Home > Feminism > Woolf, Virginia - Toril Moi (Essay Date 1985)

1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page
4. Tweet This

TORIL MOI (ESSAY DATE 1985)

SOURCE: Moi, Toril. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Feminist Readings of Woolf.” In “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse”: Virginia Woolf, edited by Su Reid, pp. 87-97. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

In the following excerpt, which comprises the second part of the introduction to her 1985 treatise Sexual/Textual Politics, Moi outlines a way of reading Woolf’s texts according to French feminist theories, which significantly diverge from the aesthetic categories of most Anglo-American feminist critics.

Woolf seems to practise what we might now call a ‘deconstructive’ form of writing, one that engages with and thereby exposes the duplicitous nature of discourse. In her own textual practice, Woolf exposes the way in which language refuses to be pinned down to an underlying essential meaning. According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, language...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Virginia Woolf (Review Date 25 January 1905)
   2. Virginia Woolf (Letter Date 16 October 1920)
4. General Commentary
   1. Herbert Marder (Essay Date 1968)
   2. Barbara Currier Bell And Carol Ohmann (Essay Date 1974)
   3. Toril Moi (Essay Date 1985)
   4. Harold Bloom (Essay Date Fall 1994)
5. Title Commentary
   1. A Room of One's Own
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Virginia Woolf
2. Feminism