‘(B)ut How Grow Flowers […] if One Kept Hens?’: The Transgressing Role of Bird Imagery in Virginia Woolf’s The Years

Abstract

[Abstract] In the atmosphere of growing oppression in the 1930s Britain, where the rapid raise of Fascism threatens to impose its hegemony over the whole of socio-political structures, the imminence of a new outburst of international combat comes to aggravate the forlorn landscape of post-Victorian society. This hopeless panorama of tyrannical dominance over the individual is completed with the oppression from patriarchal dictatorship which, supported by the inheritance of Victorian precepts, emerges as an accurate replica of its political referent. Profoundly contempt with this scenario, wherein mass manipulation has become the vehicle for central leaders, in their attempt to create an easily controllable monolithic block, Virginia Woolf envisions the principles and aesthetics of the grotesque as the most effective vehicle to accomplish the destruction of the corrupt pillars of this ideological and socio-cultural edifice. Hence, as this paper aims to demonstrate, it is through the subversion and decentralization inherent to the politics of carnival and the grotesque parameters upon which it rests that the final demolition of the rotten scaffolding of this system can be effected. Indeed, through a reality of dualities and hybrid identities in The Years, the narrator vindicates for the transgression of the constraints and monadism imposed by hegemonic forces, at the same time as she clamours for an unrestrained order. Accordingly, by focusing on Woolf’s resort to the fowl-like hybridisation of some of her characters in the novel, this analysis will attempt to shed light on the potential of these carnivalesque and grotesque principles ruling over the narrative as a powerful weapon for definitely shaking the socio-political foundations of her time, now exposed in their purest degradation and ridiculous truth. On the verge of an international conflict, it