Queer Mrs. Ramsay, or Virginia Woolf's Geomorphic Family

Abstract

Abstract:Widely regarded as a prototypical Victorian woman, Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse might also be read as embodying a surprisingly queer subjectivity. Drawing from the geological sciences and queer vitalist thought, I attend to Woolf's language for limning Mrs. Ramsay less gendered as a woman and more queered as a subject of lights and darks in motion. Woolf's father Leslie Stephen uses a similar lexicon to describe mountains in his acclaimed mountaineering tracts. Woolf borrows Stephen's mountaineering vocabulary to narrate queer subjectivities as more geological than gendered and thus loosens subjectivities from heteropatriarchal orthodoxy.