This paper seeks to explore Virginia Woolf¡¯s idea of shells, one of the most intriguing images inscribed in her works. Woolf¡¯s fiction exhibits a handling of shells, visible materials that externalize the mental process of aesthetic activity, daydreaming, a temporal detachment from one¡¯s immediate surroundings. While political activists tend to dismiss daydreaming as a mere apolitical activity that blurs a person¡¯s contact with reality, Woolf considered it absolutely central to an artist¡¯s pursuit of creation. In fact, Woolf¡¯s making of a variety of shells might help her present the process of developing a daydreamer¡¯s artistic capacity for imagination and creation. By drawing to The Poetics of Space, a 1958 book by Gaston Bachelard, whose phenomenology of shells provides a way of understanding Woolf¡¯s imagination by means of shells, this paper attempts to examine various forms and contents of shells within Woolf¡¯s writings. This paper then focuses on a particular form of a shell in Woolf¡¯s The Years (1937), and eventually argues that such a shell functions to embody Woolf¡¯s critique of war, identified by her as a destroyer of daydreams. |