The Adventure Of Stratagems

The paper explores Virginia Woolf's feminine writing practice. It demonstrates how Woolf finds the stratagems including stream of consciousness,androgyny and water imagery to write fictions that expresses her exploration of feminine discourse and the challenge to the masculine discourse..The prolegomena discusses Woolf's concept of women's sentence .Chapter 1 focuses on the appearance of women's sentence and the theoretical backgrounds and key points of feminine writing. Chapter 2 deals with Virginia Woolf's use of stream of consciousness. It is through the exploration of a language unmarked by culture coded as masculine that Woolf discovers or develops the stream-of-consciousness technique. She goes back to the pre-referential stage of language searching for a language untouched by culture, as a suitable medium to voice the female consciousness. Woolf's representation of different consciousnesses that "drift" from past to present, and her texts which "flood" with feelings, make the narrative feminine. Chapter 3 rebuts Elaine Showalter's rejection of Virginia Woolf as "flight into androgyny" to "evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness." The idea of "androgyny" defined by Woolf is seen as deconstruction of dualism of gender and the mood of a great writer. Chapter 4 presents Virginia Woolf's central symbol, water as the maternal element and the feminine liquid. Women in Woolf's novels are associated with...