What follows is an attempt to circumscribe Virginia Woolf's ideas on life and death, the relation between self and all that which is not self, and the nature of reality, in short, Woolf's vision. I hope that whatever unity and structure may exist in the vision will not be overlooked, and moreover, I intend to avoid imposing a unity where none exists, whether the absence of unity is intentional or accidental

The short stories of Virginia Woolf have never received serious scrutiny, critics determinedly maintaining that the novels contain the heart of the matter and that the stories are merely preparatory exercises. Mrs. Woolf, however, provides sufficient evidence that she was "on the track of real discoveries" in the stories, an opinion supported by her Bloomsbury mentors Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. A careful analysis of her twenty-one known stories suggests that they are indeed important (not merely peripheral to the novels and criticism) and are successful in developing specific techniques and themes germane to her total canon. One of the reasons why the stories have never been taken seriously, of course, is that they simply are not stories by any conventional definition— but are nonetheless "short fiction" of interest and significance. The stories derive from three distinctly separate chronological periods. The earliest group (1917-1921) was published in Monday or Tuesday and included two stories available only in that volume, now out of print. (To enable a complete assessment, I have made these stories available as appendices II and III of this thesis, and included Virginia Woolf's lone children's story as appendix IV since it too is of the early period). This phase of creation utilized one primary technique—that of evolving an apparently random stream of impressions from a usually inanimate and tiny focussing object, and was generally optimistic about the "adorable world." The second phase of her short fiction (those stories appearing in magazines between 1927 and 1938) illustrates a progression in both technical virtuosity and in personal discipline: the fictional universe is now peopled, and the randomness of the early sketches has given way to a more selective exploitation of the thoughts inspired by motivating situations. But vacillation is here evident in the author's mood, and while optimism at times burns as brightly as before, these stories as often presage Mrs. Woolfs abnegation of life. The third group, posthumously published by Leonard Woolf in 1944 without his wife's imprimatur (and recognizably "only in the stage beyond that of her first sketch"), still reveals a desire in the author to pursue her original objective suggested in "A Haunted House"--the unlayering of facts to bare the "buried treasure" truth, using imagination as her only tool. In one respect, and one/Only, the critics who have neglected these stories are correct: the pieces are often too loosely knit, too undisciplined, and too often leave the Impression of a magpie's nest rather than one "with twigs and straws placed neatly together." In this the stories are obviously inferior to the novels. But by neglecting the stories the critics have missed a mine of information: herein lies an "artist's sketchbook,” which, like A Writer's Diary, provides a major avenue into the mind of one of the most remarkable writers of our age. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Beginning with the premise that Virginia Woolf's novels exhibit a dual perspective of psychological mimesis and apocalyptic allegory, this dissertation formulates a critical theory of vision which operates on literary principles extracted, with a number of modifications, from two studies of Romantic transcendence: Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, and the Second Essay of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. The narrative role of the Woolfian "moment of being" is explored in her nine novels as a fictional analogue of Weiskel's "sublime moment," a metaphorical subplot in which the harmonious relation between the self and nature breaks down. When the moment of being does not merely collapse into a cycle of nature worship, it follows an Oepidal path of reactive identification in which the character identifies with the prevailing cultural pattern, or "father." Thus the fictional character experiences the moment of being as a failed psychological transcendence. From the perspective of apocalyptic allegory, these novels engage the imagination of the reader by means of the "logical imagination": that is, the poetic Logos becomes-, the anagogic Word. This revolutionary concept of apocalypse is adapted from the theory of symbols that Frye discusses in Anatomy of Criticism, where the "anagogic symbol" is identified with the divine Word. In Woolf's allegory, "there is no God; we are the words" (Moments of Being, 72). The view of Woolf's vision as a dual perspective implies that Woolf advocated, and developed, fictional forms that juxtapose realistic and mythopoeic constructs. Her characters, plots, and settings represent life in this world as a failed transcendence, while her mythical and metaphorical structures define for the reader an imaginative apocalyptic quest having five identifiable stages: 1) the presentation of an inner psychological realm where the imaginary and the real seem inextricable, 2) the discovery of the "out there" as a solid basis for imaginative identity, 3) the exploration of a crisis of vacancy out of which the imaginative self becomes reborn, 4) the establishment of an imaginative pattern as a prelude to the rejection of the "fatherhood" influence of history and society, and 5) the apocalyptic awakening of "ourselves" from the dream of history and of selfhood. From the investigation of these developments in Woolf's vision emerges a distinct novelistic canon. This study, as a whole, documents Virginia Woolf's "own particular search--not after morality or beauty or reality--no ; but after literature itself" (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, I, 214). / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

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Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Davis, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 263-275) and index.

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Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-233). Also available online in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

This thesis argues for a reading of Virginia Woolf’s work based on notions of character and characterisation as a primary interpretative perspective. The bulk of Woolf scholarship, particularly in recent years, has not been directed towards the study of character, due to both general theoretical discomfort with the category of character, and a sense that Woolf’s work in particular, as that of a feminist and modernist writer, may not respond well to traditional readings of character. However, Woolf’s exploration of the human self and its relations with other people is best understood by looking at her formal experiments in characterisation. Her writing was consistently engaged with questions of character, as an examination of her early journalism makes clear. In the years before the publication of her first novel, Woolf articulated a broad theory of character in her reviews of contemporary literature and in essays on Gissing and Dostoyevsky. In The Voyage Out, Woolf began a writing career of experiment in character, examining a continuum of character ranging from complete nonidentification to a consuming over-identification. A key element here is the introduction of the notion of the Theophrastan type as an alternative form of fictional characterisation that corresponds to a way of knowing real people. In Jacob’s Room, Woolf continued to focus on the speculative nature of characterisation and its demands for imaginative identification demonstrated by her short story collection Monday & Tuesday. The importance of this issue is clear from the debates she engaged in with Arnold Bennett during the 1920s, a debate re-framed in this paper as focussing on characterisation. Jacob’s Room initiates a quest for an elusive ‘essence’ of character that may, or may not, exist outside of the structuring forms of social life, and may or may not be accessible through speculative imaginative identification. This elusive essence of character is a primary focus of Mrs. Dalloway, a novel which explores the ways the self can be shaped under social pressures into more permanent and stable structures. This is explored in the novel in a series of metaphors circling around treasure and jewels. While alert to the role of exterior factors, including time and memory, the novel maintains at least the possibility that some more internal form of the self exists and can be represented in fiction. This possibility is explored further in Woolf’s short story cycle Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, and leads into To the Lighthouse’s study of character and its ability to represent essential or internal aspects of self, the self as it exists in relation to other selves, and ultimately a projected or created version of character that reconciles this complexity. This is again carried out through the use of a extensive chain of metaphors which function symbolically in the text, and through a meditation on the nature of the relationship between real people and their fictional counterparts. While the novel offers no clear resolution, it gestures towards a type of characterisation, and hence a type of relationship, based on limited understanding and acceptance. This notion is picked up in The Waves, a novel which both explores the continuity of the self as represented by character over time - something that is also important in The Years - and explores the ways that characters can be represented and the implications this has for the types of unity that can, for good or for ill, be achieved. Again, a notion of a limited character, closer in form to caricature than to the whole and rounded characters often associated with Woolf, is proposed by the novel as a possible solution to the problem of character. In Woolf’s last two novels, The Years and Between the Acts, many of these themes reappear, and Woolf simultaneously situates her characters more firmly than ever in a comprehensible physical and social context, and uses them to explore areas where language and rationality cease to function.