• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.531-560
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• 2008

I hope to demonstrate in this paper the degree to which the works of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, mainly The Wise Virgins, The Village in the Jungle, and The Voyage Out, are contained within the politics of home. In doing so, I aim to challenge some mainstream criticism that affirms their resistance to British imperial desire. Although their statuses as outsiders in the British Empire, being a Jew and being a woman respectively, allowed Leonard and Virginia Woolf to criticize British imperialism and a male-dominated culture as well as racial and cultural hierarchies to a degree, their works inevitably unveil their prioritization of the British white-oriented space. In some ways their authorial positions in relation to their texts uphold the imperial center as an invisible regime of truth in their narratives, supporting the patriarchal and imperial binary oppositional structure and its hierarchical order imposed not only on the British subject but also on the foreign, colonial others. Leonard's and Virginia's inconsistencies and ambiguities betray their racial distantiation and notions of British white superiority, as disclosed in their racially stereotyped descriptions and the absence of real communication between the British characters and the colonial, foreign others. The work of self-repetition, the major mechanism in the politics of home, dies hard in Leonard's and Virginia's 'antiimperial' works. Leonard's and Virginia's struggle to stand against the imperial desire needs a genuine ethical position in order to embrace the Other, which would allow us to explore further and guard against the pitfall of postcolonial criticism's being easily degenerated into a neo-colonial criticism, another politics of home.