The Exoticised Space in Virginia Woolf's Parties and the "Dreadnought Hoax"

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The Bloomsbury Group fabricated their own world of social gatherings as ceremonial space during their everyday life. Within this space, which included their own artistic interiors, theatrical entertainment, and sometimes fancy dress parties, the Bloomsbury parties could be represented as a form of performative art acting out a kind of subversiveness. This paper explores the way the notion of the 'primitive' is presented and sometimes aestheticised in Virginia Woolf's description of parties in her novels and the "Dreadnought Hoax" as the representation of those occasions. The texts are here argued to displace notions of the 'primitive, ' the 'barbaric' and the 'savage' from something external and alienated into their 'home' as the innermost English territory, communal as well as individual. The concept of 'the exotic' as the visualised, aestheticised or commodified images of the above notions is also internalised within the domesticity. The concepts of the 'madness' and 'primitive, ' which are taken up in the party scenes in Virginia Woolf's novels or as the theme of fancy dress in the "Dreadnought Hoax, " reveal society's objection to otherness and colonial exoticism. The newspapers and magazines picked up in this paper exoticise not only a tea party on the battleship but also the visual image of colonial ethnicities. It is suggested that the image of the 'primitive' of different ethnicity which was still a rare and surprising image by the early twentieth century, begins to be available and consumed in the 1910s. The 'primitive' also becomes Bloomsbury's mask of rebellion against social propriety. Their hybrid cultural identity deterritorialises the society as the territory of homogenous culture. Said suggestively points out a cultural crisis of the West between the wars, which brought about the West's own cultural definition that transcended the xenophobic. This crisis was partly caused by the diminishment of Western territory in the rest of the world. The Orient is then recognised as a partner, a cultural counterpart without which the West cannot define its own culture. In this paper the Bloomsbury Group is seen to have plotted the very cultural crisis that Said refers to, by redefining and refurbishing the cultures of home and the exotic. They shook the West, or, more precisely, the self-contentment of English culture, the self-reflexive representation of art that mirrors and circulates the image of the West as the same and the others as otherness. The margin between 'the civilised' and 'the exotic' becomes unstable in Bloomsbury's party space because they aestheticise what is represented as primitive and barbaric in the hierarchy of colonial system of signification. Their project is both rebellion and revel: revolts against the dominant institution and festive occasions that potentially ridicule them.
中部大学の論文
2007-04-01

The Exoticised Space in Virginia Woolf's Parties and the "Dreadnought Hoax"

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