Ian Blyth
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780983533955
- eISBN:
- 9781781384930
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780983533955.003.0035
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines some of the “darker currents” in Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel Night and Day which reveal the conditions on the home front during World War I. In particular, it considers how ...
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This chapter examines some of the “darker currents” in Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel Night and Day which reveal the conditions on the home front during World War I. In particular, it considers how Night and Day tackles aspects of the emergency legislation introduced through the “Defence of the Realm Act,” as reflected in all of the surveillance and subterfuge the characters are involved in. It focuses on the three central characters in Night and Day's ménage à cinq who are all, to some extent or other, “outsiders”: Mary Datchett, Ralph Denham and Katharine Hilbery. It suggests that the actions of these three characters are an expression of some form of oblique protest against the war.Less
This chapter examines some of the “darker currents” in Virginia Woolf's 1919 novel Night and Day which reveal the conditions on the home front during World War I. In particular, it considers how Night and Day tackles aspects of the emergency legislation introduced through the “Defence of the Realm Act,” as reflected in all of the surveillance and subterfuge the characters are involved in. It focuses on the three central characters in Night and Day's ménage à cinq who are all, to some extent or other, “outsiders”: Mary Datchett, Ralph Denham and Katharine Hilbery. It suggests that the actions of these three characters are an expression of some form of oblique protest against the war.
