Surviving the City: Resistance and Plant life in Woolfâs Jacobâs Room and Barnesâ Nightwood

Ria Banerjee

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Surviving the City: Resistance and Plant life in Woolfâs Jacobâs Room and Barnesâ Nightwood

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Ria Banerjee

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 123â146

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401209991_009

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In Jacobâs Room (1922) and Nightwood (1936), Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes use plant life to express a profound ambivalence about the masculine-inflected ordering functions of art and morality. They show that these processes codify lived experience and distance it from the feminine and sexual. To counter this turn towards the urban inauthentic, both novels depict non-urban spaces to upend conventional notions of usefulness. They fixate on evanescent flowers, wild forests, and untillable fields as sites of resistance whose fragility and remoteness are strengths. In Jacobâs Room, I argue that the eponymous protagonist is destroyed by his conventional education and morality, trapped in a room he cannot escape. In Nightwood, the central couple flees a similar ideological room, leaving for a remote farm where genuine feeling is momentarily possible.

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Plants and Literature

Essays in Critical Plant Studies

Series:Â Critical Plant Studies, Volume: 1

E-Book ISBN:: 9789401209991

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 01 Jan 2013

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Surviving the City: Resistance and Plant life in Woolfâs Jacobâs Room and Barnesâ Nightwood

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Plants and Literature

Essays in Critical Plant Studies

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Surviving the City: Resistance and Plant life in Woolfâs Jacobâs Room and Barnesâ Nightwood