A Call For Sane Personality

Virginia Woolf is one of the most distinguished British modernist writers in the twentieth century. The Years, as the 1937 bestseller in the United States, is her novel that focuses on the British social life. Its writing techniques differ from her previous stream-of-consciousness novels. Woolf combined "facts" and "vision", mirroring the social reality through dialogues and interior monologues of the Pargiter family members. It is an innovation of Woolf’s creation, but critics have not yet reached an agreement on it.Based on the humanistic psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s socio-psychology, the thesis is an exposure of the phenomenon of alienated personality and negative social characters under Western capitalist social and economic system. It explores Woolf’s concern with the personality development of modern people and her call for sane personality. The Years cover eleven different years. Accordingly, the author of the present study analyzes social backgrounds and changes of Britain from 1880s to 1930s with Fromm’s comparative diagnosis of the nineteenth and twentieth century. It suggests the spiritual retrogression of capitalist society despite the material civilization and uncovers how social and economic system of market-orientation hindered the personality development. Woolf s technique of contrast is to expose the disharmonious relationship between human, nature and society caused by capitalist system. Fromm’s concept of "alienation" is used to analyze the alienation phenomenon including protagonists’lack of a sense of self and estrangement between people. Negative social characters, such as powerlessness and repression, indifference and insincerity are exposed. The restoration of sane humanity is of vital importance. Protagonists realize self-salvation against alienation through cultivation of a sense of self and productiveness, and they relieve estrangement between them by love and communication. Their love for nature and nature as a shelter for human soul suggested that intimacy between human and nature is able to promote the development of the sane personality. Therefore, Woolf’s call for sane personality in The Years can be recognized. Since alienation is widespread in modern society under the economic system of market-orientation, it is impairment and hindrance to a sane society, as well as a sane personality. It is vital and urgent to restore a sane personality for modern people.