Confirmation of Candidature - Self in the Making: Virginia Woolf’s Plastic Subjects

This project investigates Virginia Woolf's selected fiction, metafiction, and autobiographical works using the concepts of plasticity derived from the French theorist Catherine Malabou. Woolf's characters demonstrate a level of plasticity through their psychic life, physical actions, and bodily transformations, which are central to the concept of plasticity. This project explores this interconnectedness between Woolf's characters' external world and their self and psychic life. In Woolf, as this study highlights, plasticity is not circumscribed to her characters' individual selves; it happens and exists externally to them in their surroundings, i.e., nature, society or culture, and environment. The cumulative impact of these external factors puts great strain on the individuality of the characters who variously adapt themselves accordingly, resist the external factors, or try to strike a compromise between adaptation and resistance, key themes in Malabou's conceptualisation of plasticity. Woolf was also conscious of the pressures of social environment upon the psyche, as she noted, the great effect of the "environment upon the mind […] in our psychoanalytical age" ("Women and Fiction", 142). However, Woolf's characters are not always successful in navigating the narrow path between adaptation and resistance; as the suicides of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway and Rhoda in The Waves illustrate, their psyche may buckle under the immense strain of circumstances. Woolf's demonstration of how her characters' psyche wrestle with the circumstances and are consequently (de)formed is the central focus of this study. Her past-haunted, present weary, and future-threatened beings are amenable to the themes of plasticity, particularly the explosive plasticity- explicated by Malabou in Ontology of the Accident (2009, trans-2012)-where they annihilate or undo the very form of self they possess. Furthermore, the investigation expands its scope to see how Woolf effectively presents the plasticity of her characters and goes on to explore her characters' transformation both in her fictional and non-fictional work. She contends in her essay, "Character in Fiction," (1924) that a character always changes, shifts, and is supple and mobile, which also accords with Malabou's theory of plasticity. Woolf sees identity as made up of fragmented bits and pieces, and while rendering these subtle pieces, she reveals the illusion of a stable identity. For both Malabou and Woolf, the construction of identity and self resists any rigid cultural or social paradigm. They are more disposed towards a becoming of identity which is processual, emergent, subjective, fluid and (re)shaped by encounters with external world. As Malabou's works primarily involve the blend of neurobiological and philosophical plasticity: splintered subjectivities, plastic individualities, subversion of self, psychic transformations etc., this project aims: - To study Virginia Woolf's traumatic characters and how their malleability and transformation can be understood through the concept of plasticity - To explore the self-making process of Woolf's characters and explore themes of identity, adaptation and annihilation or exclusion.