Doubt, Havelock Ellis, and bisexuality in Jacob’s Room

This essay examines Virginia Woolf’s experimental representations of bisexuality in her bildungsroman, Jacob’s Room (JR) (1922). This article suggests that we cannot appreciate Woolf’s complex modernist strategies of resistance to restrictive and reductive attitudes to sexual identities if we think only in binary terms of hetero- and homosexuality in Woolf’s work. I argue here that a contemporary gaze of queer theory, one informed by current ideologies on the spectrum of gendered and bi+ sexual identities, is required to unearth in full Woolf’s critique of sexology in her first substantive investment into experimental sexual realism. I aim to show how sexological bisexuality influenced Woolf’s developing aesthetic that was, at the time of writing Jacob’s Room, beginning to adopt a much more innovative and experimental form.