Da mulher vitoriana para a mulher modernista: notas feministas sobre o "night and day", de Virgínia Woolf

Abstract

The present work aims to outline some problematizations regarding the representation of the feminine, focusing on a few aspects of the European culture of the 19th century, insofar as that moment was particularly important in the construction of the feminine identity as accepted today. In this perspective, we will deal with the representation of women as belonging to the home and as an object of said home to highlight the shifts in such representations throughout the transition to the 19th for the 20th century, when there was a movement in which the image of the woman was no longer confined to the domestic environment. Our guiding light for understanding this problem is the novel Night and Day (1919), by English author Virginia Woolf. This choice is justified by the novel having as protagonists three women who embody fundamental forms of representation for the issue at hand: one of them is linked to the home, the other one is linked to suffragism, and the third is still divided between the public and the private. Since the author herself is a defender and propagator of women's rights, it is in her thinking that we find the crucial theoretical notions for our analysis: the image of the Angel of the House and the defense that women need to have A Room of Their Own.