A Psychoanalytic Interpretation Of Some Psychobiographic Charaters In Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse And Mrs. Dalloway

Concerning Virginia Woolf, an indispensable figure in English literature, what intrigues me most is the inseparable relationship between her life experience and her canon. Briefly speaking, Woolf's Life has a positive effect on her works through those psychobiographic characters created. What I intend to achieve in this thesis is to implement literary psychoanalysis (psychobiography in particular) to interpret the relationship between Woolf's life experience and several psychobiographic characters in Woolf's To the Lighthouse (hereinafter abbreviated to TL) and Mrs. Dalloway (hereinafter abbreviated to MD). In addition, Woolf's artistic creation and her uneven life which is full of pains and suffering from bouts of mental breakdown came under the influence of Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis and his psychoanalytic theory, wittingly or unconsciously. As far as the psychobiographic characters in Woolf's TL and MD are concerned, three focuses are to be dealt with: firstly, her parents'profound influence on Virginia Woolf which is artfully reconstructed in TL; secondly, Woolf's mental problem which is transplanted to Septimus Warren Smith in MD; lastly, Woolf's lesbian orientation which is demonstrated in both TL and MD.