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Attila Dósa, Högberg, Elsa. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 59, Issue 1, January 2023, Pages 160–162, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad002
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Extract
Elsa Högberg’s ambitious volume provides a compelling and uncommonly detailed examination of the ethical and political dimensions of Modernist interiority in Virginia Woolf’s fiction. It sheds new light on the concept of intimacy in Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Högberg argues that the experimental narrative methods that Woolf adopted, refashioned and developed to convey intimacy provided a way of engaging with the alarming political views of her time, such as fascism and extreme nationalism. She argues that Woolf’s novels extend the concept of intimacy into the domain of social relations and that the aesthetic formulation of interior reality turns into a coded expression of Woolf’s political resistance. Högberg’s project is aligned with affect studies, which has increased enormously in popularity in recent years, and which sees the discussion of intimacy as inseparable from the critique of power structures. Intimacy, then, is a space where private and public content meet. In other words, it is not the result of turning away from public affairs; on the contrary, it is essentially the result of a political attitude.
