Date of Award

12-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Degree Statement

Master of Arts in Creative Writing and Literature

Department

Department of English

Granting Institution

University of Alaska Fairbanks

Committee Chair

Johnson, Sara Eliza

Committee Chair

Coffman, Chris

Committee Member

Farmer, Daryl

Committee Member

Heyne, Eric

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The proper stuff of fiction

Chapter 2: Everyday life theory

Chapter 3: Representing the ordinary in The Years

Chapter 4: The solace of the ordinary in Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves

Chapter 5: Gender and the everyday in To the Lighthouse

Chapter 6: The everyday as argument for political change in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas

Chapter 7: Closer to life

Abstract

This paper argues that Virginia Woolf’s fiction and nonfiction are devoted to representing everyday life — what she termed “moments of non-being” or the “cotton wool” of daily existence. Through close readings of The Years, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and To The Lighthouse, I demonstrate how Woolf’s attention to the mundane captures the kinds of ordinary experiences that often elude representation, frames engagement with daily life as essential to psychological survival and exposes the gendered nature of domesticity. In Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves, characters who sustain interest in everyday routines survive, while those unable to balance moments of being and non-being ultimately commit suicide. To the Lighthouse reveals both Mrs. Ramsay’s confinement within domestic labor and her unexpected power through it. Finally, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas use the material conditions of women’s everyday lives—what they eat, how they spend their time—as evidence for why women need financial independence, education, and political power. Woolf’s sustained attention to experiences ‘commonly thought small’ insists that life exists just as fully there as in what is ‘commonly thought big.’

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