Virginia Wool's Visions Of Life In The Waves

Virginia Woolf(1882-1941)usually in her works employs many modernist techniques to probe into the obscure area of human being's psyche,such as the stream of consciousness,the technique of vision art and music.She devotes her lifetime in exploring the nature of human condition through portraying human being's psyche.Woolf in The Waves,published in 1931,accordingly portrays her characters' psyche.She reveals the characters' consciousness from their childhood to maturity and insinuates the unknown unconscious.Her life view generates her fascination on her characters' psyche in the novel.Mainly employing Carl Gustav Jung's psychological and archetypal theories,this thesis analyzes the visions of life conveyed by Woolf.Chapter One argues life in Woolf's view is fragmentary.Though in Carl Gustav Jung's view human's psyche is constituted with the conscious and the unconscious,Woolf in this novel only portrays her characters' “moments of being”.“Moments of being” refer to those moments lived consciously.Woolf focuses on the conscious,because she believes life only can be comprehended through the conscious.Based on this,the thesis argues that life in Woolf's view is fragmentary.In this chapter,the thesis furthermore proposes it is through rhythm that Woolfunifies those fragments.Chapter Two proposes life in Woolf's view is self-reflexive.Self-reflexivity,according to Carl Gustav Jung,is reflected in the moment when the conscious attempts to comprehend the ephemeral contents of the unconscious.The characters in the novel ruminate on the suddenly revealed consciousness in emotions and experiences,which reveals the process of self-reflexivity.By examining their emotions and experiences,the thesis argues that Woolf conveys life's feature as self-reflexivity.Chapter Three argues life in Woolf's view is abstract.This chapter mainly adopts Carl Gustav Jung's Archetypal theory to elaborate how Woolf views life abstractly.To begin with,it is conspicuous that Woolf reduces her characters into different abstract personalities.Among these abstract personalities,Susan and Percival could be identified as the mother archetype and the hero archetype respectively according to Jung's theory.Furthermore,in this chapter the thesis argues that the image of the waves serves for interpreting her three abstract notions about human being's life.The totality of human being's psyche,the renewing of personality,and the continuity of life all are conveyed through the ebbs and flows of waves.