E-C-301 The Modernist Literature

Assignment Paper: - E-C-301 The Modernist Literature

Topic                     : - Art of characterization

Student’s name     : - Makwana Jayshri D.

Roll  no                 :- 14

URL                      :-makwanajayshri261011.blogspot.com

Semester               :- 3

Batch                    :- 2010-11

                                                 

                                   Submitted to,

                                                 Dr. Dilip Barad

                                                 Department of English

                                                 Bhavnagar University.

 

Virginia Woolf: Art of Characterization:

          Virginia Woolf is a great creative artist, in the sense that her works introduce us to a unique and living imaginative world, like all other artist she also wanted to paint a picture of real life as she saw it. She had her own vision of life and wanted to convey it through her novels. She found that the conventional novel imposed order upon experience, an order which did not correspond with reality.

Break from Technique:

          Mrs. Woolf belongs to the school of “stream of consciousness” novelists she is one of those great English novelists of the 20^th century who had the courage to break free from tradition, and then she does not give us merely the externals of character, but renders the very souls of her personage with created a number of memorable, many-sided and sounded figure, which are among the immortals of literature. Her fiction is a well-stored picture-gallery of vivid and memorable men and woman.

The stream of consciousness technique:

                 Virginia Woolf is not one of the architects of the “Stream of consciousness novel”, she is not its originator, but it is in her novels that “the stream of consciousness” technique finds its balance. She has succeeded in imposing from and order on the chaos inherent in the novel of subjectivity.

                  Woolf’s characters are to give a new direction, a new form and a new spiritual awareness of the English novel. She began writing in the established tradition of the novel; her first two novels,

    The Voyage Out

    Night and Day

                     Are largely traditional but soon she realized the inadequacy of the traditional novel,and adopted the stream of consciousness technique in the Jacob’s Room, her third novel. Her art rapidly matured and her next two novels

    Mrs. Dalloway

    To the Lighthouse

                   Represent the very consummation of the novel of subjectivity. This explains her break with traditions and conventions of the 19^th century novel.

 The Technique of “The Interior Monologue”:

          Human life as it really is was her theme, and nothing else was of an interest to her she reveals the vey springs of action, the hidden motives which impel men and women to act in a particular way. This is done by a clever use of the ‘interior monologue’ or ‘the stream of consciousness technique she takes us directly into the minds of her character, and shows the chaotic flow of ideas, sensations and impressions, and in this way she brings us closer to their psyche, than can ever be possible by the use of conventional methods of characterization.

    Art of Characterization

    Conventional technique:

          E.M. Foster and other critics have expressed the view that Mrs. Woolf fails to provide in her novels memorable gallery of portrait of such as we get in the works of other novelists. Her characters, it has been said, do not live long in the mind and are soon forgotten. The fact is that there are characters in her novels, vivid and conventional and so must not be judged, by the older convention which Mrs. Woolf rejected. Conventionally, ever since the time of Fielding, novelists have adopted two methods of character drawing. First, they have sketched their characters through set description. We are told directly what a character looks like, how he dresses up, what are his oddities, and what are the silent qualities of his head and heart.

          Secondly, characters have been visualized and made real through own words and actions, as well as through what other have to say about them. However, Mrs. Woolf regarded such methods of characterization as superficial. In this way, we get the externals of characters and not the inner reality. Her purpose was to render in her novels the soul or ‘psyche’ of her dramatis nonsense and with this end in view she adopted a new technique of characterization.

    Her Range: It’s Limitation.

       Hoe ever, like all other novelists; Mrs. Woolf can communicate the experience of only a limited number of human types. Her range of characterization is limited for her central characters she limits herself to one large social class- those who have large incomes or earn salaries. Her chief characters are all drawn from the upper middle class. She herself belonged to this class and so had intimate. First knowledge of it. Mrs. Ramsay and their circle all belong to this class. Round these central figures, she creates the poor Londoners like Mrs. Macnab and Mrs.Bast. but such characters also are drawn with the same sureness of touch. When she moves outside this circle, her vision diminishes, and she points with less sureness of touch.

     For example,

                She knew very little about shopkeepers, traders and merchants, therefore, towards them her attitude is often patronizing and snobbish. They are used merely as ministers to the men and women of her limited world, the upper-middle class world, the world of those who earn salaries of have private incomes and live sheltered lives. Not knowing those below the “middle class”, she can not depict convincingly the “lower order” There are no such characters in “To the Lighthouse”.

    The multiple point of view:

Personality is revealed by inner monologue the novelist uses the stream of consciousness technique for the purpose.

“There is continual shifting from mind to mind, so that we as often perceive the impression given by one to another  the experience each receives.”

Also certain scenes and moments are selected which throw a character into high relief, the scene in the children’s bedroom in To the Lighthouse, for example, which highlights at once Mrs. Ramsay’s tact and motherly love, sympathy and understanding. Mrs. Ramsay emerges as a fully rounded character because we know her as she is reflected in several others. Further, we share the memories of divorce people regarding her at a number of crucial memories in her life. We know her as she is today and she was in the past, and also know the various factors which have influenced her soul and determined her character or predisposition to act in a particular manner. We have been a peep into her soul, and come to know her more intimately than would ever have been possible by the use of conventional methods. We know her by the roots, so to say. We know her not only through her conscious acts and words, but also through what passes within her at the sub-conscious level, and also through the stream of consciousness of a number of other characters.

Similarly, the stream of consciousness technique has been used with equal effect to render the soul or psyche of Mr. Ramsay. We first know her through the stream of consciousness of his wife, and then through that of William Bankes. Further light is thrown upon his character by the hostility which he raises in the minds of his children. James and Cam in particular. In this way his personality is built up. His character has been further realized by his habit of reciting lines of poetry to dramatize his sense of loneliness and desolation. This is one of the finest examples of the way in which Mrs. Woolf can realize a character with perfect economy. The novelists’ purpose was to convey how life fells to those who live it, to convey, in other words, the actual sensation of living and suffering, and she has fully succeeded in doing so. Indeed, as far as the richness and variety of characterization is concerned, To the Lighthouse is the finest of the novels of Virginia Woolf.

    Her female character:

          Mrs. Woolf was a woman and quite naturally it is to be expected that her greatest triumphes would be achieved in painting female characters. She does succeed in rendering the essential quality of female experience where it differs from the male, she, of course, notes the wavering, uncertain nature of the dividing line, and she also sees the qualities of each sex appearing in the other.

“But she discerns more clearly, perhaps, than any other novelist, the peculiar nature of typically feminine modes of thought and apprehension, and their peculiar value as the complement of masculine modes.”

Women in her novels, women who are clearly distinguished from each other, share this essential womanliness. Thus Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, Sally Seton, Mrs. Dalloway, Doris Kilman and Elizabeth are all sharply distinguished from each other, but all have this essential womanliness. For example, Mrs. Ramsay has this womanliness. One of the factors in this essential feminity is the incapacity of these women far retaining or distinguishing between far retaining or distinguishing between facts. Thus Mrs. Ramsay does not understand what Charles Tansley is studying. She simply says that his dissertation is about ‘the influence of someone on somebody’. Can have no idea of the four sides of the copass. Tansley speaks for the novelist herself when he says,

                               “Women can’t paint”

                               Women can’t write.”

                There is certain vagueness, certain muddle- headedness about their minds: they are all indifferent to fact. But even then her women are complements to her men-folk. This is so because they have a special honesty, honesty which comes of self-knowledge, and the power of distinguishing the essential from the accidental and non-accidental men and women are essentially different, but if there is love between them, the differences between their respective natures contribution to make a single whole, as if together they made up a human being more complete than either. Thus Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay are the natural complements of each other, together enjoying a fuller life than would have been possible far them separately.