Virginia Woolf, Vol. 84

John R. Maze presents a penetrating psychoanalytic reading of Virginia Woolf's novels from first to last. Underlying their elegant, imaginative, mysterious texture there is revealed a network of sibling rivalry, incestuous attraction and exploitation, sexual repulsion, bizarre fantasies, anger, and fatal despair.

Woolf's feminism and pacificism, based on her conscious insight into an authoritarian society, were given passionate conviction by her resentment and irrational guilt over her half-brothers' sexual aggression against her as a vulnerable girl. This found its place in repressed animosity toward her idealized mother, whom she blamed not only for failing to protect her, but also for trying to impose the Victorian female sexist orthodoxy. Deeper still was the childhood conviction that her mother was complicit in the fantasied genital injuries—exacerbated later, she felt, by the males in her life—which prevented her from having children, as her envied sister had. Maze's approach not only reveals the intimate processes of Woolf's imagination, but yields a deeper and richer reading of her texts. An important study for all students and scholars of British 20th-century literature, feminist literary criticism, and critical theory in general.

This work provides a radical psychoanalytic reading of the life-historical and psychopathological themes underlying the intellectual and emotional force of Virginia Woolf's novels.

Booknews

Independent researcher Maze notes that while taking a psychoanalytic path to Woolf as "the literary incarnation of modern feminism," he most positively does not "reduce the work to the level of a neurotic symptom." Issues he probes as reflected in individual works revolve around: images of life and death (), retreat from the brink (, identity (), sanity (, the quest for self-fulfillment (), and liberation (). In true Freudian fashion, the author concludes by attributing her ultimate despair to unresolved problems about mother. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

JOHN R. MAZE graduated from the University of Sydney, Australia, where he then lectured on psychoanalytic psychology and other aspects of psychological theory before resigning to become an independent researcher and consultant.