'Nothing but Thought, Was It?': Berkeley, Idealism and Woolf's The Years. (20th March 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Townsend, Chris
• Is Part Of: Forum for modern language studies. Volume 57:Number 1(2021)
• Page Start: 21
• Page End: 39
• Publication Date: 2021-03-20
• Subjects: Virginia Woolf -- George Berkeley -- subjectivity -- objectivity -- realism -- idealism -- immaterialism -- Modernism; Languages, Modern -- Study and teaching -- Periodicals; Philology, Modern -- Periodicals; Electronic journals; 800.05
• DOI: 10.1093/fmls/cqaa048
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0015-8518

Abstract

Abstract: Although scholarship has noted that the 'faded brown book' mentioned in Woolf's The Years – in which the world is 'nothing but thought' – is a probable reference to the eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley, the full extent of Woolf's adoption of Berkeleian ideas has not been accounted for. In this essay I argue that Woolf's use of specifically Berkeleian images – including a coin-like moon and mind-dependent trees – feeds into a larger narrative technique in The Years relating to semblance: the way things seem or appear to be. Although The Years is sometimes understood as a comparatively 'realist' work by critics, I show that even its most apparently 'objective' scenes retain a semblance of subjectivity, upon which Woolf's idiosyncratic realist mode depends. Reading Woolf alongside Berkeley, I develop a case study in the ways in which literary aesthetics can take up, and also challenge, philosophical theories of knowledge.