Themes of Lesbianism and Homosexuality In Virginia Woolf's Work

The life and work of Virginia Woolf reflect the ongoing negotiation that characterizes gay life between reality and secrecy. In Woolf's lifetime, the majority of men and women who preferred their own sex to build set lives were affected by taboos against homosexuality, closely protecting their personal selves from public knowledge. This double life of the closet sometimes took on comic forms, as when Greta Garbo perfected heterosexual love scenes on the screen while she pursued women lovers in private (Castle 1–6) or when Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, both homosexual, appeared together on BBC radio giving advice on how to have a happy marriage (Glendinning 214–16).

Their personal and public lives were closely drawn by even Woolf's Bloomsbury colleagues. This needed negotiation between personal truths and public concealment has also been translated into the lives of Woolf's writing. Woolf stated her willingness to write 'truthfully' (D 2:320) about women's relationships and about women's sexuality throughout her career. In the context of these coexisting impulses to self-expression and self-protection, reading Woolf is essential to decoding not only her married lesbian life but also the complicated, multilayered style she is so renowned for. In 1821, when Britain criminalized homosexuality, women of the Woolf generation enjoyed in their personal life an unprecedented flourishing of lesbian visibility and culture. Unlike predecessors like Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Brontë, who enjoyed romantic friendships with women separated from self-connected lesbian societies, Woolf's close familiarity with homosexuals from Bloomsbury and feminist circles offered her with a range of possibilities for expressing same-sex love. Through her friendships with leading lesbian figures Vita Sackville-West and Dame Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf had the privilege of chattering about the lesbian subculture.

However, Woolf has been concerned with the effect of censorship on her writing throughout her career and especially her capacity to write about sexuality publicly. Even though Woolf’s intentions were expression not repression of her desires, she had to deliberately hide most of the heavy lesbian themes from her hostile readers which resulted in much of her content to remain obscure. Woolf developed a multilayered and allusive style to inform us all she knew about lesbian and married lives in her lifetime, leaving a record of her lesbian interactions and politics in fiction more complete, though less open, than in the diaries and letters. Hence, analyzing Woolf will be incredibly exciting and full of suspense as she coded the themes of lesbianism in every nook and corner like a maestro. And as a queer reader myself, I will definitely have a great time completing my paper.