In Which She Becomes What She Has Read: Parody in the Work of Modernist Women Writers

Throughout the course of this project, I have tried to demonstrate the ways in which Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Djuna Barnes, who are all very different and all categorized under the heading “Modernist,” attempted to “know” and read “differently” the texts of their forefathers. These authors come to terms with “the writing of the past” by revising it and, in doing so, voice their “refusal of the self-destructiveness of male society.” By rewriting the texts of the patriarchy, the authors question and problematize the authority of their precursors. They also make space for new narratives, particularly those of women, that are not colored by the repressions that inhere to the discourses of the patriarchal order. Parody may be seen as an attempt both to “understand the assumptions in which we are drenched” as well as a way to recode these “assumptions.”