A STUDY OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

Abstract

Virginia Woolf wrote her two great novels in the age of irresponsibility when there existed no common values, so that the works of its literary artist could not find any common, ground except the personality of each individual, In such an age, Virginia Woolf entered fully into the common experience and wrote novels which dealt with the theme of personality, In other words, Virginia Woolf interpreted and expressed the twentieth century mood de-licately in her novels. The style and the method of her novels are quite different from the conventional novels. She abandoned the conventional plot and characterization, She was an experimentalist in the technique of the novel. There appears many rhythmical expressions in her novels, She uses some words repeatedly to have the effect of rhythm in her sentences, Moreover the words in her novels mean more than they actually say. Some words are used symbolically and her use of metaphors and similes are very startling. When we read her novels, we feel like reading poetry because of her poetic style. Virginia Woolf's novels have no plot in the conventional sense. The importance of the events depends upon their effect on the consciousness of the characters, not upon their function in a plot, The love story, death, and other events are disclosed through the consciousness of the characters. In the conventional novels the story is told by the guthor objectively, but in Virginia Woolf's novels it is her characters' consciousness which reveals the events to the reader. The method of characterization is also different from the conventional one, Her characters are not described from outside but from inside. Since she knew that the traditional characterization could not interpret her own vision of life, she developed the new method of characterization. She makes the reader to live in the minds of her characters. All her characters are very sensitive and intelligent ones; she created characters who have clear insight and keen sensibility. Especially her women characters are more sensitive and understanding. "Stream of consciousness" technique is used by Virginia Woolf. She was very successful in her use of indirect interior monologue and the cinematic device of montage, Through indirect interior monologue she interpreted the stream of her characters' consciousness which is discontinued end fragmentary. By this method she makes the thoughts and feelings of the characters more important than actions, dialogues, and events And she represents the dual aspect of human life by time-montage and space-montage, Sometimes she makes her subject remain fixed in space and time move, and sometimes she makes the time element static and the space element move. Besides the indirect interior monologue and time- and space-mon-tage Virginia Woolf used parentheses as her stream-of-consciousness technique, She expressed the great shift of consciousness by parentheses. What she achieved through the stream-of-consciousness technique is feminism. in the new sense She was able to describe women's delicate femininity through the stream-of-consciousness technique, She believed that women's femininity makes the world much better and the characters of masculinity could not live without the warm understanding mind and the delicacy of femininity, The stream-of-consciousness technique was fit for her purpose. Virginia Woolf had purity in her imagination ahd her style was that of delicacy and strength. She had the power to express the incommunicable thought and to illuminate common experience. Though her works are not written in a great scale, she deserves the timeless admiration from the lovers of literature, because she contributed much to the new technique and the twentieth century novel,