Carnivalization of Gender Hierarchies and the Body in Woolf's Fiction

Virginia Woolf is a leading figure in feminist literature and criticism. Woolf's novels constitute the main channel through which her feminist ideas are expressed. The Voyage Out (1915), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933) are the novels through which it is possible to see how Woolf sabotages the notions of stability and certainty, on which patriarchal ideology rests. Woolf's characters wrestle with the so-called domestic sphere in which women are entrapped to serve men, reveal the weaknesses of the patriarchal figures and manifest their flexible subjectivities and gender identities. In this regard, this study contends that these novels lend themselves to a Bakhtinian analysis. The study argues that Woolf's The Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and Flush carnivalize gender hierarchies and the notion of the stable body. The female characters in these novels tend to occupy a space where patriarchal norms are suspended; they obtain power to decrown the authoritarian father figures, and act in ways that transgress gender and sexual boundaries.