Reading Virginia Woolf Logically

Abstract

This article argues for a “resolute reading” of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, akin to Cora Diamond and James Conant’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The resolute approach to the Tractatus contends that we should embrace Wittgenstein’s assertion that the Tractatus is finally nonsense. Accordingly, the Tractatus acts as a kind of therapy, enabling us to dispense with certain types of philosophical, linguistic, and analytical claims. I argue that Woolf’s The Voyage Out takes a similar approach to the nineteenth-century novel, fully investing in the conventions of the bildungsroman and the marriage plot only to ruthlessly dispense with them. Both works use a particular kind of modernist therapeutic pedagogy reliant on logic and form.