Woolfian Love in Aggregate: Posthuman – Queer – Feminist

Abstract

Applying Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s insights into the contingency of value to the contingency of theory’s value, this essay situates Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) in relation to three critical frameworks. It argues that Woolf’s complication of love in the novel responds to three amorous ‘needs’ articulated, respectively, in the work of Rosi Braidotti, Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick and Sara Ahmed. In bringing Woolf’s novel to the needs voiced by these theorists, the essay neither synthesizes Braidotti, Sedgwick and Ahmed nor privileges one of them above the others. It shows, rather, that Night and Day keeps love unmastered by any single critical paradigm and that its literary/conceptual work is best read in aggregate – read and reread, that is, according to three often antagonistic frameworks between which the essay makes a temporary peace. The posthuman and queer frames bring to life Katharine Hilbery’s powerful attachment to and preference for the study of mathematics and astronomy, her distaste for human beings (and literary studies), and her careful stagecraft in managing the people she loves. The feminist frame links the promises of love to the patriarchal/misogynistic division between the education of men and the training of women.