Recasting Social Values in the Work of Virginia Woolf

• Author(s): Judy S. Reese,
• Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
• Pages: 168
• ISBN_10: 0945636830
  ISBN_13: 9780945636830
  
• Language: en
• Categories: Literary Criticism / General , Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh , Literary Criticism / Women Authors ,

Description:... Woolf's idealistic hope was that "great art" embodied a truth that transcended the narrow limits of her cultural context and provided an authoritative guide to true values and real loyalties. However, the dilemma of determining which artworks are to be considered "great" and whose interpretation is to be considered "authoritative" left Woolf in a critical double bind. She attempts to define and explore her value system using two fabricated measuring standards, the public psychometer of great art and the private psychometer of instinct or taste. These often conflicting standards, however, lead her into a maze of circular reasoning and contradiction. In order to escape her cultural context, Woolf needed an Archimedes point, some distant position and objective perspective from which to view and judge the whole of society. Her two standards remain embroiled in the complicity that she recognizes in herself as the "daughter of an educated man."