Wolves Like to Wander Around: Nomadic, Distal, and Unfurling Forces in Maclear and Arsenault's Virginia Wolf

Abstract

Perhaps where it is least expected in the literary arts – within a book for children about Virginia Woolf and her sister – the linguistic and visual narrative highlights a therapeutic, bioaesthetic power that is fundamentally nonhuman and trans-species. Virginia and Vanessa, the ‘Bloomsberry’ sisters in this text, undertake a shared creative practice and enlivenment that is creatural, intimate, wolfy, and filled with eco-aesthetic intensities. The story’s theme of a re-vitalizing capacity to become artistic highlights the nomadic and distalic, and the sisters engage with shared cosmic, earth, and animal shapes, sounds, colours and forces. The recuperative efforts imagined for these famous modernist sisters dwell in female relationality, but the text also acknowledges the vulnerability of living ‘on the cracks of life’, an acknowledgment Braidotti insists must remain part of the healthy life that recognizes and connects to pain, even as it works toward an affirmative ethics of biopower.