VIRGINIA WOOLF'S VERBAL ALCHEMY: FEELING IN FORM
Abstract
The problem Woolf faced throughout her works was how to represent her characters' and narrators' shifting perceptions without making her writing too idiosyncratic to be understood. With such essays as "Street Haunting," "The Moment: Summer's Night," "Life and the Novelist," and "The Narrow Bridge of Art" providing a theoretical foundation for her novels, Woolf's eight major novels, The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts, chronicle her thematic and organizational search for the appropriate "form" for modern man's "feelings." This study investigates Woolf's use of the "moment," that "form" she refines throughout her essays and novels to provide an "epitome" of characterization and theme central to her art. As such critics as Alice van Buren Kelley, Harvena Richter, David Daiches, and Jean Guiguet have noted, the epiphanic "moment" provides Woolf's characters with reaffirmations of order in their lives. Woolf's "moments," however, go even further: they offer glimpses of the archetypal and universal within the particular. Historically, this study investigates three influences on Woolf's art and her development of the "moment": the significance of the so-called Bloomsbury group, particularly of Roger Fry and his "An Essay in Aesthetics," on Woolf's own aesthetic theories; the impact of World Wars I and II and the scientific, political, and artistic ambience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on Woolf's themes; and the importance of Woolf's own changing notions about life and art as recorded in A Writer's Diary and Quentin Bell's Biography to her evolution as an artist. Critically, this study applies the Gestalt Psychology theories of Frederick Perls to Woolf's essays and novels, and especially to her use of the "moment." The Gestalt paradigm of figure-ground interaction affords a provocative method for analyzing organizational patterns in not only such traditional novels as Night and Day and The Years, but also in more experimental works such as Jacob's Room and The Waves; for an understanding of Gestalt allows the reader to perceive the nascent figures that form the gestalts and create the order, meaning, and beauty, the "verbal alchemy," of Virginia Woolf's art.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Modern literature
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