This article argues that Virginia Woolf's most central, memorable symbols share the semantic properties of mathematical variables: markers that are designed to flexibly denote multifarious, undetermined meanings. Woolf uses the generality that characterizes pure mathematics to reinvent the scope and shape of ambiguity in Jacob's Room, and in turn variables allow for an understanding of form in terms of the patterns that characterize "the life of anybody" in The Waves. Mathematics offers its own definitions of form, tied to mathematical formalism, a revolutionary 1920s movement. Ultimately, mathematical attention to Woolf's patterns offers an understanding of what it is that we call literary form, an understanding built from pattern rather than particularity. In his preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson writes, "I claimed at the start that I would use the term 'ambiguity' to mean anything I liked." 1 That is, ambiguity is itself ambiguous. We know, in literary studies, that ambiguity is important and that it is everywhere. But I am not sure if we know what it is or how it works. When ambiguity's range is large, directed toward not two or three potential confusions but innumerable and unlimited possibilities, then how, exactly, does the symbol still symbolize? Virginia Woolf tells us that her "ambiguity is intentional. .. as much elasticity as possible is desirable," 2 and her most central terms
Between 1915 and 1923, Virginia Woolf published her first three novels (The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room) as well as some of her most iconic essays and stories. This chapter examines that work with particular attention to how Woolf’s early fiction describes modern novels, placing it in conversation with her essays on the modern novel. Woolf turned repeatedly to the problem of how to achieve the freedoms of a new modernity, and her early work struggles to imagine a new kind of novel while acknowledging that this new kind of novel does not exist: not quite yet. This chapter examines Woolf’s deliberately undetermined vision of modernity, tracing how her early work persistently ponders and imagines what a new era of writing will offer even as she refuses to specify and delimit what has yet to come to pass.
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