‘The Shuffling of Feet on the Pavement: Virginia Woolf on Un-Learning the Mother Tongue’

The essay focusses on how Woolf’s quest for a ‘universal’ language of the mind can be read as redefining and even reinventing the notion of mother tongue. In particular, The Waves offers a reconfiguration of the process of language acquisition that symbolically reverses its linear development. Woolf’s stress on a dynamic, ever-moving conception of language, her connection with Coleridge’s perspectives on language, and her view of ancient Greek as an ideal lost language reveal her questioning of the idea of a culturally homogeneous and monolithic language. The notion of mother tongue is thus reconfigured by the writer in terms of a dreamed and imagined ideal language combining familiarity and foreignness, reality and ideality, exactness and the perpetual deferral of meaning.