Sapphic reflections of feminine creative power and male interruption in the works of Virginia Woolf

摘要

With queer theory and gender studies, the knowledge that Virginia Woolf was probably bisexual has come to the forefront of scholarship concerning the writer and her works. With queer theory has come an interest in Sapphism, a term evoking Sappho, the only female lyric poet for whom any poetry remains. Sappho’s poetry reveals her to be a “lesbian”: a woman expressing homoerotic feelings for other women. The word Sapphist has become interchangeable with the word lesbian, and Virginia Woolf has been proven to be a Sapphist in that sense; however, Sapphism as a literary philosophy has remained untouched by scholars. In the following composition, I examinine reflections of Sappho’s themes, motifs, and symbols such as the chora and male interruption, to then argue that literary Sapphism as it exists in the fragments, is also present in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, and The Waves. .