Emotion & Reason

The renowned British woman writer and critic Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) developed her conception of women's writing in early 1900s. which covers a range of basic issues concerning women writing's meaning, significance, style, developing trend as well as the issue whether it has its own discourse. With respect to this, modern critics more often than not focus on Woolf's identity as a feminist, trying to locate her and her conception by studying her experience or fiction writings. Indeed, their studies have contributed to the knowledge of the social and historical origins of Woolf's thinking and have revealed its social significance. However, there are still conspicuous deficiencies regarding the theoretical exploration of the essential features of her thinking about literature. Often, their criticism is overpowered by biographic elements, or too much involved in a unilateral gender-based perspective. Therefore, a proper understanding and illustration of Woolf's thinking upon literature is still an urgent and critical issue in need of study.The present dissertation assumes that, if we study from the perspective of emotion/reason, in light of feminism, psychoanalysis, narratology, and if we put more attention on her essays, diaries, as well as on her fiction, we can possibly delve into the rich connotations and essence of her conception in a historical context. It is argued that the issue of emotion/reason is the core of Woolf's writings and theoretical thinking about women's writing. Either in the argumentation about truth or about tradition, either in the exploration of writing subjects or styles, the issue of emotion/reason is a consistent concern, which develops into a theoretic conception of reasoned emotion for art.The dissertation begins with an exploration of Woolf's understanding of emotion. Woolf's discard of anger, which is also a form of emotion, does not mean that she denies the literary presentation of emotion in the broad sense. On the one hand, Woolf concerns herself with emotion revealed in women's writing,and on the other, she stresses reason from different perspectives. She holds that the writer should take an integral attitude, adhere to the human element, write in a state of anonymous freedom, and treat tradition dialectically. Generally speaking, reason is conceptualized as "integrity" and her devotion to reason in writing embodies an artist's particular rational contemplation on artistic creation.It is further argued that emotion and reason are interdependent in Woolf's conception, which, in reality, demands that the writer should acquire an understanding of reasoned emotion in art so that eternality can be achieved. With a particular look at Woolf's idea of recollection and concentration, the dissertation examines her view of poetic spirit, and of impersonality as the ideal means to effect good writing.In light of Woolf's theoretical thinking about reasoned emotion, the two most controversial concepts "woman's sentence" and "androgyny" are then brought into focus and explored for their implication of emotion/reason. With the two concepts, Woolf calls for the consciousness of reasoned emotion in women writers. For her, since future women's writing will be characterized with a poetic spirit, women writers should try to work beyond as well as work at gender consciousness, so that they can fully exert their creativity and achieve the perfect union of emotion and reason to endow their writing with perpetual energy. In view of this, her idea of reasoned emotion should be of particular significance to those women writers keen on expressing personal emotions.Based on a holistic study of literature, Woolf shows her stance as a conscious female writer by her theoretical thinking. Especially concerned with the issue of gender consciousness in writing, she acknowledges gender difference and advocates a dynamic treatment of it. She doesn't put emotion and reason in an absolute opposite dualistic relation. Marked by a pluralistic thinking paradigm, her literary conception is revealing fo...