Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study

Louis "spends all his life vacillating between a desperate desire to achieve a sense of Being-at-home within English middle-class society, and disgust at the ways in which the social order constricts the individuality and agency of the self"; Rhoda, then, enacts the "unsuccessful desire to mask her homelessness through a conscious and desperate attempt to conform to socially accepted norms and expectations" (110, 111). While there seems little to quibble with here, the interpretations are fairly orthodox, contributing to the suspicion that Heidegger is superfluous to adequately perceiving the Woolfian struggle between authenticity and inauthenticity. [...]the explicit effort to recast it as Heideggerian drama can feel forced and incongruous: "Arguably, for Woolf, one of the more significant manifestations of thrownness is the facticity of the lived body, due to its impact upon, and determination of, the average everyday lived experience of the individual" (115). [...]some efforts to link Woolf and Heidegger simply seem facile; Woolf's insistence upon the need for a room of one's own "in which to think, work and write," for instance, accords with Heidegger's "personal desire for a place of his own in which to carry out philosophical work" (128). The application of Heidegger to Woolf becomes more vexing when Simone turns to boredom; here, a dense quote concerning the temporal awareness induced by moments of profound boredom-in which past, present, and future achieve an "unarticulated unity in the simplicity of this unity of their horizon all at once" (Heidegger 148)-is presented as self-explanatory.