Virginia Woolf's Character Presentation Theory And Her Practice: With A Case Study On The Waves And Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf, one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century, is outstanding for her innovative and experimental modernism works. As an intelligent novelist, she is always concerned with possibilities of novels. Actually, she engages herself ceaselessly in the experiments on new forms and new techniques in novel writing and pushes the boundaries of novels with her own novels, which are noted for their subjective exploration of characters and theme and their poetic quality. Some traditional elements of the characters are rejected in her novels and some new writing techniques, such as the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, free psychological association, fragment and montage, are employed in her novels to reveal the complexity of people's subjective world and true feelings in that unstable time. Consequently, the characters are presented in a way different from the traditional way and invite the reader s to look at the mysterious aspects about the inner world of human beings. So, the study of her character presentation is an important point in this paper.Besides, her essays are commended for their perceptive observations on nearly the entire range of English Literature, as well as many social and political concerns of the early twentieth century. This paper is trying to go through some of her essays about theory fiction to examine her theory about modern fiction and character presentation. Through Modern Fiction, Virginia Woolf criticizes that life escapes from the Edwardians' novels that are with logical structure and scientific description of the trifles and seeks an ideal way to convey what is like to be a human being. A close examination of Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown gives us a better understanding of her idea about character presentation. She believes novels should be able to portray the spirit of the characters and to discover and record how life feels like to those who live it. To illustrate her theory about character presentation, this paper analyses Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves to demonstrate Virginia Woolf's means to present the inner life of the characters.