The appeal to audience through figures of thought in Virginia Woolf's feminist essays

Abstract

This article discusses the presence of figures of thought in some well-known feminist essays by Virginia Woolf. The novelist and essayist was especially sensitive to the challenging situation of women throughout history as far as their personal and professional desire for equality in a male-centered society was concerned. Woolf tries to make readers aware of her feminist views by using expressive resources like figures of speech or schemes, tropes and figures of thought in her writing. Figures of thought can be defined as those specific gestures which are designed to interact with the audience. Their use is connected with the functional use of language in the sense that they may draw readers’ attention away from the textual content and toward the context. Since the essays chosen for this study were first read aloud or were written in the form of letters before being published, the appeal to audience may be more deliberate and thus effective. The figures analyzed are enallage of person, erotema, ecphonesis, prosopopeia, aposiopesis and prolepsis.