NIGHT AND DAY: A REPRESENTATION OF IDENTITY THROUGH NOCTURNAL AND DIURNAL SYMBOLIC IMAGES

Virginia Woolf’s novel, Night and Day (1919), presents identity as a fusion of symbols that reveal the characters’ struggles and evolution toward self-understanding. The characters shape their identities by navigating a changing social environment, thus seeking answers and developing mechanisms for survival and adaptation. The present paper proposes a symbolic interpretation of the characters’ transformation in Woolf’s novel by applying Gilbert Durand’s anthropological framework of the diurnal and nocturnal regimes of the imaginary. The aim of the research is to illustrate significant symbols and motifs that describe the characters’ responses to social manipulation, with a focus on the evolution of Katharine Hilbery, one of the central characters in the novel, whose struggle between independence and the societal expectation of marriage reveals a sequence of factors that challenge the pursuit of self-consciousness and self-balance.