The Radical Empirical Modernism of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence

Abstract

My dissertation argues that the writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence are animated by a shared belief that the way human beings experience and understand their worlds needs to be radically transformed. Their works expose how human experience is canalized by habits reinforced through education and custom, and they explore the ways people might overcome these limitations to expand the receptive possibilities of their experience, illustrating more fruitful ways their readers might engage their worlds. Their novels offer a radical recasting of the human subject and its situation in the environment, one that valorizes a turn away from the fixity of conceptual certainty and an embrace of experiences that trouble clean distinctions between the human being and its world. Reading through the lens of radical empiricism, this project makes the case that Woolf and Lawrence are together engaging in a similar project: they are working from a shared interest in intensive explorations of the seemingly ineffable qualities in concrete human experience and in bringing those accounts into language to suggest the relational constitution of the human being with other people and the environment. They are working experimentally to discern the extent to which the human being can know first-hand its place in the extensive world. In doing so, the authors come to understand such a human being differently, as simultaneously discrete and non-discrete. By examining the methodological and philosophical intersections of these two authors, this project serves as a first step in suggesting a radical empirical British modernism. Woolf’s and Lawrence’s approaches to experience have philosophical implications that become more apparent when read in conjunction with William James’s philosophy of radical empiricism and the related philosophies of Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead. While “radical empiricist” is not a common moniker for these philosophers, my project makes the case for the consideration of several of their works as reflective of a line of confluent thought that illuminates the concerns of some modernist literature with developing a new understanding of the human situation through an inclusive attention to lived experience. The project is organized into four chapters. In the first chapter, I establish the radical empirical philosophical situation of Woolf’s and Lawrence’s writing, revealing in their novels how the dispositions of the characters facilitate different worlds, and elaborating the attentive approaches that they valorize through their novels. In the second chapter, I explore their critiques of abstraction, elaborating their concern with fixed abstract forms while countering readings of their work as anti-intellectual or apophatically mystical. In the third chapter, I examine how in and through their novels they engage the difficulty of articulating preconceptual experience, and I explore how they productively use ambiguity towards this end. In the fourth and final chapter, I examine the relational situation of the human individual that their novels disclose and the sort of self-understanding that they champion through their work.