Subversive Interventions in Socio-spatial Constructions in The Voyage Out

Authors : Rana Özkaya, Margaret J.m. Sönmez

Pages : 139-151

Doi:10.32600/huefd.1563410

View : 49 | Download : 54

Publication Date : 2025-06-30

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Throughout The Voyage Out (1915), as in its earliest (unpublished) version, Melymbrosia (written over several years up to 1912) (De Salvo, 2004, p. xix), Virginia Woolf presents a consistently and insistently critical depiction of the social, physical, and mental spaces. This paper highlights how the novel both illustrates and critiques the spatial norms and practices established by the prevailing social systems that governed the creation and utilization of lived space around the turn of the century. Woolf employs her fiction to explore how, despite the discriminatory regulation of places, social space is heterogeneous, varied, and dynamic, which aligns with the arguments of Lefebvre, Foucault, and Tuan. Bachelard is also referred to as a mouthpiece for the gendered norms of the time with regards to spatial thinking. Extended to sites beyond the domicile and the individual, the narrator’s comments, especially those mediated through the female focalizers, present differing spatial experiences that relate to and undermine this discourse and its related classist, patriarchal and imperialist ideology.
Keywords : Mekan teorileri, Virginia Woolf, Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Yi-Fu Tuan

ORIGINAL ARTICLE URL