Virginia Woolf employs eighteenth-century sentimentality in her work and when she does, it has always been assumed that she perceived sentimentality in the same negative way as the Victorians. Woolf, however, adopts Laurence Sterne's playfulness with sentimentality. In A Sentimental Journey, Sterne exposes the ravages of war and the topsy-turvy nature of culture when it is built on empire. Sentimentality is expressed for the weak and abject, but Sterne understands that these abject characters are soldiers that previously served the nation. In Jacob's Room, Woolf exposes the same with Betty Flanders expressing sentiment for fallen soldiers. In addition to this sentimentality is a false sentimentality that men learn at institutions like Cambridge, even though sentimentality is associated with feminine weakness. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf is the most ambivalent about sentimentality and hoping to find a sense of true feeling. Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and Septimus Warren Smith, all display a sense of true of feeling in addition to the false sentimentality. Because of rigid class differences, Septimus is the most natural without having learned sentimentality at Cambridge. His lack of learning and his true feeling make him an outsider, and he must escape society. In The Waves, the men all adopt false sentimentality. The women are outside because they are not allowed to attend Cambridge, but like Betty Flanders, Jinny is able to learn sentimentality. The most natural and wild character who is outside this false sentimentality is Rhoda, and she too must escape society.

This dissertation is focused upon narrative variations and interventions expressive of feminist critique. Using a feminist narratological interpretive methodology, I examine literary and film narratives containing unconventional treatments of sequentiality, temporality, resolution/irresolution, focalization, diegetic levels, and genre. These treatments are inherently rhetorical and, as shown in the texts discussed, often engaged in a questioning, unsettling or complicating of narrative form. My project is intended to locate and theorize what could be called narrative feminism, legible as narrative disruptions, indeterminacies, and ambiguities that convey feminist commentary or critique.

Rejecting a common article of faith within narratology, where narrative form is presumed apolitical and dispassionate rather than a vessel for critique, I argue that feminist inheres within narrative form, contained in the very composition and sequencing of content within a narrative. In this way, I aspire to give narrative form a more distinct primacy, focusing on narrative disruptions or variations that function as socially symbolic acts, in the sense Frederic Jameson theorizes in The Political Unconscious (1981). In my readings of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, and a group of cinematic romantic comedies, I explain how each uses narrative form to question or subvert sexist ideas about women and femininity. The title of my project is taken from Volume One (The War of the Words) of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1989), which provides an account of women’s literary engagements with gendered social tensions and violence over the last century. The authors posit that the “territory of literature [and also] the institutions of marriage and the family, of education and the professions [have become] a no man’s land – a vexed terrain – in which scattered armies of men and women all too often clash by day and by night” (xiii). I see my project as both vexing the terrain, insofar as it participates in a counter-discourse of feminism’s uneasy alliance with narratology, and also forging new interpretive possibilities among the texts that are part of this study.

Both the Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) and James Joyce's masterpiece Finnegans Wake are dream fictions in that they employ dreams as both their frameworks and subject matters. While Finnegans Wake is a fictional representation of its assumed dreamer's dream during one night, Dream of the Red Chamber portrays its protagonist's life as a dream in the metaphorical sense. The two works share a predominant interest in probing and representing, through dreams and literary devices, the often elusive workings of the human psyche. This dissertation investigates the psychic mechanisms in terms of how they contribute to the issue of subjectivity formation.

The theoretical approach employed is psychoanalytical theories, especially Sigmund Freud's dream theories and Jacques Lacan's concepts of the mirror stage, the symbolic order, and the gaze. Freud's theorization of the dream language as an arena where the unconscious struggles against the conscious to express itself is also applicable to poetic devices.

This dissertation argues that the subject's enthrallment to the Other's approving gaze is paradoxically both a necessary and a fictitious means of self-confirmation. The first two chapters on Dream of the Red Chamber apply the principles of the dream work to literary devices as well as dreams to map out its protagonist Jia Baoyu's psychic dynamics. Jia Baoyu's behavior can be traced back to the psychic trauma inflicted on him by the Great Mother and explore the issue of (mis)recognition by the (m)other. The following two chapters on Finnegans Wake study the dreamer's desires and anxieties related to his precarious status as the patriarch of his family. In both narratives, the subject is brought into being, or the drama of the dream is set into motion, by (the subject's response to) the Other's gaze. Both narratives also show that the other's gaze, which the subject desires and depends on for an image of wholeness and power, is imaginary.