Virginia Woolf (1882_1941)

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Virginia woolf(1882_1941)
Virginia woolf, who was the most distinguished woman writer of her generation, made a far more exciting use of the stream of consciousness’ technique than James Joyce. She was greatly impressed by Ulysses, in which Joyce had found an alternative to the well_ made plot and external characterization.She found that this conception of the inner drama of the mind was fraught with tremendous possibilities, and she decided to exploit it to the fullest extent.This method suited her admirably because having a purely literary background, much of her experience had come from books rather than from actual life.Moreover, like Joyce, she had a fine sense of language, and was gifted with a poetic tempremant.

Working under the influence of Joyce, and of the French novelist, Proust, who conceived personality as a continued process of decantation from state to state,Virginia Woolf ignored the outer personality regarding it simply as the semi_transparent envelope’, through which she could study the ‘reality’, namely, the thoughts, feelings and impressions as they quickedend into life.She herself pointedout, “it’s life that matters , nothing but life, the process of discovering the everlasting and perpetual process”.She depicts in her novels the stuff life____ the thought , feelings, impressions__ steeped in the richest dyes of her imagination and turned into images by her poetic sensibility,

In her first novel_____ The VOYAGE OUT(1913), Virginia Woolf followes the traditional pattern of story-telling. Here she relates the story of a young and inexperienced girl who comes to learn something of life and the relations between the sexes , falls in love and dies of tropical fever before she can realise herself.But the real intrest in the novel centres on a vague awareness that there is a meaning in life.Her second novel, NIGHT AND DAY(1919), offers an elaborate long drawn-out study of Katherine Hilberry, an intelligent young woman of the middle class and her relation with her mother and her friends.But the main interest lies not on the theme of love, but on the conversations and introspections in which the chief characters are engaged and which gradually reveal their doubts and hesitations as they face the reality of experience.

Her next novel , JACOB’S ROOM(1922), represnts her first serious experiment in the ‘stream of of consciousness’ technique.Here she makes an attempt to construct pictorially the personality of a young Englishman from his infancy to the age of twenty-six, when he is killed in the war .Here the sunlit strams of youth are overshadowed by time.Frustration and death, and fires of love are aquenched by human faithlessness.In this novel, Virginia Woolf’s quest for the meaning of human experience goes on but the mystery is not yet solved.In MRS.DALLOWAY(1925) she explores and recreates the personality of a middle_aged woman, Mrs.Dalloway.Here she sets down the incidents of a day in her life accompanied by visual, mental and emotional impressions.The day in her life is expressed in terms of a long interior monologue, the smooth flowing of the stream of consciousness , which is interrupted by the striking hours of the clock.

Virginia Woolf’s most successful novel in the new ‘stream of consciousness’ method is TO THE LIGHTHOUSE(1927) .Here the scene is set on an unnamed island, and the Lighthouse symbolizes in some queer way the’ reality’ which is never experienced.Her next novel ORLANDO, which is liveliest of all , relates in a series of vivid scenes and dramatic climaxs, the mental experiences of a poet while writing a prize poem. In THE YEARS (1937) Virginia Woolf returned to a much simpler form of fiction. It is the novel of the generations in which the fortunes of a middle-class family from 1880 to the present time are rather sketchily represented. Her last novel BETWEEN THE ACTS (1941) , is filled with a sense of her personal failure to wrest meaning from experiences, and the spectacle of the world at war deepens the despair.