Question- 'Her novels have been greeted as original experiments in a new technique of fiction, the explorations of the consciousness replacing the exploration of event. 'Discuss with reference to Virginia Woolf's To The Light House'.

Answer -

It is in this field that Virginia Woolf makes her most important contribution to the novel. Conventional conceptions of the novel she entirely rejected, replacing emphasis on incident, external description and straight forward narrative by an overriding concern with character presentation by the 'Stream of consciousness' method. This technique was not a new one. Dorothy Richardson had used it in painted Roofs (1915), Back Water (1916), Honey Comb (1917). etc.. So had James Joyce, the greater exponent of this method than either. Its great advantages are that if offers previously undreamed of possibilities for the analysis of mental states; its disadvantages, the great demands it makes on the reader, and the dangers of incoherence and mere virtuosity, which be set the author because of the lack of a logical time sequence and the temptation to go into the most minute detail. Virginia Woolf uses this technique with ever-growing sureness of purpose, her keen mind and magnificent artistic sense enable her to weld the parts into a unified artistic whole of sensitive, subtle portraiture. Her studies of mood and impulse are handled with an almost scientific precision and detachment, and yet she has a great gift for lyrical exposition,

In Virginia Woolf's first novel, the voyage out Terence Hewet confides to Rachel Vinrace. "I want to write a novel about silence ..... the things people don't say." "The things people don't say" were the things Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries, James Joyace and D. H. Lawrence, wanted to say, "They shared an interest in making silence speak, in giving a tongue to the complex inner world of feeling and memory and establishing the validity of that world's claim to the term reality." That subjective reality came to be identified with the technique rather loosely called "stream of consciousness." The debt some have claimed Mrs. Woolf comes to Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson, Henry Bergson of Joyce is less important as dominant metaphysical bias of whole generation." Literary historians invariably make a trio of Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence agreeing that they share this "metaphysical bias." We are however, becoming as much aware of their singularities as of their shared attitudes and technique. It is doubtful, for example, that Woolf and Lawrence used the famed stream of consciousness technique at all---

"Though so often mentioned together with Joyce and Lawrence, Woolf is neither so highly valued nor so well known as they are. She may partly be the victim of an obscuring personal legend created by her contemporaries. If so, she again recalls Lawrence, for Lawrence the writer was the victim of a far more obscuring personal legend, one arising out of both aduetation and animosity and Lawrence's own strident prophetic stance. Happily, Lawrence has already survived his legend. Woolf has yet to survive hers." She (Mrs. Woolf) is like a plant which is supposed to grow in a well-prepared bed-the bed of esoteric literature and then pushes up suckers all over the place, through the gravel of the front drive, and even through the flag stones of the kitchen yard. She was full of interests, and their number increased as she grew older, she was curious about life, and she was touch and sensitive." She is a poet, who wants to write something as near to a novel as possible. The next of her interests which has to be considered is society. She was not confined to sensations and intellectualism, she was a social creature, with an outlook both warm and shrewd. But it was a peculiar out look, and we can best get at it by looking at a very peculiar side of her, her feminism.

Virginia Woolf shared the restless experimentalism of her generation. The drive to begin a new may be seen as compulsion, it may also be seen as a king of courage, an artistic strategy that is anything but soft But each of her need to explore her double vision of reality. Terence and Rachel of her first novel are partly a double personality whose engagement never becomes a marriage. Terence, her surer novelistic self, must complete the awakening of Rachel, her softer, sheltered, more uncertain and highly a native feminine self. Terence interested in silence speaks for his author who knows that a novelist is also interested in talk and in objects. The attraction of these two kinds of reality always pulled at Mrs. Woolf. When she divided novels into novels of facts and vision. She was expressing a classification. She thought inherent in life and in fiction. Contrary to what she seemed to be saying in her famous attack on wells, Bennett, Galsworthy in her essays. 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' fact interested her as much as vision. If death was in the midst of life in all her novels, fact was always in the midst of vision.

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