A Woman Who Paints With Her Pen

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the most outstanding writers in English literature. To put it more precisely, she is one of the prominent figures in western literature. She is believed to be one of the four "stream of consciousness novel writers" together with Joyce, Proust and Faulkner. She wrote nine novels, a biography and many critical essays and short stories in her life. Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves have been widely accepted by the Chinese readers.Virginia Woolf is the pioneer in a new literature era. She has contributed a lot in the development of modern novel writings. All through her life, she had devoted herself to experimenting in modernist novel-writing both in theories and in practice. She maintained that novels should reveal the inner side of the human beings and also challenged the traditional novel writing techniques. In her works, she employed and developed the stream of consciousness technique, and Mrs. Dalloway is traditionally regarded by many as a masterpiece of the stream-of-consciousness novel.In Mrs. Dalloway, readers can find that the traditional techniques are becoming less and less while other non-literature techniques, such as painting techniques, can be detected frequently in her writing. The members of the "Bloomsbury Group" are artists or art theorist, such as her good friend Roger Fry, her sister Vanessa and her brother-in-law Clive Bell, so she is definitely influenced by those impressionists and post-impressionists and other artists. She tries to put the fleeting impressions of moments of people's life down on the paper with her subtle sensibility and makes her works eternal paintings out of her pen-brush. She also uses other painting techniques in her writing. Mrs. Dalloway is a series of pictures of the Londoner's life on a June day, showing us the post-war English people's general experience and the fate of all human beings.This thesis mainly discusses the painting features in Mrs. Dalloway. The introduction part talks about Virginia Woolf s life and works, the literature review on Woolf studies and the painting features in Mrs. Dalloway. Chapter one focuses on the multi-perspective portraits of Clarissa viewed by different people around her and the self portrait from Clarissa's own perspective, which shares similarities with Cezanne's multi-perspective painting technique in painting. Chapter two is mainly about Woolf's similarities with the impressionist and post-impressionist painters in describing transient moments and the portraying of the figure of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway. Chapter three focuses on Woolf's three typical figures of simplification as Cezanne did in his painting, which is in accordance with Fry and Bell's theory of artistic simplification. Chapter Four compares images and symbols in Mrs. Dalloway-the deformation of objects-with the painting techniques of Matisse and Picasso's.From the discussion above, a conclusion is reached that Mrs. Dalloway is a novel of verbal paintings. Virginia Woolf employed a number of painting techniques in portraying Clarissa and in describing daily objects and in recording moments in Clarissa's mind. She also used the simplification of typical figures, images and symbols to stand for the spiritual states of all humane beings. So we can call Virginia Woolf a woman artist in English literature, "a woman who paints with her pen".