Monday, February 18, 2008

Laboring Woolf

With all of Virginia Woolf’s short stories, I cannot help but question my mind’s eye. I question interpretation and who and/or what is real. How is one to impose order on perception? This, I believe, is some of Woolf’s intent as she delivers stream of consciousness within her short stories. For in her short stories, I have developed a flipbook of sorts, building a fuller picture as I read Woolf’s pieces, but it is not the kind that begins with a piece of an image on one page and builds little by little until I see one full picture of “sameness.” Instead, each page holds a different and unique picture that shifts quickly from one page to the next. Yet, they build upon one another to create a meaning—with color, repetition, reflection, rhythm, and perspective.

The reflections that seem to stare back at us in Virginia Woolf’s short stories, such as the “reflected apples” in “A Haunted House” and the incessant “rubb[ing] hard at a spot” in “An Unwritten Novel,” depict both a still life flash and an active clip of memory, respectively. Throughout the stories, there are flashes that are filled with dimension, color, shadow and light, as well as angled perspectives. The memory seems to go from scene to scene and, somehow, manages to tie it all together. There is a sense of unity, which, I feel, is different than what we receive from T.S. Eliot’s fragmented poetry.

As I mentioned last week: Eliot’s imagery and language lend themselves to a disjointed snapshot taken in the dark—as Prufrock has “seen them riding seaward on the waves” and the “wind blow[ing] the water white and black” (lines 126-8). Eliot’s poetry seems to connect through his disconnections with in both his poetry and his personal life. Similarly, Woolf’s stories are pieces or “things.” However, “one thing…open[s] out of another” (Kemp 72). One sensory action or image flows into the next. In “An Unwritten Novel,” we see one woman, “rubb[ing] as if she would rub something out forever…” (21) Then, we see another woman compelled to take up the same action as, “[s]omething impelled me to take my glove and rub my window…” (21). A third offspring created through this sequence is “…the spasm [that] went through me” (21). Not only are the actions somewhat transferring from one sentence to the next, but the actions of the “she” and “me” characters transfer from one to the other. There are other images that Woolf presents in her work that parallel the narrative structure.

“Woolf shared T.S. Eliot’s wish to present the boredom, the horror and the reality of the everyday world rather than to construct a fictional one” (Kemp 63). As I follow the snail and dragon fly in “Kew Gardens,” I cannot help but place these images against Eliot’s “ragged claws” in “Prufrock” to gain a greater grasp on narrative and/or poetic structure. As we discussed in class two weeks ago, the “ragged claws” image in Eliot’s poetry emphasizes his concept of fragmentation in his personal life and, thus, his poetry. In contrast, the snail seems to portray this deliberate and laborious creature as it “…began to labour over the crumbs of the loose earth” (41). It plans its slow and determined movement, as “[i]t appeared to have a definite goal in front of it” throughout the story (41). The dragonfly, on the other hand, “went round and round” in reference to the past (40). Woolf’s stream of consciousness narrative is deliberate, yet it is repetitive and cyclical. This could be applied to Woolf’s personal life, as well. From the little biography that I have read on Woolf, her interior and exterior worlds—her struggle (“horror and reality”) with mental illness and her struggle with living and writing in a predominantly male society—were taxing and recurring.

Woolf is equally as complex, in my opinion, as Eliot or any of her literary companions. She brought her own vision to the Modernist-Bloomsbury table, which provided (and continues to provide) a picture of her time; a time filled with her perspective of color and nature. On critiquing E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, she asserted: “Mr. Forster is extremely susceptible to the influence of time. […] He is acutely conscious of the bicycle and of the motor-car; of the public school and of the university; of the suburb and of the city.” (Forster 392). It was not that Woolf did not see these changes and modern advances that surrounded her; she did. However, her sense of realism within her narrative needed to delve deeper into the realm of art. There seems to be a subtle divide between imagination and reality creating one large canvas out of several flashes of words, rhythms, colors, and objects and/or creatures that develop out of Woolf’s elaborate world.

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