Fact And Fictionality In Virginia Woolf's Fiction And Biography

Virginia Woolf endeavors throughout her life for the exploration and experiment of literary form, and her contributions consist in her innovation of literary genres at the turn of the history of British literature. Woolf's experiment results in the generic identity issue concerned with her fiction and biography featured in crossing the boundary between fiction and biography. Regarding this issue, Woolf scholars at home and abroad have mainly focused on the transformation of Woolf's life experience into her fiction and biography. The relationship between Woolf's intention for the experiment with form and the issue of crossing the boundary between fiction and biography, however, are left in negligence. Therefore, this dissertation attempts to approach from the perspective of fact and fictionality the characteristics and essence of the forms of Woolf's fiction and biography, aiming to reveal the essence of Woolf's exploration and experiment of literary form. This is of significance to the interpretation of Woolf's creative concept.This dissertation is devoted to Woolf's experiment in fiction and biography constructed through the diversified relationships between fact and fictionality, i.e., marriage, dissociation, mixture, and tension. Throughout her writing life, Woolf intentionally persists in the experiment with the relationship between fact and fictionality in her entire fictional and biographical writings, which can be traced and confirmed in her volumes of diaries, letters, and autobiographical writings. For Woolf in creative writing, fact is of visibility and tangibility, which is composed of the documented facts about the actual events that happen to people in her life; fictionality is of imagination and mentality, which is related with the temporally contrafactual events in her writing. Woolf persists in her attempts at the construction of the diversified relationships between fact and fictionality, which result in the varied and distinctive form innovations in Woolf's fiction and biography. In autobiographical and fictional To the Lighthouse as a fiction, Woolf sets fact and fictionality in marriage; in poetic and fictional The Waves as a fiction, fact and fictionality in dissociation; in biographical and fictional Orlando: A Biography, fact and fictionality in mixture; in orthodox and fictional Roger Fry: A Biography, fact and fictionality in tension. In these two fictional works and two biographical works, which span Woolf's writing life from the 1920s to the 1940s, and which represent Woolf's achievements in fiction and biography, it can be seen that Woolf tends to construct an artistic world of fact and fictionality in the relationship of marriage, dissociation, mixture, and tension. Therefore, this dissertation attempts to cover an analysis of these four major works of Woolf, as well as that of the references to the composition of these four works in her diaries, letters, autobiographical writings, and critical essays in the context of the entire non-fictional works. This dissertation mainly contains four chapters, devoted to Woolf's experiment with the marriage, dissociation, mixture, and tension of fact and fictionality in those four works.Chapter One discusses Woolf's experiment with the marriage of fact with fictionality in To the Lighthouse. Woolf creates in this work Lily Briscoe and the Ramsays as the outcome of the marriage of fact and fictionality. These characters are true to Woolf and her parents Leslie and Julia Stephen, and simultaneously embody Woolf's expectation to restore the wholeness of life lost due to the death of her parents. While representing her parents as the factual absence in life, Woolf creates the ideal fictional presence of her parents, and the ideal fictional presence of the wholeness of life. The factual absence and the fictional presence are set in marriage in To the Lighthouse. This is a marriage of life and art, in which Woolf represents her real life, and simultaneously restores the lost wholeness of life by artistic means. Fact and fictionality are organically integrated into a marriage in To the Lighthouse.Chapter Two expounds Woof's experiment with the dissociation of fact and fictionality in The Waves. Woolf dissociates the six fictional protagonists in The Waves from their factual counterparts in life, through fictionalizing the mentality of the characters. Fictionality is dissociated from fact. Such dissociation is shaped in The Waves, a poetic fiction. Woolf intends to dissociate her poetic fiction from the narrative fiction of the four types of writers,"truth-tellers,""character-mongers,""psychologists,"and female novelists. While the world view of these writers who emphasize narrative construction is confined within the human society itself, the view of Woolf is expanded to the fictional world with human existence in the context of the universe, through the dissociation of the characters'emotional inner soliloquies from the impersonal descriptions of the nature in The Waves. Woolf thus dissociates actual world from fictional world, respectively represented by those inner soliloquies and the impersonal descriptions. This is the purpose that Woolf attains through the dissociation of fact and fictionality in The Waves.Chapter Three examines Woolf's experiment with the mixture of fact and fictionality in Orlando. In this biography, the fictional subject Orlando is the mixture of fact and fictionality in that the subject is derived from Vita Sackville-West and Woolf the biographer. Such Orlando as a mixture of fact and fictionality reflects that Woolf intends to mix the genres of biography that is supposed to be factual with fiction that is entitled to fictionality, for the sake of transmitting the truth of the subject's life. Through the mixture of fact and fictionality, or the mixture of biography and fiction, Woolf creates Orlando as a truthful subject in that this subject is derived from the mixed truth of Vita Sackville-West and Woolf. Through the mixture, the truth that Woolf aims to construct and reveal is fused into Orlando, a work of art. Woolf tends to imply that the truth of life or the world is unconcealed or happens in the work of art that mixes fact with fictionality. In Woolf's perspective, fact itself is the basis of attaining truth, but if without fictionality as a means of unconcealment, it could not reveal the truth residing within itself. This is the concept that Woolf in Orlando attempts to communicate through the mixture of fact and fictionality.Chapter Four discusses Woolf's experiment under the tension between fact and fictionality in Roger Fry. Woolf as a biographer is obstructed by both Roger Fry's documented facts of no fertile meaning that leads to the contraction of Woolf's fictional space, and further by the social realities that demand a morally good subject. The subject Roger Fry created in such tensional context is a compromise between fact and fictionality. This compromise in essence embodies the ethical tension of life writing, which demands that life writing should take both the liability for the truth through the presentation of fact devoid of fictionality, and the liability for moral example to satisfy social interest. Woolf's compromise implies that the tension between reality and fictional freedom is inescapable. To Woolf as an artist aiming to transmit the essence of a life through the experiment with fact and fictionality, no ultimate fictional freedom can be entitled under the tension between fact and fictionality. In Roger Fry, Woolf realizes that the tension between fact and fictionality cannot be eliminated.Based on the analysis in these four chapters, this dissertation concludes: through the experiment with the diversified relationships of fact and fictionality, i.e., marriage, dissociation, mixture, and tension, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, and Roger Fry these four works reflect that through the construction of the diversified relationships of fact and fictionality, Woolf transgresses the generic boundary of fiction and biography for the sake of exploring new effective artistic form to present life. In Woolf's perspective, life or the world is composed of the external appearance embodied by fact and the internal essence attained through fictionality. Through the diversified relationships between fact and fictionality, Woolf constructs a fictional realm founded on life of fact in diversified points of view. Woolf employs these diversified points of view to fictionalize the fact world of dynamic reality, and to objectify her subjective experience concerned with it, aiming at the truth that an artist as a subject attains about the fact world as an object. In this sense, Woolf's experiment with fact and fictionality reflects that her epistemology is as the same as that of other modernist writers, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot for instance, who explored at the turn of the 20th century through artistic means the relationship between subjective experience and objective world.