Understanding Ethics in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room

This study aims to shed new light from the post-structuralist perspective on the novels of Virginia Woolf whose works explore ethical, political, and epistemological concerns. Modernist fiction is often defined as deeply opposed to the didactic, moralistic Victorian novel. However, emerging from the postwar crisis of faith in the possibility of complete knowledge and truthful understanding, a pervasive sense of unknowability saturates and shapes Woolf’s experimental fiction. Her novels stage a wide range of approaches to questions of self and other, communication and alienation, intimacy and distance. In Jacob’s Room , often considered her first modernist novel, Woolf describes the crises of knowledge and ethics that followed the Great War. By focusing on its status as both structurally experimental and deeply engaged with questions of war, urbanism, and gender, I hope to clarify a contemporary understanding of the ethics of fiction. Reading the novel in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray helps us reconcile an ethics of otherness with the feminist values of intimacy and connection.