Androgyny Harmonious Sonata

Mrs. Dalloway, which was written by the English novelist Virginia Woolf, is a significant novel for its artistic experiment and have had a lasting effect on the art of the novel. This novel was written in 1923-1924, since Woolf's previous work Jacob's Room had been widely welcomed, she felt relaxed and happy to create a new novel. This made Woolf open her mind and put her real feelings into Mrs. Dalloway. In this novel Woolf's androgynous consciousness was very clear; it also deeply infiltrated into Woolf's narrative strategies, and influenced her choice of the form of narrative and narrative techniques.This thesis focuses its analysis on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway by incorporating the approach of close reading with feminist criticism and narratology, for the purpose of expounding the two significant narrative features—"Dual-voiced Discourses"and"Multiple-perspective Narrative"—in Woolf's texts, and consequently revealing her androgynous vision and fiction narrative strategies which are the characteristics of feminism. A brief recapitulation of the chapters in this thesis is as follows:I. Introduction. Summarizing the narrative research findings that have been achieved in terms of Woolf's production so far; justifying the value and significance of this paper.II. Androgynous consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf recognized that gender identity is socially constructed and can be challenged and transformed,so she argued that women's writing should explore female experience in its own right and not to form a comparative assessment of women's experience in relation to men's. Rejecting a"feminist"consciousness, and wanting her femininity to be unconscious so that she might escape from the confrontation between femaleness and maleness. She praised the Bloomsbury sexual ethic o"fandrogyny"and hoped to strike a balance between male self-realization and female self-annihilation.III. Narrative strategies of Mrs. Dalloway. The discussion probes into Woolf's narrative strategies by construing"dual-voiced discourses"and"multiple-perspective narrative"in her texts. Woolf made the consciousness of female characters a restrictedly free flow by way of the presence of an androgynous narrator through the use of"free indirect speech". The term"free indirect speech"emerged before and after the First World War. The main characteristic of this speech is that it uses the form of indirect speech to represent the characters'thoughts or saying.The multi-perspective narrative refers to the narrative that various characters conduct about the leading hero or heroine in the text, and the variety of narrative perspectives manifests the pluralization of ego. Woolf deliberately provides the reader with more than one narrative perspective instead of restricting the narration to a single narrative point of view. This narrative method puts the emphasis on how the character experiences rather than what is experienced.IV. Conclusion. This paper appreciates Woolf's endeavor and achievements in narrative technique. In order to restore women's position of subjectivity, Woolf subverts the conception of binary oppositions of men and women in the male-dominated culture by constructing a new gender identity as well as depicting her female and male characters. The above discussions have highlighted two distinctive features in this novel's narrative strategies. These narrative strategies not only serve as unique tools for Woolf to bring to light her androgynous vision, but also significantly mark her literary identity and establish her as one of the first-rate English writers。...