'One must stop to find a word': Language and communication in the novels of Virginia Woolf

In Virginia Woolf's nine major novels, as well as in her diaries, letters and essays, one finds an ambivalence toward language. From her earliest novels through her final notes for essays she never finished, Woolf was fascinated and frustrated by the power and limitations of the written and spoken word. While Woolf recognized a need to express herself, to define the world around her, and to communicate with others, she also doubted verbal language's ability to do these things. This ambivalence creates a tension in Woolf's nine major novels. Many of her characters reveal the need of verbal language in understanding the self and the surrounding world and show that communication is necessary for personal well being. Yet the most insightful characters also believe that language ultimately fails to express "reality" and to communicate our deepest feeling. By examining the dialectic between the need to articulate and communicate and the skepticism about fully succeeding in these verbal endeavors we discover a progression in Woolf's attitude about what words can and can not do.; In The Voyage Out and Night and Day the protagonists must learn to articulate in order to understand themselves and their world. Yet they also come to realize language is unable to express the deepest truths. In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse verbal communication is necessary to health and happiness, but, again, language fails to express the deepest truths or emotions. In Jacob's Room and Orlando Woolf explores the narrators' desire and failure to adequately capture the "granite and rainbow" of personality in words. The six characters of The Waves present varying degrees of verbal abilities, and these abilities reflect their understanding of the surrounding world. In this novel Bernard, the most verbally accomplished of the six, expresses profound doubts about language's ability to define and to communicate. By the time Woolf wrote The Years and Between the Acts her doubts about verbal language become most apparent. In these novels language fails either to define or to communicate. While the dialectic is evident in all of the novels, in the first six Woolf's trust in language outweighs her doubts about it. In the final three novels, however, Woolf's skepticism becomes decidedly more predominant.