“Knitting against the war: Virginia Woolf’s building-up of forms”

Both World Wars play a crucial role in Virginia Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional writings. Her macrotext variously testifies to the war on the level of content, by thematizing it, and on the formal level by mimicking the phenomenological bursting caused by the conflict. In this paper I intend to illustrate how Woolf’s formal strategies convey the effects of war and how, at the same time, they are also intended as a remedial alternative to the destruction they narrate and epitomize. My analytical focus will be on Woolf’s second experimental novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925). In this novel, Woolf deals explicitly with the war and, more implicitly, with the possibility of opposing it through writing. It is through writing that she relates parts to form a pattern, and this building-up device can be considered the artistic counterpart to another unifying and typically female activity that the novel also thematizes: knitting and sewing.