Name : Anjali M. Rathod
Enrollment no. : 4069206420220024
Roll no. : 02
Batch : M.A. Sem. 2 (2022-24)
Subject Code : 22399
Paper no. : 106 - The Twentieth Century Literature: 1900 to World War 2
Email Address: rathodanjali20022002ui@gmail.com
Submitted to : Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar - 364002
“Virginia Woolf's Use of Stream of Consciousness Technique in her Novel- ‘Orlando:A Biography’.”
“Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.”
-Virginia Woolf
Introduction :
Born: January 25, 1882 in London, England
Died: March 28, 1941 (aged 59), England
Notable Works: ‘A Room of One’s Own’, ‘Orlando : A Biography’, ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, ‘To The Lighthouse’
Movement : Modernism
Notable Family Members : Spouse- Leonard Woolf, Father- Sir Leslie Stephen.
Virginia Woolf, original name in full Adeline Virginia Stephen. She was an English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre. She is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse(1927).
Virginia Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. A fine stylist, she experimented with several forms of biographical writing, composed painterly short fictions, and sent to her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters.
About the novel(Orlando: A Biography) :
Orlando: A Biography written by a well known writer Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1928. Orlando's life traces the history of Vita Sackville-West's family, up to the present day, when Vita was unable to inherit her family estate because she was a woman. Most of the photographs are of Vita or members of her family. The fanciful biographical novel pays homage to the family of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West from the time of her ancestor Thomas Sackville to the family’s country estate at Knole. The manuscript of the book, a present from Woolf to Sackville-West, is housed at Knole.
The novel opens in 1588. Young Orlando, a 16-year-old boy, writes a poem called “The Oak Tree.” He finds favour at the Elizabethan court and love in the arms of a Russian princess. A garrulous poet, Sir Nicholas Greene, discusses literature with him. During the reign of Charles II , Orlando was named ambassador to Constantinople and was rewarded with a dukedom. One night he stays with a dancer and cannot be awakened. Seven days later Orlando rises, now a beautiful woman. She returns to England and savours intellectual London society in the age of Addison, Dryden, and Pope but turns to bawdy street life for relief from this cerebral life. She marries to achieve respectability during the Victorian years, and by 1928 she has returned to London, where she is reunited with her friend Greene, who offers to find a publisher for “The Oak Tree.” Back at her country estate, she stands under the great oak and remembers her centuries of adventure.
The novel is also an affectionate portrait of Sackville-West, who, because she was a woman, could not inherit Knole. Written in a pompous biographical voice, the book pokes fun at a genre the author knew well: her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, had edited the Dictionary of National Biography, and her friend Lytton Strachey had written the revolutionary Eminent Victorians.
Virginia Woolf also parodies the changing styles of English literature and explores issues of androgyny and the creative life of women. Orlando marked a turning point in Woolf’s career. it was a departure from her more introspective works, but its spectacular sales also ended her financial worries. Readers praised the book’s fluid style, wit, and complex plot.
What Is “Stream of Consciousness”?
Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique used in literature that attempts to reproduce the flow of a character's thoughts, feelings, and sensations in a continuous and uninterrupted stream. In this technique, the writer presents the character's inner monologue, including associations, memories, and sensory perceptions, as they occur in the character's mind.
The stream of consciousness technique aims to create a sense of intimacy and immediacy with the reader by allowing them to experience the character's thoughts and emotions as they happen. It can also be used to represent the fragmented and associative nature of human thought, as well as the complex relationship between language and thought. This technique also enables Woolf to experiment with the fluidity of time and the boundaries of gender and identity, as Orlando lives for centuries and undergoes a gender transformation.
Virginia woolf uses “Stream of Consciousness” in her novel ‘Orlando: A Biography’ :
"Stream of consciousness" is a narrative technique. This technique is used to create a sense of immersion and intimacy with the character, as well as to explore the inner workings of the human mind. The Aim of these narrative techniques is to capture the flow of a character's thoughts and feelings in a continuous and unbroken manner.
"Orlando: A Biography," Woolf employs this technique to explore the inner world of her protagonist, Orlando. Through the use of free indirect discourse and the stream of consciousness technique, Woolf allows the reader to experience Orlando's thoughts and feelings in a direct and unmediated way, as if we are inside his head.
This Novel is a remarkable example of Woolf's innovative use of narrative techniques and her exploration of complex themes such as gender, identity, and time. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness writing mirrors the thoughts of Orlando, her protagonist. Thus, the scenes which occur at the very end of the novel, where Orlando goes up to her tree, looks out over her home, welcomes back a dead queen, and heralds the return of her husband, may be a product of her imagination.
Mrs. Woolf’s hero-heroine is hundreds of years old. At the beginning of the book Orlando is a boy of 16, melancholy, indolent, loving solitude and given to writing poetry; the age is the Elizabethan; the book ends on the 11th of October, 1928, and Orlando is a thoroughly modern matron of 36, who has published a successful book of poems and has evolved a hard-earned philosophy of life. Thus, to express her very modern fourth-dimensional concepts, Mrs. Woolf has fallen back upon one of the most ancient of literary forms, the allegory. In doing so she has left the book perhaps more confused than was strictly necessary.
Mrs. Woolf has broken with tradition and convention and has set out to explore still another fourth dimension of writing. She has abandoned the "stream of consciousness" method which she used with such conspicuous success in her previous novels, but with it she has combined what, for lack of a better term. She is largely preoccupied with the "time" element in character and human relationships. And also with a statement of the exact complexion of that intangible moment, a combination of past and future, of objective reality and subjective consciousness, which we refer to as the present.
Orlando unexpectedly changes sex, and throughout the rest of the novel is a woman. There is a revolution in Turkey. She escapes and for some time wanders about Central Europe with a band of gypsies ; eventually her British love of nature asserts itself and she hastens back to the hills and hedges she is so fond of. Later she comes to London in search of "Love and Life,". She experiments with the various diversions the city has to offer, but finds them empty. Fashionable society is exciting for the moment, yet "nothing remains the next day;". She becomes intimate with Pope, Addison and Swift, but finds them dull compared with their books.
The eighteenth century fades from the screen and Orlando finds herself in the age of Victoria. The rest of the novel may be divided into two parts : the first deals somewhat whimsically with Orlando’s attempts to adjust herself to the conventions of nineteenth century England. The second, and by far the most stimulating section of the book, describes Orlando at the present moment, and traces with breath-taking delicacy the influence of her past upon her present.
It is in these last thirty-odd pages that the book springs startlingly to life. Up to this point it had seemed a pleasant narrative made notable by a number of passages of great beauty and by occasional bits of vivid description, but marred by a rather self-conscious facetiousness on the part of the author, an addiction to parenthetical whimsicalities that are not particularly effective.
Conclusion :
Overall of the novel, Virginia Woolf seems to reach down through the whole superstructure of life and to lay bare a new, or at least a hitherto unperceived, arrangement of those ephemeral flashes of memory of perception that go to make up consciousness. Mrs. Woolf presents concrete proof that this is not merely an impression, but a fact, by showing what time, not as a mechanical, but as a human element, consists. Virginia Woolf has carried the "stream of consciousness" technique a step further. She has not been satisfied to present a succession of thoughts and sensations passing through the mind; she shows what is behind those thoughts and sensations, whence they spring, and how great their relative value.
Works Cited:
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Orlando". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Mar. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Orlando-by-Woolf. Accessed 27 March 2023.
Reid, Panthea. "Virginia Woolf". Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 Mar. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Woolf. Accessed 27 March 2023.
The New York Times, The New York Times, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-orlando.html.
(Words: 1531
Characters: 9830
Images : 2)
Thank You… .
Comments
Post a Comment