Mrs. McNab’s time passes: working women outside the brackets in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2020.49798

Keywords:

Woolf, Modernism, Prose, Precarity.

Abstract

This creative critical piece considers the changing economic status of women and related changes in prose forms between the 1920s and the 2020s. We explore the character of Mrs. McNab, a housekeeper, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), using sentences from the novel interspersed with creative-criticism in brackets (just as the action of the plot is bracketed in the novel). We argue that while upper class women are bracketed and domestic staff kept outside the brackets in Woolf’s novel, the daughters of educated men she identified with trouble the brackets today, while the Mrs. McNabs are still outside the brackets. 

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Original in English

Author Biographies

Saskia McCracken, University of Glasgow

Pesquisadora de doutorado na Universidade de Glasgow, Escócia. Seus trabalhos de crítica criativa foram publicados em Datableed, Zarf, Epizootics, Spam, Adjacent Pineapple, e Algia, entre outras revistas. Autora de ensaios sobre Virginia Woolf em volumes de crítica especializada, tais como  Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory (Clemson & Liverpool UP, 2020), Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism Beyond the Human (Cambridge UP, no prelo), e Modernism/Modernity: Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction (Modernist Studies Association, no prelo).

Greg Thomas, The University of Edinburgh

Possui doutorado (Edinburgh University), mestrado (Cambridge University) e bacharelado (Sussex University) na área de Letras. Atuou como British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow na Universidade de Edimburgo. É escritor e crítico cultural em Glasgow, Escócia. Em 2012, organizou a exposição Beauty, Happiness and Play: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan and UK Concrete Poetry na Biblioteca de Poesia Escocesa (Scottish Poetry Library). Autor de Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool UP, 2019), e do poema objeto Cloud Cover (Essence Press, 2018).

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Published

2020-10-03

How to Cite

McCracken, S., & Thomas, G. (2020). Mrs. McNab’s time passes: working women outside the brackets in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. MATRAGA - Journal Published by the Graduate Program in Letters at Rio De Janeiro State University (UERJ), 27(51), 569–573. https://doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2020.49798

Issue

Vol. 27 No. 51 (2020): Modernist prose in contemporary times

Section

Literature Papers

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