Department of English

This thesis begins by asking: How does Virginia Woolf contend with the positionality of the ignored woman within literary narratives, structures, and histories? What about the yearning, unhappy women that reside on the plot's edges of Woolf’s fiction, who find themselves displaced and suspended – by their own longing– from the narratives in which they reside? In a series of readings of Jacob’s Room, her first experimental novel but still one of her most undertheorized, I argue that while Woolf’s work uncovers this absence, she refuses to patch up its damage on literary history by merely filling it, or relocating these disappearing women back into our line of sight. Instead, she asks what limitless structure might arise from the discomfort of a woman’s heaving sobs. By laying out the truncated desires of the forgotten women who disappear from the novel almost as soon as they’re introduced, I demonstrate the narrative potential Woolf locates in the absence found by female characters who vacillate between abandoning their unfulfilling position in the marriage plot and untethering their desire from narrative altogether. What results is an examination of what is unwritten and how women absent themselves from a fixed narrative and time through reading and sleeping. Finally, through tears and laughter, I propose an argument that finds both the productivity and loss offered by disappearance and absence. Ending with “A Woman’s College from Outside,” a chapter cut from Jacob’s Room and published as an independent short story, I argue that Woolf’s reproduction of the very thing she critiques about literature, that is, this disappearance, becomes the site of queer possibility.