Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 22, 07 December 2023
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Analysing Virginia Woolf's the Mark on the Wall from an Existentialist Perspective
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Abstract
During the world wars, people experienced harsh realities and had no recourse. Traditional values were no longer suitable for the post-war world, but they could not find a new standard of living and suffered a crisis of identity. Given this background, both the existentialist thought of the philosophical world and the literary realm coincidentally turned to exploring the survival state of humankind. As a pioneering writer, Virginia Woolf had a meticulous portrayal and profound thinking about the spiritual state of human beings in the post-war period. The academic research on Woolf's works has mostly explored from the perspectives of feminism, epiphanic moments and narrative style of stream of consciousness, but less from the existentialist viewpoint. However, many of Woolf's works have different methods, leading to the same result with Existentialism. Therefore, this paper tries to analyse the existentialist tendency in Woolf's first stream-of-consciousness short story, The Mark on the Wall, with the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, the representative figures of Existentialism. The work shows the absurdity of the world and people's despair. The stream-of-consciousness narrative mingles the past, present and future, breaking the linear concept of time. It elaborates that people are free to exist but always face the constraints of established rules and conflicts with others, which coincides with Existentialism. In addition, Heidegger's view of the initiative of things is also reflected in the narrative way of constructing the protagonist's identity by depicting a series of objects in the piece.
Keywords
The Mark on the Wall, Virginia Woolf, existentialism
References
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-187-2
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-188-9
- Published Date
- 07 December 2023
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/22/20231555
- Copyright
- 07 December 2023
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited