Virginia Woolf: Her Writing Of Silence In To The Lighthouse

As one of the most prominent literary figures of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf is widely admired for her technical innovations in the novel, most notably her development of narrative subjectivity. Rejecting the boundaries of traditional European narrative form, which she believes had become too artificial and restrictive for increasingly poetic, impressionistic renderings of life, Woolf is constantly attempting to produce the novels in her own distinctive narrative style. The formal uses of silence as part of her experimental narrative methods lead her to create new representations of mind and self. To the Lighthouse, generally considered to be her greatest fictional achievement, marks the emergence of her mature narrative voice, as well as the perfection of the experimental writing technique used tentatively in her preceding novels.This thesis is an attempt at reading Virginia Woolf's writing of silence through her masterpiece To the Lighthouse. Traditionally, silence is regarded as an absence in life, but it figures in Woolf's novels as a presence, and is infused with a new psychic and narrative life. But why does Woolf structure various kinds of s'ilence into her works? What do these silences express in her text? How does she "write" silence? And finally, how do we read silence in narration? These questions are important to our understanding of Woolf and her works.Chapter One first gives the concept of silence a brief survey based on the position of silence in the integrated theory of communication. Then a general discussion is conducted about the different types of silence commonly figuring in her novels.Chapter Two thematically examines Woolf's expression of silence based on her masterpiece To the Lighthouse, which possesses the inherent complexities of her many themes. A careful study of Woolf's thematic and philosophical expression of silence reveals her modernistic ideas about novel, vision of gender, particularly, of women, a worldview, and also her notion of language to express silence.Chapter Three focuses on Woolf's writing techniques of silence which are her artful achievement in language and form in realizing her ambition of writing "a novel about Silence." A careful examination of her novel reveals that Woolf has created a "zone of art" -including punctuation, a lexicon, metaphor, and rhythm of silence-which enables her to capture the lifeof both the surface and the depth, the ineffable and unsayable things.Through her original writing of silence, Woolf compositionally marks a space for readers' active understanding, and invites us into her sentences, novels, and characters' consciousnesses in a new way; we have to learn to read her novel from a new perspective.In viewing silence as a presence and value rather than traditional assumptions of silence as an absence of ability and subordination, Woolf infuses the meaning of silence with a new psychic and narrative life. Silence is a constituent part of her narration as she traces the patterns of the mind and its relation to woman's way of knowing and being.