Name:-
Kailash Baraiya
Course:-
M.A. English
Semester:-
03
Batch:-2016-2018
Enrollment
no:- PG2069108420170001
Submitted
to:-Smt. S.B. Gardi Dept. of English MKBU
Email id:-
kailashbaraiya21@gmail.com
Paper no:-
9, The Modernist Literature
Topic:- The
Stream of Consciousness novel: Virginia woolf’s Contribution
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v
About The Life of Virginia Woolf:-
Ø Her
Early Life:-
Born on January 25, 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen was raised in a
remarkable household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a historian and
author, as well as one of the most prominent figures in the golden age of
mountaineering. Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson), had been
born in India and later served as a model for several Pre-Raphaelite painters.
She was also a nurse and wrote a book on the profession. Both of her
parents had been married and widowed before marrying each other. Woolf had
three full siblings — Thoby, Vanessa and Adrian — and four half-siblings —
Laura Makepeace Stephen and George, Gerald and Stella Duckworth. The eight
children lived under one roof at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.
Two of Woolf’s brothers had
been educated at Cambridge, but all the girls were taught at home and utilized
the splendid confines of the family’s lush Victorian library. Moreover, Woolf’s
parents were extremely well connected, both socially and artistically. Her
father was a friend to William
Thackeray, the father of his first
wife who died unexpectedly, and George Henry Lewes, as well as many other
noted thinkers. Her mother’s aunt was the famous 19th century photographer
Julia Margaret Cameron.
From the time of her
birth until 1895, Woolf spent her summers in St. Ives, a beach town at the
very southwestern tip of England. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House,
which is still standing today, looks out at the dramatic Porthminster Bay and
has a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse, which inspired her writing. In her later
memoirs, Woolf recalled St. Ives with a great fondness. In fact, she
incorporated scenes from those early summers into her modernist novel, To
the Lighthouse (1927).
As a young girl, Virginia
was curious, light-hearted and playful. She started a family newspaper,
the Hyde Park Gate News, to document her family’s humorous
anecdotes. However, early traumas darkened her childhood, including being
sexually abused by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth,
which she wrote about in her essays A Sketch of the Past and 22
Hyde Park Gate. In 1895, at the age of 13, she also had to cope with
the sudden death of her mother from rheumatic fever, which led to her
first mental breakdown, and the loss of her half-sister Stella, who had
become the head of the household, two years later.
While dealing with her
personal losses, Woolf continued her studies in German, Greek and Latin at the
Ladies’ Department of King’s College London. Her four years of study introduced
her to a handful of radical feminists at the helm of educational reforms. In
1904, her father died from stomach cancer, which contributed to another
emotional setback that led to Woolf being institutionalized for a brief period.
Virginia Woolf’s dance between literary expression and personal desolation
would continue for the rest of her life. In 1905, she began writing
professionally as a contributor for The Times Literary Supplement.
A year later, Woolf's 26-year-old brother Thoby died from typhoid fever after a
family trip to Greece.
After their father's death,
Woolf's sister Vanessa and brother Adrian sold the family home in Hyde Park
Gate, and purchased a house in the Bloomsbury area of London. During this
period, Virginia met several members of the Bloomsbury Group, a
circle of intellectuals and artists including the art critic Clive Bell, who
married Virginia's sister Vanessa, the novelist E.M. Forster, the painter
Duncan Grant, the biographer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes and
essayist Leonard Woolf, among others. The group became famous in 1910 for
the Dreadnought Hoax, a practical joke in which members of the group dressed up
as a delegation of Ethiopian royals, including Virginia disguised as a bearded
man, and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their
warship, the HMS Dreadnought. After the outrageous act, Leonard
Woolf and Virginia became closer, and eventually they were married on
August 10, 1912. The two shared a passionate love for one another for the rest
of their lives.
Ø Literary
Work:-
Several years before
marrying Leonard, Virginia had begun working on her first novel. The original
title was Melymbrosia. After nine years and innumerable drafts,
it was released in 1915 as The Voyage Out. Woolf used the
book to experiment with several literary tools, including compelling and
unusual narrative perspectives, dream-states and free association prose. Two
years later, the Woolfs bought a used printing press and established Hogarth
Press, their own publishing house operated out of their home, Hogarth House.
Virginia and Leonard published some of their writing, as well as the work
of Born on January
25, 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen was raised in a remarkable household.
Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a historian and author, as well as one of
the most prominent figures in the golden age of mountaineering. Woolf’s mother,
Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson), had been born in India and later served as
a model for several Pre-Raphaelite painters. She was also a nurse and wrote a
book on the profession. Both of her parents had been married and widowed
before marrying each other. Woolf had three full siblings — Thoby, Vanessa
and Adrian — and four half-siblings — Laura Makepeace Stephen and George,
Gerald and Stella Duckworth. The eight children lived under one roof at 22
Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.
Two of Woolf’s brothers had
been educated at Cambridge, but all the girls were taught at home and utilized
the splendid confines of the family’s lush Victorian library. Moreover, Woolf’s
parents were extremely well connected, both socially and artistically. Her
father was a friend to William Thackeray, the father of his first wife who died
unexpectedly, and George Henry Lewes, as well as many other noted
thinkers. Her mother’s aunt was the famous 19th century photographer Julia
Margaret Cameron.
From the time of her
birth until 1895, Woolf spent her summers in St. Ives, a beach town at the
very southwestern tip of England. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House,
which is still standing today, looks out at the dramatic Porthminster Bay and
has a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse, which inspired her writing. In her later
memoirs, Woolf recalled St. Ives with a great fondness. In fact, she
incorporated scenes from those early summers into her modernist novel, To
the Lighthouse (1927).
As a young girl, Virginia was
curious, light-hearted and playful. She started a family newspaper, the Hyde
Park Gate News, to document her family’s humorous anecdotes.
However, early traumas darkened her childhood, including being sexually
abused by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, which she
wrote about in her essays A Sketch of the Past and 22
Hyde Park Gate. In 1895, at the age of 13, she also had to cope with
the sudden death of her mother from rheumatic fever, which led to her
first mental breakdown, and the loss of her half-sister Stella, who had
become the head of the household, two years later.
While dealing with her
personal losses, Woolf continued her studies in German, Greek and Latin at the
Ladies’ Department of King’s College London. Her four years of study introduced
her to a handful of radical feminists at the helm of educational reforms. In
1904, her father died from stomach cancer, which contributed to another
emotional setback that led to Woolf being institutionalized for a brief
period. Virginia Woolf’s dance between literary expression and personal
desolation would continue for the rest of her life. In 1905, she began writing
professionally as a contributor for The Times Literary Supplement.
A year later, Woolf's 26-year-old brother Thoby died from typhoid fever after a
family trip to Greece.
After their father's death,
Woolf's sister Vanessa and brother Adrian sold the family home in Hyde Park
Gate, and purchased a house in the Bloomsbury area of London. During this
period, Virginia met several members of the Bloomsbury Group, a
circle of intellectuals and artists including the art critic Clive Bell, who
married Virginia's sister Vanessa, the novelist E.M. Forster, the painter
Duncan Grant, the biographer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes and
essayist Leonard Woolf, among others. The group became famous in 1910 for
the Dreadnought Hoax, a practical joke in which members of the group dressed up
as a delegation of Ethiopian royals, including Virginia disguised as a bearded
man, and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their
warship, the HMS Dreadnought. After the outrageous act, Leonard
Woolf and Virginia became closer, and eventually they were married on
August 10, 1912. The two shared a passionate love for one another for the rest
of their lives.
Sigmund Freud, Katharine Mansfield and T.S.
Eliot.
A year after the end of
World War I, the Woolfs purchased Monk's House, a cottage in the village of
Rodmell in 1919, and that same year Virginia published Night and Day,
a novel set in Edwardian England. Her third novel Jacob's Room was
published by Hogarth in 1922. Based on her brother Thoby, it was considered a
significant departure from her earlier novels with its modernist elements. That
year, she met author, poet and landscape gardener Vita
Sackville-West, the wife of English diplomat Harold Nicolson. Virginia and Vita
began a friendship that developed into a romantic affair. Although their affair
eventually ended, they remained friends until Virginia Woolf's death.
In 1925, Woolf received rave
reviews for Mrs. Dalloway, her fourth novel. The mesmerizing
story interweaved interior monologues and raised issues of feminism, mental
illness and homosexuality in post-World War I England. Mrs. Dalloway was
adapted into a 1997 film, starring Vanessa Redgrave, and inspired The
Hours, a 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham and a 2002 film adaptation. Her
1928 novel, To the Lighthouse, was another critical success and
considered revolutionary for its stream of consciousness storytelling.The
modernist classic examines the subtext of human relationships through the
lives of the Ramsay family as they vacation on the Isle of Skye in
Scotland.
Woolf found a literary muse in
Sackville-West, the inspiration for Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando,
which follows an English nobleman who mysteriously becomes a woman at the age
of 30 and lives on for over three centuries of English history. The novel was a
breakthrough for Woolf who received critical praise for the groundbreaking
work, as well as a newfound level of popularity.
In 1929, Woolf
published A Room of One's Own, a feminist essay based on lectures
she had given at women's colleges, in which she examines women's role in
literature. In the work, she sets forth the idea that “A woman must have money
and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf pushed narrative
boundaries in her next work, The Waves (1931), which she
described as "a play-poem" written in the voices of six different
characters. Woolf published The Years, the final novel published
in her lifetime in 1937, about a family's history over the course of a generation.
The following year she published Three Guineas, an essay which
continued the feminist themes of A Room of One's Own and
addressed fascism and war.
Throughout her career,
Woolf spoke regularly at colleges and universities, penned dramatic letters,
wrote moving essays and self-published a long list of short stories. By her
mid-forties, she had established herself as an intellectual, an
innovative and influential writer and pioneering feminist. Her ability to
balance dream-like scenes with deeply tense plot lines earned her incredible
respect from peers and the public alike. Despite her outward success, she
continued to regularly suffer from debilitating bouts of depression and
dramatic mood swings.
Ø Suicide
and Legacy:-
Woolf's husband,
Leonard, always by her side, was quite aware of any signs that pointed to his
wife’s descent into depression. He saw, as she was working on what would be her
final manuscript, Between the Acts (published posthumously
in 1941),that she was sinking into deepening despair. At the time, World
War II was raging on and the couple decided if England was invaded by
Germany, they would commit suicide together, fearing that Leonard, who was
Jewish, would be in particular danger. In 1940, the couple’s London home
was destroyed during the Blitz, the Germans bombing of the city.
Unable to cope with her
despair, Woolf pulled on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones and
walked into the River Ouse on March 28, 1941. As she waded into the water, the
stream took her with it. The authorities found her body three weeks later.
Leonard Woolf had her cremated and her remains were scattered at their home,
Monk's House.
Although her popularity
decreased after World War II, Woolf's work resonated again with a new
generation of readers during the feminist movement of the
1970s. Woolf remains one of the most influential authors of the 21st
century.
v Introduction:-
It is in the early part of the nineteenth century that ‘the stream of
consciousness’ novel, a new literary genre, began to appear in the realm of
English literature. It was William James who first used the phrase, ‘stream of
consciousness’ in his Principles of Psychology in 1890 to denote
the chaotic flow of impressions and sensations through the human consciousness.
Then Freud’s writings began to appear in English translations shortly after
1910. The ideas of Bergson and William James also began to have their impact in
England. According to William James, “Consciousness in an amalgam of all that
we have experienced and continue to experience. Every thought is a part of the
personal consciousness: every thought is also unique and ever-changing.
We seem
to be selective in our thoughts, selectively attentive or inattentive focusing
attention on certain objects and areas of experience, rejecting others, totally
blocking others out. Experience is remoulding us every moment and our mental
reaction on every given thing is really a result of our experience of the whole
world up to the moment”. And this is also true not only of ideas but also of
sensory perception as consciousness registers them.
Ø Edwardians and
Georgians:-
In fact the Edwardian writers
saw people as simple, whole and definable, whereas the Georgians began to see
them as complex, diverse and ineffable. The rise of this literary genre of ‘the
stream of consciousness, novel in the early twenties is but a reaction of the
increasing inwardness of life consequent upon the breakdown of accepted values
with the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War
accelerated this process. The Georgians realised that if they were to explore
the new territories, they required new tools. The new perspective needed a new
technique. Mrs. Dorothy M. Richardson was, no doubt, the pioneer in this field
in England. But Virginia Woolf was the most important protagonist of this new
literary genre. Of course this was not just confined to England. On the eve of
the First World War, three novelists unknown to each other, began their
epoch-making works destined to have enormous influence on the fiction of the
century. In France, Marcel Proust published the first two volumes of his Remembrance
of This Past. And then in 1914 James Joyce, an Irishman, began
publishing in serial form A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. And the third novelist was Miss Dorothy Richardson. So between
1913 and 1915 was born the new novel, the psychological novel or the novel of
‘the stream of consciousness’. And the great thing is that the three novelists
turned fiction from the external to internal reality. All the three wrote from
an acute need to pose inner problems and project their inner life before the
world.
Ø Other Influences:-
We may now assert that the modern
psychological novel is ‘modern’ in a way that it reflects the deeper and more
searching inwardness of our century. And, in fact, this turning inward was
promoted by the writings of Bergson and Freud besides those of William James.
Ø Bergson and Theory
of Time:-
The novelists of this new school were
greatly influenced by Bergson who held that we all are remoulded constantly by
experience and our consciousness in a process of endless accretions as long as
mind and senses are functioning. ‘The continuation of an infinite past in the
living present’ is always there. Bergson divided time into “Linner time” or
‘Duree’; it may also be called psychological time. And the other is ‘Clock
time’ or mechanical time. ‘Inner time’ is conceived as a flow, a continuous
moving stream and hence the division into past, present and future as
artificial and mechanical. In fact the past lives on in the present, in memory
and its consequences, and hence it also shapes the future. Hence in the
psychological novels there is a preoccupation with time. So in this type of
novel we find the action moving backward and forward freely in time. There is
no chronological forward movement which is a common feature of the traditional
novel. There the movement is zig-zag, a sinuous movement from the past to the
present, and from the present to the past. Thus we often find the novelists of
this school making an hour seem like a week or a week like an hour. In this
connection David Daiches’ comments are worth quoting “The stream of
consciousness technique is a means of escape from tyranny of the time
dimension. It is not only in distinct memories that the past impinges on the
present, but also in much vaguer and more subtle ways, our mind floating off
down some channel, superficially irrelevant but really having a definite
starting-off place from the initial situation, so that in presenting the
character’s reaction to events, the author will show us states of mind being
modified by associations and recollections deriving from the present situation,
but referring to a constantly shifting series of events in the past”. And we
find Mrs. Woolf showing great skill in the manipulation of time in her
Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse.
Ø Human
Consciousness: Its different Layers:-
The great psychologists like
Freud, Adler and Jung probed deeper and deeper into the human consciousness.
They studied it very carefully and conceived of it as nothing static or fixed.
To them it was something in a state of flux, constantly changing and becoming
different, in response to sensations and emotions received from outside. And
then deeper probings and careful researches by them revealed that there were
layers within layers in the human consciousness. Beneath the conscious, there
is the sub-conscious, and then the unconscious. And the epoch-making revelation
is that the past lives in the sub-conscious and the unconscious and is brought
up to the conscious level through memory and recollection. And the ‘conscious’
is only a small part of the human psyche or soul. Hence human actions are bound
to be determined more by the subconscious and the unconscious than by the
conscious. Then Freud’s concepts like ‘mother-fixation’ or ‘father-fixation’ or
‘Oedipus complex’ have been freely exploited by the modern writers in their
novels known as psycho-analytical novels. It may be noted that ‘the stream of
consciousness’ novel carries the impression of all these theories and the
result of careful researches.
Ø More Interested in
the Inner than in the Outer Life:-
The modern novelist of the new
school is more interested in the inner than in the outer life of a character.
And the aim of these writers is to render the soul or ‘psyche’ truthfully and
realistically and hence they use the stream of consciousness technique. They
know and so they want to show that the human psyche is not a simple entity
functioning logically and rationally, in a predictable manner. Hence, in their
novels, in place of external action and violent deeds, there is the interior
monologue and there are the fluid mental states. The novelist creates a world
of his own with its own laws. Hardly any climax or a turning point is to be
found in the story. It is the penumbra of the mind which becomes important.
Hence the modern novelists of this new school are spiritual, as opposed to the
Edwardian novelists. Hence these type of novels have mainly as their essential
subject-matter the consciousness of one or more characters. The depicted
consciousness serves as a screen on which the material in these novels is
presented. There is very little of external action. But in its place we get the
interior monologue and the fluid mental states—existing simultaneously at a
number of points in a person’s total experience.
Ø Interior Monologue:-
The interior monologue is, in
fact, an integral part of the novels of this new literary genre. This internal
or interior monologue is the silent speech of a given character, designed to
introduce us directly into the internal life of the character without the author’s
intervention to explain or to comment. A well-known French novelist defined it
as ‘the speech of a character in a scene, having for its object the direct
introduction of the reader into the inner life of a character, without an
intervention by way of explanation or commentary on the part of the author;
like other monologues, it has theoretically no organisation in these respects:
in the matter of content, it is an expression of the most intimate thoughts,
those which lie nearest the unconscious, in its nature it is a speech which
precedes logical organisation, reproducing the intimate thoughts just as they
are born and just as they come; as for form, it employs direct sentences
reduced to the syntaxical minimum, thus in general it fulfils the same requirement
as we make today for poetry. Thus we may say that this is a new technical
device that enables the reader to enter the inner life of a character
straightaway and to watch the flow of sensations and impressions as they rise
without any logical organisation.
Ø Plot and Character:-
In the psychological
novel there is hardly any plot or story. Both plot and character in the
conventional sense have decayed in the novels of this new genre. There is no
set description of characters as in the older novel; there is a shift from the
externals to the inner self of various personages. And then there is no
plot-construction in the sense of a logical arrangement of incidents and
events, leading chronologically to a catastrophe or denouement. And according
to Virginia Woolf herself, in the novel of subjectivity there is no plot, no
character, no tragedy, no comedy, and no love-interest as in the traditional
novel. That is why she abandoned the convention of story for the same reason
that she abandoned the convention of character drawing; neither of them could
be made to express life as she saw it. She ceased to draw characters in
outline, she ceased to sum up men and women or to give her reader the illusion
that they could be covered with a formula, or that their identity was constant
or definable. As in her conception of human personality, so in her conception
of human experience, continuity and fluidity is emphasized rather than boundary
or definition. To the writers of this school a continuous action seems too
unlike ordinary experience, with its freakish accidental interruptions, its
overlapping of time and circumstance. According to them the sense of life is
often best rendered by an abrupt passing from one series of events, one group
of characters, one-centre of consciousness, to another. Hence they don’t
particularly care about neatly finishing off a given action, following it
through to the fall of the curtain. They also feel that the imagination is
stimulated and rendered more active, is actually exhilarated, by broken bits of
information, as the nerves are stimulated by the discontinuity of an electric
current. Thus the technique of these writers conforms more closely to the
actual thought process, which is made up of a flux of sensations and
impressions than does a connected chain of logical reasoning. In addition,
their purpose is to turn the reader into an author by removing themselves from
the scene. It was for achieving a full measure of realism that the novelist
left, the characters alone to put forth their mind. It was an attempt to document
the whole world of the sense in a minute and to catch fugitive thoughts in
their progress through the mind—catch them as Joyce did in Ulysses in
their movement or flux. For the first time these writers were trying to find
words that would convey elusive and evanescent thought. They were seeking to
express, moreover, the images of the inner world of fantasy, fusing with sounds
and smell, the world of perceptual experience. So it must be carefully noted
that the stream of consciousness technique is a way of rendering the psyche or
the soul of the characters, accurately and realistically. And to know a
character really or truthfully, we must know what is happening inside his mind,
we must plunge into his pre-speech level of consciousness, and see what sensations
and impressions are floating there uncontrolled and unorganized.
Ø
Mrs. Woolf and the Stream of Consciousness Novel:-
Undoubtedly Dorothy Richardson
is the English writer who is the pioneer in this field and who presents stream
of consciousness writing at its purest. But among the stream of consciousness
novelists in England, Virginia Woolf is the most important name. Mrs.
Richardson’s work is in fact unbearably diffuse and an average reader finds her
almost unbearable. In contrast with her Mrs. Woolf can tightly organise a
novel. She realised that the tools and established conventions of the Edwardian
novelists would mean sure ruin for the novelist of the new generation and hence
she made continued experiments with the form of the novel. Her chief purpose
was to record what lifes for living beings, and then to communicate the
impression made by one individual upon another. She also aimed at revealing the
human personality partly through its own self-consciousness and partly through
the picture projected by it on other minds. But she knew that art implies
selection and ordering of materials. Hence she did not follow her theory in
every detail in her great novels like Mrs. Dalloway or To
The Lighthouse. There is definitely some form or pattern and some
inner unity in these novels. Most of the novelists of this hardly cared for a
closed and compact plot. As a result the novel in their hand became very often
incoherent and shapeless and made unbearable for most of the readers. That is
why they find even great works like Ulysses unreadable,
freakish and eccentric. But the credit of imparting form and discipline to the
chaotic novel of this genre and making it acceptable to the average reader must
go to Virginia Woolf whose contribution in this field is of far-reaching
consequence. Of course the influence of Joyce and Bergson is considerable. But
she is by no means a blind imitator of the great masters of the new technique
or the psychologists who furnished the theoretical framework for the stream of
consciousness novel. Her essential method is her own. That is why we find that
the novelist is playing the role of a central intelligence in her outstanding
novels and is constantly busy, organising the material and illuminating it by
frequent comments. In fact Virginia Woolf was a great experimenter. She
experimented with many methods and gave to ‘the stream of consciousness’
technique so many twists and turns and finally achieved her complete success
in Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. Unquestionably
she was a professional, evolving a new form of fiction and creating a
masterpiece in it. Thus, for all her brilliant achievements in this literary
genre of the ‘stream of consciousness’ novel Virginia Woolf is the most
important name among the novelists of the new school. And that is why Virginia
Woolf belongs to literature and Miss Dorothy Richardson along with many other
writers of this genre to the history of literature.
Work Cited
Editors, Biography.com. Biography.com website.
A&E Television Network. 27 october 2017
<https://www.biography.com/people/virginia-woolf-9536773>.
www.
NeoTrainings.com. 11 December 2010
<http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.in/2010/12/stream-of-consciousness-novel-virginia.html>.
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