Reality in Abstraction— A Tentative Analysis of Virginia Woolf

Abstract

To the light house is Virginia Woolf’s one of the most famous “stream of consciousness novels”. For over ten years Mrs. Woolf advocated the new style of writing assiduously in her works. There is not much of plot in most of her major work. Relatively speaking, she focused more on the reflection of the inner world and mind’s responses of the characters in her works. One is its autographic style—Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are the epitome of Woolf’s parents, which offers precious materials to study the comparison between sense and sensibility. She poured out all the memories stored in her mind over the years to express her emotions—recalling her parents in heaven. The other is its great value in both mental and artistic fields. Woolf abandoned the traditional writing mode, and masterly used skills and innovative thinking to reproduce the contradictory inner world perfectly, which marks the important development of “stream of consciousness novels” in modernist literature.