- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
Virginia Woolf, Clothing and Contradiction
- Chapter:
- (p.129) But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Source:
- Contradictory Woolf
- Author(s):
Claire Nicholson
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
This chapter explores Virginia Woolf's relationship to clothing and fashion, focusing in particular on ambivalence and contradiction in her perception of dress. Woolf's deployment of clothing in her fiction has drawn the attention of critics such as Lisa Cohen, Randi Koppen, and Jane Garrity. For Woolf's characters, clothes can act as vehicles for self-construction, as signifiers of cultural resistance, and as a means of contemplating the boundary between the self and the other. The chapter also analyzes Woolf's sartorial observations in the novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) and related short stories. It then places these fictional fashion choices in context with Woolf's own sartorial experiences during the period in which she expressed strong interest in clothing and which saw a marked evolution in clothing styles, the decade from the early 1920s to 1930s. It suggests that Woolf knew how to indulge in sartorial pleasure, in fabric, as well as in fiction.
Keywords: fashion, clothing, dress, ambivalence, contradiction, fiction, Mrs Dalloway, sartorial pleasure, fabric
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- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Preface
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”?
- Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
- “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise
- “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue, Performance and Painting. A multimedia Exploration of Woolf’s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory.
- Report to the Memoir Club
- “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”
- Contradictions in Autobiography
- “But something betwixt and between”
- “Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
- Woolf’s Un/Folding(s)
- Woolf’s Contradictory Thinking
- The Feeling of Knowing in <i>Mrs Dalloway</i>
- “When the lights of health go down”
- Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
- But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…
- Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in <i>A Room of One’s Own</i>
- Lacanian <i>Orlando</i>
- The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and <i>Flush</i>
- From Spaniel Club to An<i>i</i>Malous Society
- Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
- “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press<sup>1</sup>
- “Am I a Snob?” Well, sort of
- “Come buy, come buy”
- Virginia Woolf and December 1910
- Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
- “A Brief Note in the Margin”
- “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the “<i>Patron au Dedans</i>.”
- Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” and the Anxiety of Authorship
- Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
- “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
- “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”
- Travesty in Woolf and Proust
- Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”
- Figures of Contradiction
- Do Not Feed the birds
- Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf
- Duncan Grant
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
