Los espacios del recuerdo y la intimidad: Momentos de vida de Virginia Woolf

Abstract

In autobiographical writing, childhood, which is the primal space of family and intimate experiences, acquires relevance, since it is the territory to which the author’s images of the self are linked. Bodies, spaces, objects and customs inhabit memories and are associated together in the web of memory. The one who writes rethinks his/her own experience through language and makes new relationships emerge. Thus, for example, in Virginia Woolf’s works, the reduced space under a table of her father’s house becomes a secret and sheltered place where an unbreakable alliance between two sisters begins. From the theoretical and philosophical approaches of Mijaíl Bajtín and Gastón Bachelard, in this essay, I intend to achieve a chronotopical analysis of Virginia Wolf’s privacy, to show how memory space is shaped in “Reminiscences” and “A Sketch of the Past”, two texts of Moments of life by Virginia Woolf. The way the writer housed her memories in them is extremely significant, as she reveals there, the multiple attempts she appealed to give shape to her own family novel, in search of knowing or explaining herself or even confessing her deepest wound in an elaborate chronotope of her intimacy.