Subversive Interventions in Socio-spatial Constructions in The Voyage Out

Year 2025, Volume: 42 Issue: 1, 139 - 151, 30.06.2025

Rana Özkaya , Margaret J.m. Sönmez

https://doi.org/10.32600/huefd.1563410

Abstract

Throughout The Voyage Out (1915), as in its earliest (unpublished) version, Melymbrosia (written over several years up to 1912) (De Salvo, 2004, p. xix), Virginia Woolf presents a consistently and insistently critical depiction of the social, physical, and mental spaces. This paper highlights how the novel both illustrates and critiques the spatial norms and practices established by the prevailing social systems that governed the creation and utilization of lived space around the turn of the century. Woolf employs her fiction to explore how, despite the discriminatory regulation of places, social space is heterogeneous, varied, and dynamic, which aligns with the arguments of Lefebvre, Foucault, and Tuan. Bachelard is also referred to as a mouthpiece for the gendered norms of the time with regards to spatial thinking. Extended to sites beyond the domicile and the individual, the narrator’s comments, especially those mediated through the female focalizers, present differing spatial experiences that relate to and undermine this discourse and its related classist, patriarchal and imperialist ideology.

Keywords

Space theories , Virginia Woolf , Gaston Bachelard , Henri Lefebvre , Michel Foucault , Yi-Fu Tuan

Project Number

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The Voyage Out Romanında Sosyo-mekansal Düzene Yıkıcı Müdahaleler

Abstract

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915) romanı boyunca, tıpkı ilk (yayınlanmamış) versiyonu olan Melymbrosia’da (1912’ye kadar birkaç yıl boyunca yazılmıştır) (De Salvo, 2004, s. xix) olduğu gibi, sosyal, fiziksel ve zihinsel alanların sürekli ve ısrarla eleştirel bir tasvirini sunmaktadır. Bu çalışma, romanın hem dönemin sosyal sistemleri tarafından oluşturulan ve yaşanılan alanın yaratımını ve kullanımını yöneten mekansal normları ve uygulamaları gösterdiğini hem de eleştirdiğini vurgulamaktadır. Woolf, kurgusu aracılığıyla, mekanların ayrıştırıcı düzenlemelerine rağmen sosyal alanın heterojen, çeşitli ve dinamik olduğunu gösterir. Bu yaklaşım, Lefebvre, Foucault ve Tuan’ın argümanlarıyla uyumludur. Bu çalışmada Bachelard da mekansal düşünce konusundaki cinsiyet normlarının bir temsilcisi olarak bahsedilmektedir. Ev, vatan ve birey ötesindeki alanlara genişletilen anlatıcının yorumları, özellikle de kadın karakterlerin bakış açılarıyla iletilenler, farklı mekansal deneyimleri sunar ve mevcut sınıfsal, ataerkil ve emperyalist ideolojilere karşı çıkar.

Keywords

Mekan teorileri , Virginia Woolf , Gaston Bachelard , Henri Lefebvre , Michel Foucault , Yi-Fu Tuan

Ethical Statement

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Supporting Institution

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Project Number

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Thanks

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