Analysis of Stream of Consciousness and Feminism in To

ABSTRACT

 

Virginia Woolf is one of leading writers through Europe in the beginning of 20thcentury, who is one of the famous writers like George Eliot, Jane Austin. To the Lighthouse is one of famous works, which hasn’t complete and complex plots. Stream of consciousness is previous characteristic of her works. She pays more attention to describing internal emotion of characters; meanwhile, she also uses symbolism, and lighthouse is hope to people. She is also a feminist, and she thinks female should have independence, only like that, could female have real life of themselves. The paper mainly studies feminist and stream of consciousness of Woolf’s novel of To the Lighthouse.

 

KEY WORDS:  Stream of Consciousness   To the Lighthouse   Feminist

 

摘    要

 

弗吉尼亚· 伍尔夫是英国20世纪初期风靡欧美的意识流小说的开山鼻祖之一，与乔治·艾略特﹑简·奥斯丁同为英国最杰出的女作家。《到灯塔去》是她最著名的作品之一，这部小说并无完整复杂的故事情节，意识流是她作品最大的特点，她注重对人物内心世界的微妙刻画；同时，她还运用了象征主义手法，灯塔对人们来说是希望。她又是一个女权主义者，她认为女性应该拥有独立的女性意识，这样女性才能拥有真正属于自己的生活。本dissertation主要研究《到灯塔去》中所体现的女性主义精神和伍尔夫意识流小说的写作特点。

 

关键词：意识流  到灯塔去  女权主义

 

 

1.Introduction

Virginia Woolf is one of the key figures of Modernism. She is a novelist, short story write, essayist and critic and part of a large of circle of writers, artist and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group. Her most famous novel, To the Lighthouse shows great technical mastery, with a form tightly organized through the use of recurrent images and a restricted time frame. The book is generally regarded as one of her masterpieces for its special style that combines a stream of consciousness with the accumulation of many details and thus creates a strong feeling of intensity that is quite common in Woolf’s works.

 

1.1 Virginia Woolf

Born in London to well educated upper-middle-class parents, Virginia grew up as a member of a large and highly literary family. Leslie Stephan, his father, was a famous Victorian philosopher, bibliographer and critic. Encouraged by her father, she read widely and freely in his extensive library. She never went to school. She was taught at home by her parents and tutor with her sister Vanessa, who became a famous modern painter later. From an early age Virginia got into the way of writing stories and kept a journal. She even tried out experiment with various narrative literary forms and voices. The death of her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904 influenced her life greatly and a mental illness began to develop then into the late years. In 1913 she attempted suicide. After the death of her parents, Virginia and her sister Vanessa moved out of the family to Bloomsbury, a district of London, to have a freer life. There they entertained their literary and artistic friend and with the gathering of a group of intellectuals outstanding at the time, there was the famous Bloomsbury Group where their conversations and ideas sparkled. In 1912, she married one of the group members, Leonard Woolf, journalist, essayist and political thinker.#p#分页标题#e#

 

Her works, influenced by contemporary movement such as psychology, impressionism, and feminist, reveal her preoccupation with the complexity of both the individual’s perception and the large cultural system that shape them. Woolf was famous for her works’ beautiful style. In her works, it was filled with breath of life. Her works and ideas have informed many of great feminist thinkers, novelists and poets. Her radical and experimental writing laid a foundation for them.

 

1.2 To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse, one of her most experimental and remarkable works, is modulated by the consciousness of the characters instead of the passage of time. The plot centers on the Ramsay family’s anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse. To the Lighthouse is a representative work which best exhibits Woolf’s style and innovation. It is regarded as her autobiographical fictional record, for the characters are based on her own parent and siblings. To the Lighthouse is divided into three sections: “The Window”, “Time Passes”, and “The Lighthouse”. Each section is fragmented into stream-of-consciousness contributions from various narrators. “The Window” opens just before the start of World War Ⅰ. Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay bring their summer home in the Hebrides (a group of islands west of Scotland). Across the bay from their house stands a large lighthouse and Mrs. Ramsay tells him that they will go the next day if the weather permits. James reacts gleefully, but Mr.Ramsay tells him coldly that the weather looks to be foul. James resents his father and believes that he enjoys being cruel to James and his siblings.

 

2.The stream of consciousness in To the Lighthouse

 

2.1 Social and cultural backgrounds of the novel

To the Lighthouse is a novel about steam of consciousness which is most famous novel of Virginia Woolf. This novel is centered of the behavior of to the lighthouse. It describes the family of the Ramsey and several guests’ life experience fragments before and after the First World War. In the novel, at the request of young son, Mrs. Ramsay decided to go to the lighthouse. But because of something, they didn’t go there. After that, World War Ⅰ broke out, and then the Ramsay family experienced many difficulties. After war, Mr. Ramsay loved Lily for his wife’s death but While Lily refused him. So after his children grow up, he carried them to go to sea by boat, finally they arrived at the lighthouse. After the World War Ⅱ, Britain people suffered serious loss. To the extent, the spirit pillar of European civilization was shacked. Relentless artillery destroyed Woolf’s family in London. These disasters took heavy pressure to her spirit. On March 28, 1941, Woolf suicide.

 

2.2The characteristics of stream of consciousness#p#分页标题#e#

The whole book doesn’t have the main character through to the end and complete and complex plot of story. On the contrary, the book uses stream of consciousness which is the artistic features of the largest, meanwhile it is also most successful aspect. From arising of novel in 16th century to developing of novel in 20th century, this kind of traditional writing practice that pays more attention to the plot of story, figure, and theme and so on haven’t already far contented the flew of consciousness in this age. Stream of consciousness uses the writing practice which reflects figures’ consciousness and psychology’s mystery. Its plot is simple, but it is very rich of figure’s thought and emotion. It combines reality life with psychology activity, and pays more attention to the figures’ all kinds of reflections to outside stories, and fully of tell their implicit in heart. The kind of novel describes the variability of consciousness from now to past, from here to there. These consciousness appears one by one and great lively, however, they probably disappears in a moment and extremely variable. In them, association and metaphor are rich and peculiar, what’s more, they are also profound and odd.

 

The contents of novel are divided into three sections. They are “The Window”, “Time Passes”, and “The Lighthouse”. There are ten main figures and the most important figure Mrs. Ramsay died finally but Woolf still described her many thought activities and her actual activities are only in the former part. The novel describes every figure’s thought activities and inner monologue more while the language and action are less. Though the main action of Mrs. Ramsay is knitting socks and reading fairy tales, and Lily is mainly drawing and have few words, their though activities are very active. A paragraph of description in heart of Mrs. Ramsay is nearly 4000 words.

 

3. Feminism in To the Lighthouse

3.1 Virginia Woolf’s feminism

Contemporary feminist critics on Woolf see her as a proto or early feminist, a tremendously influential mother of the novel. The comments she has made about the roles of women, even the representations of different male and female minds is highly original and has been unsurpassed in all the years since. She ever writes the sentence in A Room of One’s Own: We think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. She thinks the female should have profession of themselves. She challenges patriarchal values and ways of seeing and expressing the world and the self set a model for other women’s challenge, in literature and in life.

 

3.2 Mrs. Ramsay’s feminism

In the novel, Mrs. Ramsay is a woman who makes contribution to her husband. She sacrifices herself for breaking through absolute oppose situation between men and women and tries to seek a harmonious world of male and female. She realizes her value through owning independent personality and life target of herself. But when she was 40 years old, she realizes that a woman only has independent spirit and feminist consciousness, she can own indeed life.#p#分页标题#e#

 

3.3 Lily’s feminism

Lily Briscoe is an artist. She attempts to capture her feelings of reality and of experience throughout her first visit to the house on the island. When she returns, she manages to do so, and finishes her picture. This takes place at the same time as the remainder of the family arrives at the lighthouse. Lily is a very special female. As an artist, Lily is sensitive about the role of women and feels constantly pressurized by Mrs. Ramsay into bolstering male egos. Mrs. Ramsay obviously wills her to be polite to Charlie Tansley, the skeptical follower of Mrs. Ramsay, yet she finds it hard and feels she is betraying her own nature to so abase herself. Tandley really doesn’t like women, and he think that “It is the women’s fault. Women made civilization impossible with all their ‘charm’, all their silliness.” The draining effect Lily feels when she is expected to bolster up Tansley is also connected with the sensation she has when he is around that he is constantly deprecating her work. ‘Women can’t write, and women can’t paint’. However, Lily still finished her painting finally regardless of his discrimination to women. This is the first aspect which can reflect her feminist. And the second aspect: In the last section, Mr. Ramsay comes to Lily, now that her wife is dead, to provide the sympathy which he feels is the women’s role to provide for a man. This self-sacrifice drains women of energy and prevents them from painting or doing anything creative. In the traditional men and women’s view, it is women’s responsibility. But Lily doesn’t think so. She feels both that she can’t and won’t give sympathy, must keep herself inviolate emotionally and she can’t create, which is her life, and yet that in some way she is being less than a woman by refusing to sympathies. She doesn’t think this is women’s responsibility which is reflection of feminist.