Painting, Poetry And Play: The Hybrid Art In Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Novels

Virginia Woolf is an artist famous for her highbrow taste in literary circle. She treatsher novels as pieces of art and gives priority to artistry in literary writing, being proud ofher perfectionism. As a writer with a painter’s eye, a poet’s concern, a playwright’sambition, and a philosopher’s intellectual depth, she chooses fiction as her main artmedium to show her thoughts of art and philosophy. Realizing that the art of traditionalfiction cannot meet the requirements of modern pattern of minds and life, Woolf breaks therestraint of fiction, uses other art medium as reference, and gets inspiration for herinnovative techniques used in fiction. Because of potential competitive relations with hersister in their different art medium, Woolf pays more attention to the aesthetic formaldimensions of her fiction and the fusion of the “sister arts”(visual art and verbal art). Shethinks that to inherit the unparalleled merits of fiction, poetry, plays or poetic plays canpossibly solve the dilemma of modern fiction. Therefore, in her essay “Poetry, Fiction andthe Future,” she outlines the form of “future fiction” and puts forward her concept ofpoetry and “novel-play,” where her intention to learn from poetry and plays is obvious butthe concrete means are just vaguely mentioned. Woolf’s actual writing practice is moreexquisite than her general concept of fiction, which just sheds light on the direction offiction innovation. It is noteworthy that, apart from the play as literature, the play as theperforming art and “spatial art” on the stage is also the referential source from whichWoolf gets inspiration and with which her skills of “spatial turn” have close connection.From reference to practice, Woolf painstakingly designs how to apply the art of painting,poetry and play to bring newness to fiction and present the corresponding aesthetic effectsof the hybrid art at the same time.The dissertation aims at examining the hybrid art of painting, poetry, and play inWoolf’s modernist novels, revealing the hidden regular patterns and proposing theaesthetic paradigm finally. In each of Woolf’s modernist novel, the hybrid art is applied,with each kind of art showing its unique and universal characteristics. The hybrid art leadsto Woolf’s innovation, her philosophic thoughts permeating her craftsmanship. The hybridity of painting, poetry, and play can also enlighten the uniformity presented in othermodernist novelists’ creation and innovation. Referring to Woolf’s own concepts ofmodern fiction, the dissertation explores one specific kind of art in one representativenovel. Introduction, three chapters and conclusion compose the dissertation.Introduction puts forward the main argument of the dissertation: with painting, poetryand play as reference, Woolf gets inspiration for her innovative concept; by theemployment of the hybrid art of painting, poetry and play, Woolf accomplishes herinnovation in fiction, which produces the artistic forms of her modernist novels.Introduction also reviews the studies on the artistic forms of Woolf’s fiction and explainsthe origin and development of Woolf’s view of artistic forms in fiction; it mentions thesignificance of the topic and the criteria applied in selecting the specific novel fordiscussion; it finally introduces the organization and arguments of each part.Chapter One deals with the art of painting in To the Lighthouse, where verballandscapes, still lifes, portraits, and genre paintings fill. With the aid of visual imagination,readers can “see” with their mind’s eye sorts of “realist paintings,”“Impressionistpaintings,”“Post-Impressionist paintings,” and “Cubist paintings.” Demonstrating hergood awareness of paintings preceding, including, and succeeding those of theImpressionists, this chapter argues that Woolf looks at scenes with a painter’s eye andemploys her knowledge of modern painting either in the creation of concrete paintings orin the organization of structure and characterization. This chapter points out that Woolfinherits the ekphrastic tradition and shows ingenious art of “metapicture”–picture aboutpicturing. This chapter proposes that Woolf provides us with “metapictures” on severalplanes and interprets how the significant opening scene presented by Woolf forms a“metapicture” similar to Velázquez’s Las Meninas, a famous metapicture, and how theother “metapictures” come into being. This chapter illustrates Woolf’s “Impressionist”ways to capture light and color of scenes and the subjective reality, by which the formerproduces her “Impressionist paintings” of landscapes and still life that precisely capture thechanging qualities of light and color and cover objects by a luminous halo or aureole ofcolor; while the latter her literary impressionism that captures the transitory impressions, sensations and emotions in one’s consciousness. Lily Briscoe’s two Post-Impressionistpictures and Woolf’s “Post-Impressionist” ways to handle the novel are dealt with fromaspects of design, distortion and simplification–the three features shared byPost-Impressionists. Towards some details dealt by Woolf, hypotheses are put forward.This chapter notes that Woolf borrows “Cubist” ways to handle the novel: to finish her“portraits” and characterization by “Cubist” perspectives (simultaneous multi-perspectives);to chop life into “moments of being” and consciousness into fragments; and to reconstructperspectives, fragmented consciousness and life by synthesis in order to represent thechaos of modern experience and essence of human beings.Chapter Two investigates the art of poetry in The Waves. Woolf devotes herself tografting poetry onto prose artistically. In her concept of poetry, poetry means more than agenre written in meter, rhyme and poetic diction but most importantly the “poetic sense” or“poetic spirit” linked with the attitude, rhythm, situation and perspectives of poetry. Poetry,in her mind, signifies observing life through a broader perspective, reflecting importantquestions of life, catching imagination, unloading loads of details and facts, andharmonizing characters, scenes and atmosphere. Her ideal novel should have the attributesof poetry: to stand aloof from life; to give the outline rather than the detail; to conveyemotions, feelings, soliloquies in solitude; to express relations of the mind to general ideas,of man to nature and fate, etc. Woolf emphasizes that her so-called “poetry” does notnecessarily depend on the lyrical, poetic words or meter or rhyme, however, her lyrical,poetic language is without any doubt one instinctive style in her writings. This chapteragrees that stream of consciousness possesses the poetic effects, with recourse to MelvinFriedman’s relevant theory and arguments to justify this point. Symbolism and rhythm arenot only the vital essence of poetry but also Woolf’s ways towards poetry. Symbols andsymbolic images are used in great scale in The Waves. Rhythm is not only the structuringforce to hold the novel into a unity but also the final aesthetic effect achieved by her lyricallanguage and rhetoric. Woolf’s masterful quotations from poetry and allusions to poetry arenot only the poetic characteristics of her writing but also her important means to createpoet-figure in her works. In light of Woolf’s concept of poetry, this chapter argues that poets’ perspective or the perspective of poetry accords with the direction of the philosophicthinking. Philosophical depth and concerns are also indispensible to the content of Woolf’sfiction; therefore, a “poet” in her writing should also shoulder the responsibility of a“philosopher”: reflecting on wider questions about existence and life and conveyingphilosophical concerns. Since both “poetry” and “philosophy” are indispensible, there mustbe characters in Woolf’s fiction similar or equivalent to a “poet as a philosopher,” whoarticulates most of the philosophical concerns. In my opinion, Rhoda, Neville and Bernardin The Waves are such “poets.”Chapter Three explores the art of play in Between the Acts, where play as literature(play-script) and play as performing art and “spatial art” are conspicuous. Woolf’s deeprespect for plays is evident in her essays on Greek drama and Elizabethan drama (esp.Elizabethan poetic plays), from which she obviously learns a lot, and with which her“play-poem” complex and concept of “novel-play” are closely connected. With aplaywright’s ambition, she longs for inventing a new kind of play: it is prose yet poetry, anovel and a play; away from facts, it makes the form become the perfectly elastic envelopeof one’s thought and makes the author express his attitude to life freely and fully; it will beread, be acted in the mind, instead of being acted in reality; it should be as condensed asplays are, with time, space, and scenes concentrated; all the richness that the author wantsto give can be compressed into the dialogue; every moment is the center and meeting placeof perceptions; it should get the explosive emotional effect of drama, dramatize theinfluences which play so large a part in life, and create characters who have a dramaticpower. Moreover, Woolf thinks it necessary for a novelist to withdraw from narration andmake readers confront characters and consciousness, just like a playwright absent from aplay, who makes characters act their own parts on the stage and face the audience directly.This chapter argues that the stage direction, the traditional form in drama, is inherited, andreappears in variants; Woolf’s condensed time-frame of one day might refer to the fact thatthe time is restricted to a single day in ancient theatre for the sake of audiences and actors.When traditional linear narration does not satisfy modernist writers’ purpose ofrepresenting the complicated life and reality, they cut off the linear time sequence and seek for spatial forms to represent spatial effect, making their “spatial turn.” Woolf is noexception. She attempts to evoke simultaneity in readers’ perception and make her text“show” everything dynamically like a real play performed in front of readers. Juxtapositionand synchronization, the essence of “spatial turn,” are crucial to represent the spatiality andsimultaneity of stage performance and stagecraft. Since acting, dancing, singing, and musiccan happen simultaneously in the same space and produce sound simultaneously, shouldthey be seen and heard simultaneously by audiences. Thus Woolf uses “parallel structure”and “polyphony”(borrowed from polyphony music) to juxtapose simultaneous events,sounds and consciousness in front of readers in order to create simultaneous effect. Woolfpays homage to plays in the form of a pageant, which also gives her a chance to be aplaywright. This chapter argues that the pageant is not only an instrument for Miss LaTrobe to review, criticize, rewrite and reform the history and plays but also an instrumentfor Woolf to convey metaphorically the relations between actors and audiences, the playand the reality, art and life, writers and readers, and her concept of modern fiction. Shesignificantly shows “plays” on the stage and off the stage,“plays” between the intervals,and plays within a play, making the novel turns into another play.The conclusion part proposes a4P aesthetic paradigm (i.e. poetry+play+painting+philosophy) to appreciate and observe Woolf’s modernist novels. Each part of theparadigm shows its unique characteristics owned by the specific novel and its universalfeature shared with her other modernist novels as well. The whole range of Woolf’smodernist novels will be examined in the light of the4P aesthetic paradigm, which meansthat in addition to the three novels discussed in the dissertation, Jacob’s Room and Mrs.Dalloway are also included for the consideration. This part surveys characteristics of poetry,play, painting and philosophy in those novels and reveals the hidden regular patterns. Thispart finally emphasizes that with reference to other art and medium, with her hybrid art ofmodernist novels which bridges the gaps among poetry, plays, painting and fiction, Woolfmakes herself become a hybrid artist, an outstanding novelist towards poetry, play, paintingand philosophy.