Virginia Woolf

• 1882-1941

Modernist perception

• “Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the

pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of
those two men, and to follow her thought was
like following a voice which speaks too quickly
to be taken down by one’s pencil, and the
voice was her own voice saying without
prompting undeniable, contradictory things”

• Exposition of the psychological realm of a

character

Mode of writing

• stream of consciousness

– “a narrative method that allows the free flow of

thoughts, sensations, and associations at multiple
levels of awareness. Stream of consciousness
focuses on the inner reality of characters rather
than external events”

– Woolf’s female narrative

Structure

• Division of chapters

– The window; Time passes; The lighthouse
– “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark

morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay
having died rather suddenly the night before, his
arms, though stretched out, remained empty]”

– “Will you fade? Will you perish”

“They should answer: we remain”

Woolf’s vision of life

• “[…] that community of feeling with other

people which emotion gives as if the walls of
partition had become so thin that practically
[…] it was all one stream”

Woolf’s vision in practice

• “To be silent; to be alone. All the being and

the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal,
evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of
solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped
core of darkness, something invisible to
others. […] When life sank down for a
moment, the range of experience seemed
limitless”

• “Losing personality, one lost the fret, the

hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips
always some exclamation of triumph over life
when things came together in this peace, this
rest, this eternity”

When half-hypnotized by the

world’s rhythyms - consoled

• “She saw the light the light again. […] she

looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the

remorseless, which was so much her, yet so

little her, which had her at its beck and call,

but for all that she thought, watching it with

fascination, as if it were stroking with its

silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain

whose bursting would flood her with delight,

she had known happiness, exquisite

happiness”

• “It was odd how if one was alone, one leant to

inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt

they expressed one; felt they became one; in a

sense were one”

Briscoe

• “Always before she exchanged the fluidity of

life for the concentration of painting she had a
few moments of nakedness when she seemed
like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body,
hesitating on some windy pinnacle and
exposed without protection to all the blasts of
doubt. […] She looked at the canvas […] It
would be hung in the servants’ bedrooms. It
would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa.
What was the good of doing it then, and she
heard some voice saying she couldn’t paint”

• “Yet it would be hung in the attics, she

thought; it would be rolled up and flung under
a sofa; yet even so, even of a picture like that,
it was true. One might say, even of this scrawl,
not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of
what it attempted, that it ‘remained for ever’”

• “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear

for a second, she drew a line there, in the
centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she
thought, laying down her brush in extreme
fatigue, I have had my vision”

Varieties of experience

• Active

– Time-bound – facts, surfaces, struggle and death

• “Don’t interrupt me, he seemed to be saying,

don’t say anything; just sit there. And he went
on reading. His lips twitched. It filled him. […]
This man’s strength and sanity, his feeling for
straight forward simple things, these
fishermen, the poor old crazed in
Mucklebackit’s cottage made him feel so
vigorous”

• Passive

– No sense of time – no bound of one’s personality

• “And she opened the book and began reading

here and there at random, and as she did so

she felt that she was climbing backwards,

upwards, shoving her way up under petals

that curved over her, so that she only knew

this is white, or this is red. She did not know

at first what the words meant at all. […] she

read and turned the page, swinging herself,

zigzagging this way and that, from one line to

another as from one branch to another, from

one red and white flower to another, until a

little sound rounsed her – her husband

slapping his thighs”

The hours – Woolf’s self-

destructiveness

•

http://video.google.pl/videosearch?q=%22the+hours%22+Wool
f&hl=pl&emb=0&aq=-1&oq=#q=%22the%20hours%22%20Woolf&hl=pl
&emb=0&aq=-1&oq=&start=10

•

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPeo4ZyK2X0&feature=related

Quotes

• “Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In

every human being a vacillation from one sex to the
other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that
keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the
sex is the very opposite of what it is above”

• “Women have served all these centuries as looking

glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of
reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size”

Woolf’s feminist stance

• Victorian society defined by two spheres

– the masculine sphere - politics and commerce
– the feminine sphere of the home and family

A room of one’s own

•

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=dgMabVQocd0&feature=related

Too conscious of herself –

destructive

• “They had reached the gap between the two

clumps of red-hot pokers, and there was the
Lighthouse again, but she would not let
herself look at it. Had she known that he was
looking at her, she thought, she would not
have let herself sit there, thinking”