A Literary Feminist Phenomenology of Place in Early Twentieth Century Women’s Writing

Abstract

This thesis develops a critical approach to women’s experience by engaging with phenomenology and modernist poetics of place. It critiques the androcentricity of phenomenology and philosophical abstractions of gender and space, arguing that a feminist phenomenology with its focus on alternative modes of being in a diverse but socially and gender-stratified world can more aptly articulate experiential specificities that neither fortify nor fit into conventional paradigms of experience. This thesis discusses the imaginative and aesthetic rendering of women’s experiences of rooms in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, and Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover,” “Pink May,” and “Hand in Glove.”