Monday, February 18, 2008

Virginia Woolf

To be honest, I was not expecting to find Virginia Woolf’s short stories as convoluted as I did, but after reading them and thinking about some of the narrative qualities, I find they appear to be more like journal entries than short fiction. Perhaps they are a hybrid of the two, as Sandra Kemp describes them as “an interior monologue” (62). In Kemp’s article, we also learn that Woolf allowed herself to indulge in short stories such as “The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens,” and “Monday or Tuesday” as a personal indulgence. She explains, “they were written by way of diversion; they were the treats I allowed myself” (63). I find that the way Woolf viewed the work strongly impacts the experience readers will have when they read it.
In several different places within these short stories, we can see the fragmentation commonly associated with modernism as well as what Kemp terms the blending of the “inner and outer voices” (77). I believe what Kemp is referring to here is the near seamless manner whereby the reader can barely distinguish whether they are reading the narrator’s words or a character’s words. I am also including in my reading of this statement the way that Woolf often transitions from one thought to another without clearly distinguishing whose thoughts they are, or perhaps more importantly, if these thoughts belong to a single person or multiple people. For example, the third paragraph of “Monday or Tuesday” contains a largely fragmented passage which exists, I feel, at the intersection of a conversation with another character and a frantic internal dialogue. It reads, “Radiating to a point men’s feet and women’s feet, black or gold encrusted -- (This foggy weather--? No, thank you—The commonwealth of the future)—the firelight darting and making the room red, save for the black figures and their bright eyes” (17). The section continues, but that becomes more streamlined as it goes on.
Another observation I made after reading several of these short stories, and perhaps I would not have been as quick to make this connection had last week’s class not focused on visual arts, was Woolf’s use of color and carefully artistic descriptions of items and images in these works. There is, of course, the titular reference to color in “Blue & Green” which I feel signifies the difference between land and sea, confinement and freedom. The strong emphasis on color and nature pervades nearly every line in “Kew Gardens.” Woolf describes a landscape where there are “leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface” (39). The passage continues to catalogue a “brown earth,” “grey back of a pebble,” “brown circular veins,” and “vast green spaces” (39). To me, the way the first paragraph uses color and depiction coincides with the imagery common to the time period, but also to the paintings of Van Gough and others that we examined last week. I am curious to the extent that Woolf fashioned her descriptions to match the visual representations of place offered in paintings.
The visual arts were something she was immersed in partially because of her family. Kemp details a conversation between Virginia and Vanessa regarding visual arts. She says, “‘I should like you to paint a large, large, picture, where everything would be brought perfectly firmly together, yet all half flying off the canvas in rapture” (62). This statement makes clear the importance of visual art for Virginia Woolf and the values she places on it find their way into her short stories. I also think that the color is used as a means of rich description because its absence frightens Woolf. In a way, her inclusion of color works as a means to preserve what she fears could be lost. Woolf says “‘We shall very soon lose our sense of colour’” (67). Kemp informs us that “she calls this ‘the worst of living in a highly organized community” (67). Because the short stories she wrote were half journal and half fiction, Woolf can address her emotions. She does this in subtle ways like with her abundant use of color rather than by overtly stating her concerns via characters within the narratives of these short stories.

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