A Portrait Of The Character In His Inner World

Being an important writer of stream-of-consciousness novel beside Proust, Joyceand James, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) made considerable contribution in boththeory and practice with her insightful essays and ingenious experimental works.Through a rough research on her essays and her novel Mrs. Dalloway, this thesistries to study her theory on novel, especially on characters, her approaches in practiceto creating characters in this novel, and then to interpret some major characters.In the general climate of the early 20th century and under Freud's and Russianwriters' influence, Woolf believes that reality lies in people's inner world rather thanin the outer world. With this belief, she models characters, to which she attachesmuch importance, through the exploration of their inner world instead of thedescription of their external surroundings. This can be clearly seen in the characterportrayal in Mrs. Dalloway. Ingenious techniques are needed to present this innerworld, ignored before in literature. This thesis tries to look at some of the techniquesWoolf applies to explore characters' inner life. They are indirect interior monologue,the shift of perspective, the extension of time, the special use of external objects andthe unity in the structure, the latter four of which are so called by the author just forconvenience. A tentative interpretation of some fully-developed characters reallyshows that their private and complex inner world can be revealed with considerableskill and rendered onto pages.Although engaged in the revolution against the out-of-date conventions andexperiments with new form and techniques, Woolf attached, both in theory andpractice, much importance to characters and she creates characters through theexploration of their inner world.