stream of consciousness 3

Virginia Woolf’s Writing Style
Virginia Woolf was born in London, the late Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer, and scholar.Considered one of the best of the Modernist writers, Virginia Woolf’s personal life is almost as intriguing as her fiction. Troubled by mental instability for most of her life, Virginia composed her great works in bursts of manic energy and with the support of her brilliant friends and family. However, upon completion of a book, Virginia fell into a dangerously dark depression in anticipation of the world's reaction to her work. Despite her personal difficulties, Virginia Woolf’s fiction represented a shift in both structure and style. The world was changing; literature needed to change too, if it was to properly and honestly convey the new realities.
Woolf came naturally into the profession of writing. Moving among writers artists, her world was from the beginning the cultured world of the middle-class and upper-middle-class London intelligentsia. She rebelled against what she called the “materialism” of such novelists as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy , and sought a more delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human experience really lay. After two novels cast rather cumbersomely in traditional form, she developed her own style, which handled the “stream of consciousness” with a carefully modulated poetic flow and brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and the imagery of lyric poetry.
Stream of consciousness is defined as the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them, usually in an disjointed form of interior monologue.
Mrs. Dalloway is the first completely successful novel in her “new” style. In this novel’s excerpt, Woolf started with the feelings of Clarissa. “She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”Secondly, Woolf continued to describe some reflections about Clarissa’s former lover. “but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being apart.”Thirdly, Woolf wrote about a book that Clarissa read. “as she read in the book spread open: Fear no more the heat o’ the sun/Nor the furious winter’s rages.”Then, Woolf went on with Clarissa’s feelings about her own appearance. “How much she wanted it--that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Later on, Woolf drew readers’attention to some reflections about Clarissa’s daughter. “and Elisabeth, her own daughter,went to Communion; and how she dressed, how she treated people who came to lunch she did not care a bit, it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous.”
These are only part of the examples reflected Woolf’s
stream-of-consciousness style in Mrs. Dalloway. In a word, Woolf was a skilled exponent of the “stream of consciousness” technique in her novels, exploring with great subtlety problems of personal identity and personal relationships as well as the significance of time, change, and memory for human personality. The delicate lyrical prose of her finest novels was a remarkable achievement.。