Why Teach Virginia Woolf?

The English novelist Virginia Woolf remains a towering name in literature, yet her works are not taught as widely as those of other Modernists. Woolf's novels do not offer the spare emotionality of Hemingway or the layered, intricate organization of Joyce, but these differences are not faults. Unique in their shape, Woolf's novels are challenging and compelling and full of sad beauty.

The novels of Virginia Woolf are wonderfully expressive of a simultaneity of feeling and thought. These works explore the nebulous conceptual experience of the self as it is being constantly made and re-made out of emotions, ideas, anecdotes, and aspirations.

The characters in Virginia Woolf, as seen in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, are great examples of the fluid and contradictory experience of being human. These characters are variable; divided within themselves. They are tossed by the waves of daily life, fully enmeshed in the act of balancing their inner world with the world around them. They exist as experiential beings slightly outside the tug of history because these waves, as it were, are too pressing to ignore.

Perhaps we can say that they are too absorbed in the agitations of the mind to have anything to do with history.

Stream-of-Consciousness

Virginia Woolf was a pioneer in the stream-of-consciousness style of narrative, a technique also found in much of William Faulkner's work. A course pairing Woolf and Faulkner would provide an instructive contrast in how stream-of-consciousness can emphasize spontaneity while exploring a "present moment" or explore the nature of personal history and culture as they exist in an individual's thinking.

For Virginia Woolf, the stream-of-consciousness method leans toward the present moment. Whole novels are woven out of a single day, as in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.

History has its place in these books only in so far as it informs the thinking of a character in the moment. The cultural or historical determination of a person's identity is not of interest here, as it is in Faulkner. Instead, Virginia Woolf presents us with characters as they exist, in the moment, a cacophony of feelings and thoughts that are related to past experiences but which stand as obsessions and fixations; things of the mind.


Motif & Symbolism

Eschewing traditional plot concerns, Virginia Woolf uses repeated visual and intellectual details to organize her novels. Her technique of organization is effective, while also unstructured. By utilizing motif in place of plot, Woolf manages to communicate the workings of the mind without need of recourse to the more usual "mapping orientation" of plot.

In Mrs. Dalloway, the central image of the text is flowers. They appear again and again, as symbols for the intricacy of identity and as symbols for the notion that drives the book '" people follow a single path through life, no matter how random or chaotic life may seem. People grow as flowers grow, into fuller versions of themselves, and they never deviate to become anyone or anything else.

The flower motif is nowhere clearer than here, when the mad poet of Mrs. Dalloway is described in his melancholy and his inevitability:

But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: It has flowered; flowered from vanity, from ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room of Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to prove himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare.

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf offers a more nuanced use of motif, forgoing a central image as she uses in Mrs. Dalloway. Each character in To the Lighthouse is presented with his or her own fixations. For the most part these fixations are visual.

The central figure of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay, considers the lighthouse off the coast in various ways throughout the book, seeing it once as a symbol of life's disappointments then again as a representative for her own hopes. This changeability is at the heart of Mrs. Ramsay's character '" a person who is growing old, while still beautiful, who believes that life is terrible, beautiful, pointless and joyous and who is capable of considering life in each of these ways while putting stitches into socks and watching her husband read.

To the Lighthouse is more experimental than Mrs. Dalloway, in focus and in structure, yet the use of repeated images serves here again as an alternative mode of giving coherence to a stream-of-conscious novel thoroughly focused on the wandering thoughts of four or five characters.



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Sources:
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1925, Harcourt Brace
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, 1927, Harcourt Brace