Martin was in the jungle alone, and the sun was sinking’: The Weather, Culture and Identity in Virginia Woolf’s The Years

Abstract

Depictions of the weather as cultural representation in literature, particularly in Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), challenge the construction of meanings, identity, and culture. Basing my argument on Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of colonial ambivalence, I propose in this chapter that though the weather is often portrayed in our daily life as an essence, it is at the same time, portrayed as the very ‘thing’ which constantly escapes essentialisation and therefore, can be compared to an individual’s complex sense of self, sense of place, and sense of culture. There are numerous attempts to regulate the weather, as there are numerous attemps to regulate and pigeonhole one’s identity and mind-set. Endeavours of this kind are, according to Woolf, constantly challenged by the weather and the self’s dynamism and unpredictability. Also, the weather endows place with a sense of identity, as patial consciousness. Its very physicality contributes to the construction of an imagined community at both regional and national levels. However, in the text, the weather’s ambivalence and changeability, as reflected in human beings’ past and present obsessive attempts to control and rationalize it, shatter its very essence and challenge our fixed concepts of identity, sense of regionality and sense of nationhood