Visual Arts And Pictorialism In The Waves

Having long been viewed as a paradigm piece of modern literature, The Waves (1931) can best demonstrate the innovative spirit of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). The highly pictorial scenes in the novel that may resemble certain paintings reflect the influence of visual arts upon Woolf. Current studies on visual elements in The Waves mainly concentrate on its visual images abounded and its use of rich colour, but few scholars have systematically studied the use of visual arts in the novel by interpreting the detailed literary pictorialism in it. This thesis aims to study the use of visual arts and pictorial renderings with respect to their effects on representation of subjects, characterization and formal construction, and to further illuminate the visual elements that are implicated in it.Woolf’s involvement with visual art movements like Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and abstract art provides her knowledge of visual arts and cultivates her a sense of the visible. Her intimate and sustained relationship with practicing painters and art critics such as Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell greatly influences her ideas about visual arts and relationship between the arts. Considering her verbal medium all-encompassing, Woolf looks at paintings with Vanessa and Fry to inspire her writing, to find images, metaphors, relations, and potential stories that could help her break the moulds of traditional novels without sacrificing aesthetic wholeness.In The Waves, visual arts, along with the technique of pictorialism, reveal their influences in the construction of subjects, characters and form. The literary equivalent of a series of Impressionistic scenes helps to bring about a nature real, vivid and sublime, while with Post-Impressionistic "stokes", life gets to be rendered with vibrant colours and powerful visual impressions similar to the effects in a Post-Impressionistic painting. Then like in a Cubist collage, The Waves juxtaposes visual images of different motifs and represents an infinite cosmos with the Cubist strategy of multiple-perspective. And more specific artworks and visual art genres are alluded to in the process of characterization. Different visual artworks are referenced to reflect the differed characters and ideologies of Neville and Bernard. Verbal renderings of Susan’s and Jinny’s typical mental pictures, with an analogy to distinctively different art genres, suggest two patriarchal women on the polar of a social construction. Then as for Rhoda and Louis, the abstractness in the graphic representation of their minds, similar to the representation in abstract art, reflects the sense of anxiety and unsafety concerning their tensioned relationship with the real world. Influenced by visual arts and its related aesthetics of significant form, Woolf’s innovation on form in The Waves also assumes a visual dimension. Visual images, visual rhyme and visual structures come to be three layers of form in the novel, contributing to its consummation in aesthetic form.Nowadays interdisciplinary study has become a trend in literary criticism, and explorations on relationship between Woolf’s writing and visual arts provide some inspiration for us to rediscover the tradition of ut pictura poesis in the Modernist context.