The Development Of The Self Of Virginia Woolf's Major Female Characters

As a most prominent woman modernist in 20 century, Virginia Woolf is an experimenter of modernism in fictional creation as well as a pioneer in feminism. While exploring and practicing modernist techniques in her fictions, she shows her keen concern of women's existence in the patriarchal society. Her lifework is a developmental and unified process of seeking women's selfhood.Woolf's concept of unity in characterization of female characters is what this thesis concerns, and the unity is examined from a coherent development of the women in her major works to demonstrate the writer's developing understanding of womanhood as well as the developing formulation of her feminism. The focus is laid on the developmental reading of three novels: her first novel The Voyage Out, the mature work of her stream-of-consciousness technique Mrs. Dalloway, and her magnum opus To the Lighthouse. The three novels respectively stand for three different stages of women's development with each representing a psychological voyage out of reality, and with each voyage ending with an exhaustion or revelation, a larger wholeness is formulated in the developing process of a complete voyage from the starting point with uncertainty, across the loss and struggling of self, to the destination of brightness and hope. Meanwhile, Woolf's exploration of women's independent identity reaches a climax with her discovery of the possibility for woman to maintain her self in art.