Common Readers and Scholars of Woolf relentlessly seek and often find messages of hope in Woolf’s writing. From second-wave feminist criticism to contemporary studies in new materialism, we look to Woolf to find hopeful visions of liberatory, equitable ways of living that disrupt repressive late-modern ideology and offer some hope for a future in which we might ‘live differently’. At the same time, Woolf scholars attend to her critical skepticism regarding utopian promises and her refusal to subscribe to easy political answers. Writing about Woolf’s agnostic mysticism, for instance, Gabrielle McIntire describes how, “Woolf attests to her disbelief or uncertainty precisely when she is grappling with the wonder of mystical insight, encountering her own resistance at the very moment of revelation.” This panel explores the political and ethical stakes of this tension in three 15-minute papers that address Woolf’s work in relation to critical race, queer, and disability studies.

In “Elizabeth Dalloway’s Chinese Eyes: Envisaging an Alternative Future,” Jingjing Cao focuses her expertise on Virginia Woolf, China, and global modernism on The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway to examine the place of China and Chinese farmers in Woolf’s utopic imagination. In The Voyage Out, Helen Ambrose envisages that the future is in the hands of Russian and Chinese farm laborers rather than the English. The constellation of China, farmers, and the future is reprised in Mrs. Dalloway where Elizabeth Dalloway, viewing laborers on the Strand, is given “Chinese eyes” that anticipate a future of economic power and political enfranchisement for herself. Identifying problematic links between race, class, and gender in the symbolization of Elizabeth’s Chinese eyes, Cao simultaneously identifies, in Bloomsbury’s rural experiments in farmwork, a source for Woolf’s revolutionary social consciousness. By imagining middle class English women and Chinese farmers as “outsiders,” Cao argues that Woolf refigures China’s geographic remoteness as English futurity to envision a utopic post-war future that might challenge male-dominated politics and Western expansionism.

In “For the ‘love of beautiful things or of good persons’: Bloomsbury’s Queer Utopias as Creative Strategies in Jacob’s Room and The Waves,” J. Ashley Foster, author of the forthcoming monograph, “Impossible Witness: Modernist Peace Testimonies from the Spanish Civil War” (Clemson UP), investigates Woolf’s utopic impulses in Jacob’s Room and The Waves. Both novels feature idyllic communities that are drawn from the male members of the Bloomsbury group and their experiences at Cambridge. The configurations formed by the Cambridge scholars in Jacob’s Room, the group of friends in The Waves, and the Bloomsbury members in “real” life open onto a queer space of social critique and dissent, where lifestyle, friendship, art, life, and civilization become sites of political radicalization and absolutist pacifism. However, as Foster argues, “utopia” itself implies and contains a dystopian alterity signaling danger. In Jacob’s Room and The Waves, the utopian communities experienced by some are shadowed by those who are excluded or subordinated. Interrogating the line between no-where and now-here where utopic strategies live, Foster shows how youth, memory, and imagination, pictured in these novels as utopian sites of possibility and resistance, refuse settled forms.

In “‘Odious Rice Pudding of a Book’: Virginia Woolf’s Failed Novel, Failing Bodies, and Failing Body Politics,” Benjamin B. Bengtson draws on his research in medical rhetoric, critical disability studies, and late modernism to examine the multigenerational depiction of broken and failing bodies in The Years. Bengtson argues that the novel, which Woolf described as a “dank failure,” supplants her early experiments with interiority in favour of a realism that visibilizes the body as a mediating site where past and future sociopolitical anxieties converge on an uneasy present. The Years’s mutilated fingers and amputations, sickrooms and mourning rituals, aging, degeneration and “gross, obese, shapeless” individuals with “exaggerated features” proleptically present disability as a collective experience engendered by the temporal open-endedness of warfare. Woolf’s “failure” of a novel reflects her utopian skepticism through the inevitable failure of the body to liberate itself from violence and, concomitantly, the body politic to prevent war. However, Bengtson argues, The Years’ metonymic association between disability and decay risks a harmful depiction of various bodyminds that perpetuates a narrative prosthesis whereby the marginality of broken bodies metaphorically (and reductively) negotiates the boundaries of a broken state.

This panel features voices from across the career spectrum and the world and represents a diversity of critical approaches to Woolf studies, each exploring a different facet of Woolf’s utopian skepticism.