Christine Bucher
State University of New York at Binghamton

Please note: Christine Bucher will not be presenting her paper at the conference.

In this paper I want to look at how space is represented and to what effect this representation works in both E. M. Forster's Howards End and in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out. I think an examination of space and its construction is important in evaluating the literal grounds of a social critique of the early modernist period, a period concerned with questions of change. Following Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel Foucault, I view a consideration of space as important to the functioning and critique of power. Forster and Woolf both wrote in the aftermath of the Victorian era, a period marked by social critique. As they watched England move into the First World War, both were concerned to examine what it meant to fully see England, and this attempt at (re)vision shows in both novels.

The plots of Howards End and The Voyage Out are concerned with the image of England. Both novels figure this image through travel, or more specifically, through some illusion of travel. Forster imagines England's landmass through the eyes of a foreigner, while Woolf constructs an English colony on the shores of South America. In both cases, the English landscapes constructed become destabilized as major characters view them. In part, I read this destabilizing as the result of a tension between the public and the private, or in another sense, the imperial and individual. The public space of the (imperial) nation becomes transformed by an individual consciousness unable to hold onto the image of the public, stable nation. This inability is the result of a difficulty in maintaining a single idea of what it means to be English across colonized space. The emphasis in Forster and Woolf on individual perception shows that older codes of knowledge cannot encompass this distance; space rearranges itself and thus results in a new, fragmented vision of the world.

Christine Bucher
State University of New York at Binghamton

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