A STREAM OF LIFE

“I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity;

I want to criticize the social system, and show how it works, at its most intense”.

As the 20^th century brings its first changes, i.e. the 1^st World War and its consequences, literature starts to adapt to the new tendencies and to the new feelings in order to communicate in a deeper way; it is a period of strong upsetting and the previous Victorian values, which had appealed so much, simply seem to die off: they do not suit anymore the society of the time.

The modern novel underlines the relationship between the internal and the external worlds of the character, since writers feel it is time to really communicate people’s feelings without the intermediation of a narrator. Finally characters live into a limited perspective, but at the same time it is a reassuring and apparently complete reality.

To this turning point corresponds the need for new stylistic techniques: in 1890 William James, an American psychologist, created the expression “stream of consciousness”; this had to describe the unbroken flow of thoughts, a set of changing inner impulses which an individual has while unconscious.

The stream of consciousness was readily adopted in writing and the first authors to make use of it were Virginia Woolf (“Mrs Dalloway”) and James Joyce (“Ulysses”): there is a peculiar difference between their ways of studying the flux of thoughts, which is the fact that in Woolf’s works time is not regarded as a continuous stream, but as a series of different moments collected by the free association of ideas; secondarily her characters’ thoughts belong by some means to Woolf’s personality, which is not of little importance, because it allows us to speculate about her figure and psyche.

Far from relating in an exhaustive way everything about the English writer, it could be an interesting purpose to denote how Virginia Woolf contributed to the growth of the communicative level in prose: in fact she was able to represent the flow of time in centuries (“Orlando”), in many years (“To the lighthouse”) and in only twelve hours (“Mrs Dalloway”), according to Bergson’s theory of time[1]. Her works are made distinctive by a polished figurative language, full of metaphors and assonances, with the abundant use of semicolons and hyphens, thus representing her point of view about the typical feminine way of thinking.

It is said that a good psychiatrist could reconstruct Woolf’s background and life, insofar as he read Mrs Dalloway: apart from the literary aspects, this novel gave her the possibility to express some nuances of her mind and of her complex sensibility.

First of all we should speak of the theme of the double: Virginia Woolf created the figure of Septimus Smith, who is seen as Clarissa Dalloway’s doppelganger, a darker personality, compared to her social outlook. These two characters seem to represent herself, or at least a part of her persona.

From any biography, we learn about the author’s fear of the war, of the destruction brought by the second world war into the streets of London (this soon led her to suicide, since she could not afford all that stress): Septimus is an ex-soldier, who began suffering from shell shock[2] after having come back from war; this kind of disorder can be provoked by a stressful situation, as well as a traumatic experience; Virginia’s half-brother George, much older, sexually abused her and she incredibly suffered from her parents’ death during her whole life. Therefore the theme of insanity was close to her existence and, while speaking of the man’s distorted reality, she could be describing her own situation: Woolf saw in Septimus the possible “vicarious dead”, in order not to “kill” Clarissa Dalloway, and after she committed suicide this character began to be associated more and more with her.

Eventually the author’s deep attraction for women (not only in a physical way) is to be found in most parts of the book (e.g. when Clarissa remembers her past particular relationship with a friend of hers).

In conclusion, what are supposed to be Virginia Woolf’s merits?

She contributed to the development of new genre in a personal and original way; she succeeded in writing about things she strongly owned in her internal consciousness (and which belonged to her character); indeed she was able to describe reality, her sole aim, through thoughts, feelings and without her personal intervention. And what is more, she probably made us understand the real value of time, of The Hours of our life, better than anyone else, since she taught it to us through her personal life.