writing style of virginia woolf

virginia woolf

1. Writing style of Virginia W oolf Instructor: Mrs. Ateqa Alvi Presented by: Hadeeqa Batool

2. Contents Introduction What is style? An individual peculiar style Style is the man Free from artificiality Narrative technique Realistic portrayal of living beings The use of poetic-prose Emergence of an art form Objectivity Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness method

3. Introduction Adeline Virginia Stephen Father: Sir Leslie Stephen Mother: Julia Prinsep Stephen (a painter) Born into a privileged English household in 1882. R aised by free-thinking parents . B egan writing as a young girl and published her first novel, The Voyage Out , in 1915 . S uffered bouts of deep depression. Woolf had three full siblings — Thoby , Vanessa and Adrian — and four half-siblings — Laura Makepeace Stephen and George, Gerald and Stella Duckworth . The eight children lived under one roof at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington . Committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59 .

4. Works of Virginia W oolf Melymbrosia (1906)….. The Voyage Out (1915) Night and Day(1919) Jacob's Room(1922) Mrs . Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1928) Orlando (1928) A Room of One's Own(1929) The Waves (1931) Three Guineas The years (1937)

5. Style in literature is the literary element that describes the ways that the author uses words, sentence structure, figurative language, and sentence arrangement all work together to establish mood, images, and meaning in the text. What is Style ?

6. An individual peculiar style It was difficult for Woolf to portray life in an ordinary prose writing. For this she definitely required a new style. It was very essential for her to evolve a style of her own. She did this and her style is really individual peculiar style, adapted to the kind of work she had to do. Jacob’s Room is a best example of her style. As she opens it: " So of course," wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, " there was nothing for it but to leave." Although being one of earlier novels it lacks many things , as it leaves too much unsaid and it is not very satisfactory but still Virginia was confident about her own style.

7. An individual peculiar style

8. Style is the Man If style tells a man, Woolf’s prose tells that she is a cultured woman. She uses words with a keen sense of their rhythmic and musical potentialities. Her style is richly figurative. As she states in Modern Fiction: “any method is right, every method is right that expresses what we wish to express if we are writers that bring us, closer to the novelist’s intention, if we are readers” It was in this figurative style that Woolf could express her purpose and the reader could best comprehend her intention.

9. Free from Artificiality Virginia Woolf expresses her stream of thoughts as it flows. Her style is free from artificiality, affectation and mannerism. She didn’t like these things. That’s why she denounces the essayist, Mr. Belloc and says about his style that: “his style comes to us not with the natural richness of the speaking voice, but is strained and thin and full of mannerism like the voice of a man shouting through a megaphone to a crowd on a windy day.” Her style is living and quite natural without any effort to force things. Her novels not only reveal the stream of consciousness of their characters but flow like a stream of themselves. There is a spontaneity in Woolf’s style, which is her own. The words come naturally to her as breathing to a man. As her novels flow like a stream there is no room in them for pedantry or scholasticism.

10. Realistic portrayal of living beings Virginia Woolf, in her essay on Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown said that Edwardian Novelists had made tools and established conventions which do their business; and that business is not her business. For her, those convention were ruin, those tools dead. Her own experiments with the form of the novel were the result of that belief. According to her the business of a novelist was not merely to communicate human experience. She borrowed this term from Dorothy Richardson. She aimed at revealing the impression by one individual upon others as also the impressions made on an individual by others; she wanted to reveal human personality partly through its own self-consciousness and partly through the picture projected by it upon other minds.

11. Objectivity It is not objectivity of drama, which is limited to the enacted scene and spoken word. It is an objectivity in which the feelings, the meditations, the memories of the protagonists are projected, without intervention upon the mind of the reader. For example: when James in To The Lighthouse emerges into manhood, we receive his impressions of the “world of the elderly”, through the medium of his own reflections.

12. Emergence of an art form Although Virginia Woolf has used her unique and new style but still she was not rigid on her own only she emerges her style with some old conventions. In To The Lighthouse the outward structure is simple. It consists of 3 movements of unequal length and of 10 prominent characters while her convention was of 5 characters. She has flexibility in her style so she changed her art according to need.

13. The use of Poetic-Prose On the prose plane To The Lighthouse tells about the Ramsay family and their relations to one another. On the other plane the lighthouse is a poetic symbol with an uncircumscribed power of suggestion. For example: For the reader, as of Mrs. Ramsay, the altering light and shadow of the lighthouse beam symbolizes the rhythm of joy and sorrow in human life and the alternating radiance and darkness of even the most intimate human relationship.

14. Stream of consciousness

15. Stream of Consciousness Origin: It is a literary technique which was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Definition: stream of consciousness is characterized by a flow of thoughts and images, which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. The plot line may weave in and out of time and place, carrying the reader through the life span of a character or further along a timeline to incorporate the lives and thoughts of characters from other time periods.

16. Stream of Consciousness Writers who create stream of consciousness works of literature , focus on the emotional and psychological processes that are taking place in the minds of one or more characters. Important character traits are revealed through an exploration of what is going on in the mind.

17. Stream of Consciousness with a reference to Virginia’s writings Woolf incorporates a level of psychological realism that Victorian novels were never able to achieve. The everyday is seen in a new light: internal processes are opened in her prose, memories compete for attention, thoughts arise unprompted and the deeply significant and the utterly trivial are treated with equal importance. Woolf’s prose is also enormously poetic. She has the very special ability to make the ordinary ebb and flow of the mind sing.

18. Stream of Consciousness with a reference to Virginia’s writings Woolf’s probing into the human mind (consciousness) in To The Lighthouse is not so simplistic that it can be attributed to any particular narrative technique. What really distinguishes her novel, is the aesthetic effect of her exploration of minds of her characters.only an artist of Woolf’s stature can present the mental worlds of her characters with an unprecedented depth and intensity.