Abstract

Human life as represented in literature is intricately connected with time and space. In Bakhtin’s words, this is equal to saying that the human perception and construction of experience have an essential chronotopic pattern. This is one of the basic structural principles adopted by a modernist writer as Virginia Woolf in her novels. Caught between past, present and future, between objective time and the subjective time of Bergsonian duration, Woolf’s protagonists enact metaphorical plunges into their inner infernos through flashbacks triggered by the spatio-temporal coordinates that define their diegetic positions. This paper aims to explore Woolf’s revisionary mode which projects the characters’ struggles on a background saturated with mythological allusions that provide a frame from within which restrictive traditional models and social conventions are subtly contested.