An Ethical Interpretation Of Virginia Woolf’s Short Stories

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) plays an important role in modern literary history forher great contribution to innovating both in skills and styles of novels and herfundamental role in western feminist movement in the twentieth century. Therefore,there has been great numbers of researches on her works and herself both in westerncountries and China, which makes it difficult for people to do researches from atotally new perspective. But recently, a few people apply the theory of Ethical LiteraryCriticism to interpret her main stream-of-consciousness novels, which inspires me tomake analyses on her short stories from the perspective of ethics through doing closereading of the texts to find out her ethical ideas. This thesis concentrates on three ofWoolf’s short stories: The New Dress, An Unwritten Novel and Kew Gardens.The Ethical Literary Criticism helps to judge the everyday life with its moralcharacters in the perspective of ethics. And this theory also contributes to constructhumanistic spirit in terms of human-nature, human-other, human-self andhuman-society relationships.The thesis is composed of six parts, the introduction and conclusion embodied.The first part briefly introduces the whole thesis and includes a general description ofWoolf’s lives and literary works, the researches on Woolf both in China and othercountries, and the feasibility and significance of this study. The second part mainlyintroduces the literary ethical criticism and Woolf’s related ethical thinkings reflectingfrom her essays about short stories. The third part analyzes the factors contributing toWoolf’s ethical thinking to explore the origin of her ethical awareness and herdefinition of the short story. Next are part four and part five, which are the mostsignificant parts of the thesis. And this thesis tries to explore Woolf’s ethical ideasthrough analyzing the contents and her artistic techniques in her three major shortstores. In Kew Gardens, Woolf describes four groups of people to give us an outlineview of the people after wars. The seeming close people have their own things ontheir minds, but after some compromises, they finally achieve harmonious state. In AnUnwritten Novel, analyses focus on the heroine Minnie Marsh’s image changed in thenarrator’s mind. Her wretched image changes into powerful woman because of thearrival of her son, which indirectly reflects the unequal social status of women in that time. In The New Dress, the interpretation mainly focused on Mabel’s ethical identity,which has gone through three stages: denial of self-identity, reflection of self-identityand affirmation of self-identity. Her writing techniques in her short stories are the useof fragmentation and whole, conversation and silent conversation. There are manytalkings disconnected by repetition of words and sentences constantly interrupted bysome punctuations, which make the conversation meaningless. So the conversationbecomes no real spiritual communications. Conversation can evoke some emotions,while silent conversation which includes gestures, indirect words, and metaphors,represent a kind of resistance or suppression. And conversation and silentconversation supplement each other in the short stories. The conclusion is the last partof this thesis and mainly summarizes the main idea of this thesis.Woolf’s ethical ideas can be reflected in her humanistic care for people, her ideasagainst violence and patriarchal society, together with feminism she advocated.And all her life, Woolf tries to pursue a kind of inner harmonious state, which, inher mind, is the moral aim and final value for people. She holds that to achieve innerharmonious state is one’s final promise of life. Through the interpretation of Woolf’sthree main short stories, people could be encouraged to pursue their inner harmoniousstate, even through some compromises and pay more attention to the inner mind ofothers and their own. And this thesis also hopes to supplement the researches onWoolf and inspire others to analyze other writers’ works in the perspective of ethics.