Virginia Woolf's Keen Sensitivity to War: Its Roots and its Impact on Her Fiction

Virginia Woolf saw the nightmare of war as a form of madness which posed a threat not only to individual human life, but to art and culture as well. Her many tragic personal experiences with death together with the fact that she lived through World War I and the beginning of World War II, caused in her a keen sensitivity to the transitory nature of life. Because Woolf saw militarism and the violence of war as blindly chauvinistic and utterly wasteful, war became for her a source of anger and contempt as well as fear. Woolf's response to war had a tremendous impact on her writing. Psychologically, Woolf saw war primarily as the senseless cause of human death. Politically, she felt that war was a direct outgrowth of patriarchal dominance in the home. In Between the Acts, Woolf expressed her belief that war meant the destruction of the cultural heritage, which to her translated into the end of civilization and, hence, chaos. By examining her major works, this thesis will reveal how and why the theme of war permeates her fiction.