We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
A Space of Her Own: Hotels in the Interwar Short Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen.
- Authors
Despotopoulou, Anna; Marinou, Chryssa
- Abstract
This paper explores the representation of hotels in Virginia Woolf's "Lappin and Lapinova" ([1919] 1938), Katherine Mansfield's "The Lost Battle" (1917), and Elizabeth Bowen's "Salon des Dames" (1923), discussing the ways in which this modern space of commercial hospitality engenders and hosts, but also challenges, the creativity of women characters. Amid the lingering uncertainty and loss of the interwar period, hotels become spaces of bodily and mental emancipation but also of anxiety, unresolved conflict, and violence, and spaces in which women face the challenge of shifting gender ideologies. Facilitated by the non-domestic, temporary space of the hotel, the women characters of the three stories fashion alternative selves by pursuing sexual liberation, self-determination, and the expression of their creativity. They are encouraged to mentally wander : to write, figuratively and literally, their own stories. Hotels, which are less socially determined than the home, may thus be viewed as thresholds, generating restlessness and transitional states. While women may thrive in such spaces of temporary occupancy and not of dwelling, they may also be forced to compromise. In this sense, the hotel becomes an in-between space, a porous space of instability, which, though not inscribed specifically with war, does become one of its literary geographies.
- Subjects
WOOLF, Virginia, 1882-1941; SHORT story writing; SEXUAL freedom; ANXIETY; UNCERTAINTY
- Publication
Space Between: Literature & Culture, 1914-1945, 2023, Vol 19, pN.PAG
- ISSN
1551-9309
- Publication type
Article