'A luminous halo': Madness and the inexpressible in Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Virginia Woolf's 'Between the Acts'

This thesis will argue that the semantic breakdowns of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts represent a collapse of language into madness, and, in so doing, undercut the existence of the narratives within which they occur. The better Conrad and Woolf become at writing, the more conscious they are of language's inability to articulate life and represent meaning, and this paradox produces a confrontation with madness in their texts. This madness is related to the fragmented and disorderly state of early twentieth-century human consciousness---the modernist condition---and is, in part, a consequence of humanity's inability to express itself through language. Thus, the thesis will analyze the undoing of language and narration in Conrad's and Woolf s texts, and will examine the relationship between madness and the inexpressible that is paradoxically pronounced through words that have become unhinged from meaning.