Approaching Perfection: Vita Sackville-West’s Ultimate Pursuit in the Other Way

Abstract

Vita Sackville-West devoted herself to approaching perfection in the Other way of both gender and solitude. In regard to gender, she practiced dominating masculinity in her homosexual and heterosexual affairs and managed to equilibrate what she was in lack of as a female. In regard to solitude, she succeeded in counterbalancing what she had not achieved in real life by realizing her dominating dreams with wild imaginative sex-swapping in her novels and being remote as much as possible from the modern society in her poems and gardening. The root of Vita’s Other way of life might be discovered in three dimensions. Biologically, she did have more extrovert physical male features than ordinary women; psychoanalytically, she had the “active imagination” or “creative apperception” as the “capacity to be alone” motivated by the wills to pleasure, to power and to meaning; and metonymically, the context of her family, lovers and necessary triggers contributing to her views of life and relevant values established the indexical link between her choosing gender and solitude to approach perfection in the whole life.

Keywords

Vita Sackville-West / Otherness / Approaching Perfection / Wills / Creative Apperception / Metonymization / Gender Identity

References

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