Seeking For Significant Form

As a forerunner in British modern literature of the 20th century and core member of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolfs unique position in the history of British literature is attracting more and more attention from the world of criticism. The publication of her diaries, letters, biographies and collections of her essays has pushed the study on Woolf to a climax since 1970s. Literary criticism on Woolf has been made from various angles, while the study from the angle of painting has been largely ignored. This dissertation is aimed at analyzing Woolfs innovatory novels from the angle of painting with an attempt to explore the ways in which she has combined the art of writing with that of painting in her novels to achieve the aesthetic effect of an organic whole.Modernism emerged first in the field of visual art as early as in late 19th century with the appearance of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. These two schools are innovatory in that they have freed themselves from the traditionally dominant subject, using colour and form to convey the artists' concept about life. With these two movements spreading throughout Europe, Britain was undoubtedly under their influence and British literature began its process of Modernism from then on. Modern novelists, with Virginia Woolf the most outstanding of them, have patterned their literary experiments on parallels drawn from visual arts. Virginia Woolf herself says that "now undoubtedly we are under the dominion of painting."Being the center of the Bloomsbury Group which is mainly composed of writers, artists and aft critics who share a common interest in art, Virginia Woolf has always been considering the possibility of marrying the art of writing to the art of painting, for she always envies her sister Vanessa Bell as a painter who uses lines and colours freely. Roger Fry, a painter and art critic of the Bloomsbury Group, believes that the effort of combining these two arts is possible and significant. In his opinion, the tedious structureof the conventional novels in the 19th century lacks aesthetic effect of an organic whole. If this idea has stimulated Virginia Woolf's decision to make innovations in her novel writing, Post-Impressionists' paintings introduced by Roger Fry into Britain must have suggested to her the direction she will go. Under Roger Fry's influence, Clive Bell, Vanessa's husband, makes a close study on Post-Impressionists which has resulted in his book Art in 1913. In this book he puts forward his aesthetic hypothesis of "Significant Form" as the quality common to all visual arts. This hypothesis is based on Bell's summary of the characteristics of Post-Impressionists. As Bell sees it what the Post-Impressionists have done is to convey their aesthetic emotion through the pure form they have created. This form is achieved through the processes of simplification and design, the former referring to the elimination of representative elements while the latter referring to the arrangement of the simplified form into a significant whole. Under the influence of Bell's theory, Virginia tries to borrow the principles of modern painting into her novel writing. This influence can be seen clearly in her writing manifesto in "Modern Fiction". In this essay, she insists on novelists' deviation from the tradition by advocating that what modern novelists should do is to throw away the representative details of life and record instead the varying and unknown spirit. This is what she has done in her innovatory novels which start from Jacob's Room.Considering the similarities between Woolf s novels and the Post-Impressionists' paintings, I think it convenient for me to use Clive Bell's hypothesis to make a study on Woolf's novels to see how Virginia Woolf has succeeded in combining these two arts together.This dissertation is written from three aspects according to Bell's hypothesis梥implification, form (lines and colours) and significant design. Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse have been chosen as the objects of this study because...