving on diversity and interaction.¹ However, we have purposefully avoided the word “dialogic” so far. Resorting to the term “conversation”, as redefined by Woolf as originating in and departing from Plato’s dialogue, and with the various shades of meaning we have explored, allows indeed for a finer and more adequate appraisal of Woolf’s short stories.² We saw that within the short story as conversation, the interplay between emotion, impersonality and proportion creates both tension and circulation, dissent and debate at a structural, thematic and metafictional level. Such a dynamic space is the specific space of the short story, an aesthetic space with an ethical turn that opens, because of its very nature, onto the political. This dimension of conversation will be explored here at length as well as the way in which the political, the ethical and the aesthetic are closely intertwined in Woolf’s short stories.