Chapter 3 - “Innumerable Slight Changes”

Summary

Chapter 3 reads Virginia Woolf’s The Years as a domestic novel, even though it eschews all the landmarks – births, deaths, marriages and courtships – that typically animate the genre. If consent in nineteenth-century novels is typically doubled – consent to the marriage contract reading as consent to the social contract – I find, in Woolf, a critique of the whole idea, as she presents characters who are interpellated into a social system that predates them. Reading the novel alongside recent work in Social Reproduction Theory – and with the aid of Judith Butler’s notion of the “heterosexual matrix” – I show how Woolf situates her investigation of gender within a larger social totality even as she, characteristically, finds agency within its determining structures. Woolf’s domestic novel here transforms into its opposite – a historical novel – as she meditates on the passing of time and the way new social forms emerge out of conditions inherited from the past.