Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Considered, along with James Joyce, as one of the most influential English (and not
only) writers before WWII, Virginia Woolf was born and brought up in a family where
love for art and letters was already a tradition. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was one of
the most important intellectuals of the late 19 th – early 20th century, and his influence
upon his daughter was decisive, if we are to mention only her taste for free discussions
and her disregard of religious matters. After the death of her father, Virginia moved to
Bloomsbury, a district of London where, between the two World Wars, a sophisticated
group of intellectuals was formed. The Bloomsbury group included besides Virginia and
her sister Vanessa, their husbands, Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell (critic and
philosopher), Lytton Strachey (critic, novelist), E.M. Forster (novelist), Duncan Grant
(painter), Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore (philosophers) or Maynard
Keynes (economist).
This ‘aristocracy of the spirit’, as Virginia Woolf later called it, came to influence
her greatly, with its refined but unstable preoccupations, gracefulness, sophistication but
also snobbish attitude.
She started to publish anonymous reviews in The Times, where, at first, she
focused on commonly accepted writers and rather disliked young and innovative
authors such as D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, on whose Ulysses she stated that ‘it
was a memorable catastrophe’.

Her conception on the art of the novel was revealed in her essays. In Modern Fiction,
published in The Common Reader (1925), some of her theoretical ideas are presented.
She suggests that each day the common mind receives a ‘myriad of impressions’,
and they are differently shaping the consciousness of each of us. The novelist’s art is to
base his/her work on their own feeling, and not on conventions, and using this method,
they have to convey a ‘luminous halo’ of life; not life itself but the life radiated by our
impressions of it.
What she is defending here is not a new range of topics/themes, but she tries to
find new ways of rendering and designing the novel. She challenges the idea of realism
by replacing it with a new aesthetic, an impressionistic one (at the beginning, but in her
late work and criticism she acknowledges the importance of method, of the novel as a
carefully planned construction)  switch to symbolism and expressionism (method,
rhythm, pattern).
The new type of novel is conceived in opposition to a contemporary school of
writers commonly known as the ‘Edwardians’ (e.g. Arnold Bennett) who insisted on
exterior details; they obeyed to conventionalism and ‘were the slaves of the plot and of
the chronological development of the story’ (V.W.)
 The new novel had to evolve out of this ‘myriad of impressions’ which daily
impose on human consciousness. The main conflict is concerned with the disparities
between the mind within and the exterior world.
In writing her novels, she makes a distinction between subjective and objective
methods and there is no wonder that she embraces the spiritual method of James Joyce,
coming close to the ‘quick of the mind’, i.e. the novels are records of something that
occurs in the mind of the character. Her ambition was to illustrate the quickness our
mind moves from one impression to another.
She considered her own style as opposed to the realist, materialist style of the
Edwardians because they were not able to create hypothetical characters. Her ambition
was to create characters who were not familiar to anything recognizable in literature so
far, but potential characters existing only in her mind.
Her view of the surrounding world is neither ecstatic, nor political, but mainly
psychological. According to her, the distinguishing feature of her art was to move the
point of interest towards the dark places of human psychology.

She was also conscious of her place in the tradition of women writers (the first to focus
on feminist ideas in literature - "A woman must have money and a room of her own if
she is to write fiction"). In A Room of One’s Own (1929), she attacks the various types
of masculine arrogance. The superiority of the women lies in the fact that their life has a
greater impersonality which allows them to look beyond the personal and political
aspects to deeper problems such as destiny or the meaning of life.

It has been argued that her work exhibits the dominance of a poetic spirit, therefore
there is a high degree of imprecision in establishing the meaning of her novels. E.M.
Forster says that her fiction is characterised by a method essentially poetic. The roots of
her novels are to be found not in the tradition of the Edwardian fiction but rather in
painting, as she came very close to the post-impressionism of a Van Gogh where form is
merely suggested. She uses a realist pretext but reflects it in a personal way by stressing
the impression left on her artistic rationality, her personality.

***

Novels
Virginia Woolf’s first novels were rather traditional in form and conservative in
meaning.

The Voyage Out (1915) is the story of a female character, Rachel Vinrace, a naïve
young woman who during a voyage on her father’s ship and her stay on an island
discovers reality and tries to understand it. The novel becomes one of initiation, of
Rachel’s struggle to get out of isolation and innocence. The second part of the novel,
when Rachel meets young writer Terence Hewet, is an opportunity for Virginia Woolf to
voice some of her ideas on the art of fiction. Terence is planning to write a novel about
silence (Virginia’s obsession) in order to get a grasp of the reality beyond words.
 an example of intertextuality: aboard her father’s ship, Rachel meets the
Dalloways (Clarissa).

Night and Day (1919), generally considered inferior to the first novel. The plot is vivid
and deals with the duties of everyday life, rather melodramatic in tone and content,
emphasizing the disparity of intentions and feelings. We are presented with the daily
lives of two friends, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet and the various relationships
established between love, marriage and happiness.
V. Woolf discovers the technique of using symbols in a personal way: day stands
for life lived in a normal way and night means the intimate universe of dreams and
fantasy.
Some of Virginia Woolf’s favourite motives are present: the lighthouse, the
senseless bird, the theme of experience and its control.

Jacob’s Room (1922), a satire directed against males and ‘their attempts to think or to
keep the appearance of thinking’, is the first novel where Woolf experiments with the
technique of the stream of consciousness and the interior monologue and develops her
poetic method.
The impressionist method used provides an original point of view, which is not
that of the character, Jacob, but that of the world perceiving Jacob from different angles.
Thus, the portrait of the hero is drawn on the testimony of friends and strangers.

Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are probably the finest treatments of the issue of
loneliness and love which haunted V. Woolf. The novels are almost eventless, but they
both illustrate the technical innovations forwarded by Woolf and the use of these
technical devices.

Mrs Dalloway (1925) opens with Clarissa Dalloway planning to give a party and going
shopping. The party becomes a pretext of bringing together various people, individuals
who are unable to mix in a crowd and who eventually come to demonstrate that one
remains lonely even among the others or within their families.
As Clarissa moves about London, encountering various people, a whole range of
memories is suggested. We do not actually follow her, but her stream of consciousness,
her thoughts moving freely from one referent to another.
This uneventful day is counterpointed by the events of Septimus Warren Smith’s
day, a character whom Clarissa never meets but with whom she has a symbolical
relationship; they both feel trapped. The relationship between the two characters
becomes obvious when Sir Williams, the specialist who treated Septimus, comes to the
party and tells Clarissa about Septimus’s suicide. That moment Clarissa realizes that she
had been suffering from the same illness, the same isolated emptiness.
At the same time, Clarissa’s past is brought into the present by means of interior
monologue, and by creating a text which is very close to the poetic text.
The rhythm of the story is very important because it suggests the passing of time;
the images are based on suggestion and on linguistic similarities.
The plot covers a single day, the same as in Ulysses. The technique used is quite
unusual, as we pass from one mind to another through transitional impressions of the
environment (see the scene in the park).

In To the Lighthouse (1927) we are dealing with a group of characters, brought for a
holiday on an island, a pretext for the analysis of the symbolic relationship between
them and the landscape. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of
it is written as thoughts and observations.
The first part of the story is centred around Mrs Ramsay who brings her guests
on the Skye Island.
The second section deals with the passage of time over the next few years; Mrs
Ramsay dies, one of her sons is killed in the war, one of the daughters dies in childbirth.
In the last section, the rest of the family visits the island 10 years later. Some of
the initial guests are also invited. The book symbolically ends with Lily Briscoe
finishing Mrs. Ramsay’s portrait, a portrait where the reader discovers the whole
significance of Mrs Ramsay’s personality and of the entire family. At the moment Lily
finishes the painting, Mr Ramsay and his son and daughter reach the lighthouse.
The novel stresses the importance of time and is based on indirect rendering of
the events, on a large variety of symbolic patterns, detailed description of moral and
psychological problems.
It is a celebration of the human creativity set against the desolated passing of
time, suggested by the beams of the lighthouse in the enormous dark. Woolf insists that
creativity is a feminine function. The disappearance of the woman brings about the
disintegration of the universe which loses coherence.

The Waves (1931) is considered by criticism the most complex of V. Woolf’s novels, a
genuine novel of the mind. The plot has a very simple outline and is centred on six
characters:
3 men: Neville, Bernard and Louis;
3 women: Susan, Jinny and Rhoda.
They are presented from early childhood to the adult age, and are not
characterised through their actions. As readers, we come in contact with them from a
variety of impressions. These impressions are conveyed by the people around them and
by the inner experiences of the characters.
V. Woolf has finally reached her wish of writing about silence: the characters do
not speak about anybody, not even themselves. The technique used is that of the
soliloquy which provides a gradual unfolding of their minds.
 The novel is also an excellent illustration of Woolf’s belief in the duality of life,
in the everlasting conflict in the human mind. Thus, as the story unfolds, the characters
become differentiated by the changing focus upon their inner experiences. The idea is
that people perceive things differently as they grow old. The duality of life means that
the existence is characterised by isolation and detachment and by the urge of having a
normal, typical life. When the characters are not able to grasp both aspects, a crisis
occurs and the characters are victimized by their own aspirations. (see Bernard, the
artist).
The unity of the novel is achieved by means of the juxtaposition of the individual
soliloquies. The rhythm of the speech offers some sort of internal melody, similar to the
movement of the waves.
In order to depict the multiplicity of life’s forms she invented a new structure for
the novel. Its form is achieved by means of poetical devices; the plot is actually
unimportant and develops by the association of ideas which take us from one character
to another and from one place to another.
Each character is a mirror that sees and reflects reality, but only a part of it. The
reader is supposed to put together these fragments to understand the life they live.