『제이콥의 방』: 상류사회 청년지식인의 초상

Jacob"s Room : The Portrait of a high class intellectual as a young man

&nbsp;&nbsp;Throughout her career, Virginia was recognized as a modern novelist of the private sphere or as a precursor of feminism.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The existing objection that her work lacks social vision and concern often accompanied charges of false lyricism or snobbish aesthetism. But these biased misreadings come in part from an emphasis on her relationship with the intellectual aristocracy of the Bloomsbury and her own famous attacks on Bennett&quot;s Victorian Materialism. Yet her vigorous social activities, as well as the radicalism of Bloomsbury group influenced her social vision to form the world of her fiction as the texture of psychological and social life.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;In Jacob&quot;s Room, Woolf shows the influence of dominant ideology in constructing human subjectivity, revealing the process of Jacob&quot;s characterization. The whole Victorian educational system, represented in Cambridge University, embodies the Western logocentrism contributing to the expansion of military and commercial Empire.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Although Jacob tries to reconcile in him the discrepancy between his intellectual beliefs and the real life, he comes to be imbued with the patriarchal discourse, and to be left eventually as a victim of the First World War. His preoccupation with the spirit of the ancient Greece and pursuit of unity describing him as constructed by dominant ideology and thus as a figure in an institutional sacrifice, Woolf completes her criticism against the founding culture of imperial Britain.