Amy Smith – “Dreams and Realities”: Woolf’s Revisions to Plato in Night and Day

Brief Summary of the Talk

The intellectual significance of Night and Day in Woolf’s development as a writer and thinker has long been overlooked. In this paper, I consider Woolf’s critical engagement with Platonism in the novel, where it appears both as genre model and as a reservoir of imagery, to which Woolf makes polyvalent references that disrupt Platonic idealism. Woolf’s active wrestling with Plato suggests that she is processing and separating from early philosophical influences just as she is from her inherited models of love, marriage, and the correct life for a woman, and also from conventional models of writing in her emerging in her modernist stories and aesthetic theory. Equally important as the aesthetic and personal revolutions Woolf makes at this moment is her philosophical revolution, and wrestling with Plato is a necessary step in her development of a unique, mature philosophy of her own.