Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf is regarded as one of the key English writers of the 20th century who shaped the modernist tradition. She became a narrative pioneer, being the first who discussed topics of gender, feminism, and freedom from the standpoint of a woman. Another innovation that she has implemented is the language itself: she happened to be the first author to popularize the nonconventional way, using the method of stream of consciousness.
Woolf’s writings are considered to be complicated as they require a detailed study of her creative development. This includes the exploration of her biography, the discovery of central sources of inspiration, and the recognition of fundamental ideas. Then, to understand Woolf’s style, the discovery of its principal features is needed. It involves the research of her key works, such as “The Voyage Out”, “Mrs. Dalloway”, “To the Lighthouse”, and “Orlando: A Biography”.
Woolf is perceived as a complex author, the exact and clear understanding of whose works requests the synopsis of her biography. Born in 1882 in South Kensington, she was raised in the family of a writer, Leslie Stephen. He provided her with access to a large home library and encouraged her to start writing when she was studying classics and history at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London. Corbett states that being a student, Woolf got inspired by the early movement for women’s rights. Then, this topic manifests in her works from the very first novel “The Voyage Out” firstly published in 1915. Her mother died when Woolf was 13 and her father deceased when she was 22. The deaths provoked mental breakdowns which influenced the author’s focus on the stream of consciousness instead of linear narratives.
Another factor that contributed to the development of her ideas and style was the friendship with her brothers with whom she moved to Bloomsbury after their father passed away. There she became a part of The Bloomsbury Group where she developed her style. Moreover, her marriage to Leonard Woolf in 1912 also should be taken into consideration. Being a writer himself, in 1917 her husband established The Hogarth Press, a publishing house that published most of Woolf’s works till she died in 1941.
Until the very end of her life, Woolf was constantly exploring the works of contemporary authors and classics. Russian literature, especially the works of Dostoevsky shaped her aesthetics and rose her interest in writing the moment, without any plans. Then, from the Russian tradition, she acquired the dialectics of the literary figure and the polyphonic form of narration with several equal voices in the book. Corbett mentions that this method finds its realization in Woolf’s work “To the Lighthouse” (72).
Furthermore, she remastered Chekhov’s attitude to plots: simple stories of ordinary people can become dramatic and powerful if irony and reality are balanced. Apart from elements of the Russian literary school, Woolf was highly inspired by Henry Thoreau’s s mystical approach to the ordinary. The influence of his atmosphere follows Woolf’s works, including “Orlando: A Biography”.
Woolf’s background reveals what influences her style and shows how the central feministic idea of her writing was formed, but it was not the writer’s only concept. Her understanding of feminism was based on her fundamental ideas that including humanism and gender identity. To begin with, humanism should be marked as the core of the free-minded tradition of her works. Born in a non-religious family, Woolf developed anti-religious views that enabled her to distance herself from the church and work on her personal views. In her works she emphasized that religions can tear souls apart, being destructive to every conscious person.
According to her position, the life of a human being has the highest value. A person’s sufferings are more important than religious requirements, meanwhile, the emotional and physical well-being of every individual should be the core target of society.
The next Woolf’s core idea is the matter of gender identity which was widely explored by the author in “Orlando: A Biography” published in 1928. The plot of the novel depicts the sudden transformation of the key literary figure, Orlando, from a man to a woman. Despite this physical transition, thoughts, ideas, intellect, and the identity of Orlando remain the same. According to Corbett, this illustrates Woolf’s attitude to the concept of gender as artificial and archaic (201). Woolf’s point of view is that both genders are equal and indissociable. Nevertheless, the division is primarily negative for women who are dejected by their sex: to solve this problem, Woolf shapes her feministic ideas.
Marked as one of the central feminist figures of the last century, Woolf touches on the theme nearly in all of her works. The development of the topic peaks in “A Room of One’s Own”. Woolf claims that “women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” The passage reflects the author’s attitude to women’s power and the oppressed position that needs to be changed. She emphasizes that women and men are equally intelligent, but women are used by men to acquire dominion. At the beginning of the last century, it was practically impossible for a female writer to set her view radically and with such clarity, but Woolf kept on developing the topic from her first works.
“The Voyage Out” is the first novel where the author reflected on her approaches to the understanding of femininity and marriages. The main literary figure of Woolf’s work marries, but her family is unconventional, seeking the intellectual. Quigley points out that this was the writer’s earliest attempt to show women’s intelligence. Then, in 1925 “Mrs. Dalloway” was created, regarded as a female’s response to James Joyce’s “Ulysses”.
This was explained by the same methods of stream of consciousness and flashbacks used. Though stylistic similarities exist, the plots are built from the pole points of view. With inner dialogues and retrospectives used, Woolf aimed to represent Clarissa as a person seeking happiness. For the writer, this novel was not primarily an experiment of allusions and metaphors, it was focused on the characters. Forms and narration came to the front later with “To the Lighthouse”.
Published in 1927, “To the Lighthouse” is considered to be Woolf’s brightest example of modernist writing. The key features of the work include its form and the type of narration. The novel is divided into three parts: “The Window”, “Time Passes”, and “The Lighthouse”. The storyline is centered on the Ramsays, but the three episodes happen at different times, and the plot is not as important as the emotions described. The first part is calm, but with the prediction described, is written to provide readers with the feeling of presentiment. The second is focused on the topic of death, while the third is about the concepts of time and reflections.
In the end, Woolf describes flashbacks positively, as “reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story since it had happened twenty years ago.” Such an attitude proves that the narration is modernistic and distorted for the readers to portray the events taking both the experience of the characters and their ideas about their development into consideration.
To highlight the core aspects of “Orlando: A Biography”, the two main aspects should be pointed out. First of all, this satiric novel can be perceived as an anti-gender manifesto, and as a historical introduction to English literature. Second, in this work Woolf criticizes the most common cliches of the Victorian Times. For example, she depicts the concept of eternal life and the abundance of orientalism in the literature of that epoch. According to Corbett, the novel should be analyzed as an anti-gender one. Obvious to the author equality of women and men are described, but being a woman is satirically described as a gift to praise.
Wolf emphasizes that as long as a woman thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking, but in other cases, she can be highly condemned. Then, the maternal roles of women are diminished: Orlando became a mother, but that was not the last stop of her journey, because she was searching for the best form of her potential realization. Meanwhile, Wolf showed lesbianism: women are not attached to men physically, and their sexuality can vary.
Regarding the stylistic development of Woolf’s key works, it may be pointed out that the author was gradually changing the way of incorporating her ideas. The progress in her writing was caused by the instant search for the form which would reflect and emphasize the meaning of the plot. For example, though Woolf was developing feministic ideas in her very first works, she managed to depict her understanding of time, and genders only by using the method of stream of consciousness and allegories. According to Woolf’s works, the simplicity of forms leads to a superficial reflection of the core ideas. Inspired by modernists of her time, she created her way of narration. Her depiction of the flood of thoughts is not chaotic, but distorted, and manifests her acquired skills in “To the Lighthouse” and “Orlando: A Biography”.
To sum up, the literary heritage of Virginia Woolf can be considered complicated, but her works become understandable through the investigation of her complex development as an author. The peculiarities of Woolf’s biography shaped the freedom of her thought and enabled the writer to explore topics, nonconventional for the epoch she lived in. Inspired by multivalued Russian authors and Henry Thoreau, Woolf was researching the problems of humanism, gender identity, and feminism from the perspective of a woman. The method of stream of consciousness is used to illustrate her ideas: humankind is indivisible, every action leads to consequences, and gender is an artificial concept. Woolf is a genuine pioneer of her time whose writings need to be studied in the scope of her creative development.
Works Cited
Corbett, Mary. Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts. Cornell University Press. 2020.
Quigley, Megan. “Reading Virginia Woolf Logically: Resolute Approaches to The Voyage Out and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” Poetics Today, vol. 41, no 1, 2020, pp. 101–116.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Benediction Classics. 2017.
—.Orlando: A Biography. Mariner Books. 1973.
—.To the Lighthouse. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1989.
—.The Voyage Out. Andesite Press. 2015.