ABSTRACT
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce are novels concerned with the development of the nascent artist. More than this, they both identify two central features as being significant in the struggle to develop individual identity – features which affect the relation of the individual to the community, to representations of reality and thus ultimately to themselves. First, both novels grapple with the problem of how the individual might negotiate cultural and community institutions of language and subjecthood – in Joyce, these issues are complicated by the master ideologies of nationality and religion, in Woolf, the ideologies of patriarchal norms; for both, these influences are sources of repression, obstacles to the realisation of self, and of art. Secondly, both novels are concerned with a dominant philosophical question – of how the ‘subject’ relates to ‘reality’, the relationship between life and art, between subjective experience and aesthetic representation. These two themes, the material relation of the subject to ideological and cultural context, and the intellectual relation to the concept of reality (and its relation to the aesthetic) are relevant to constructions encountered in law and jurisprudence. Such concerns, though not fully acknowledged as such, arise in a case from the period, The Viscountess Rhondda’s Claim.1 Together, the two novels permit interesting comparisons to be drawn concerning the nature of subjecthood and related philosophical and ethical models. In short, the texts of Joyce and Woolf produce a dynamic engagement with philosophical questions, especially with regard to the individual’s construction of ‘reality’. When placed alongside a contemporaneous case – The Viscountess Rhondda’s Claim – dealing with legal personality, the nature of personhood, of power – the construction of the individual by a ‘reality’, the dynamic becomes vigorous indeed, implicating not just the identities and realities of novelists and litigants, of men and women, but of philosophers and judges too – all sucked into an equalising maelstrom, yet separate, fervent and sincere.
