Eliades 1 Prelude Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding

us from beginning of consciousness to the end. Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, 154. My study of Virginia Woolf began four years ago when I was a senior in high school unofficially auditing an advanced writing course that I was unable to take due to scheduling conflicts. Early in the school year, alongside class-wide assignments, each student was to take another text to examine and present on their own. My assigned text was A Room of Ones Own. Immediately, Woolfs voice and ideas grabbed me. The vitality, phrasing and sentences of Room lit my thoughts, as her speech for gender equality and space for the female writer came at a time in which I was beginning to feel a permanent call to the power and nuance of words. Three years and three Woolf novels later, I idled in a used bookstore, skimming the Literature shelves for something new to read. My eyes swished the Qs, the Rs and then the Ws, finally resting on Woolf. I bent down and saw Night and Day and The Voyage Out. I picked up the novels and weighed their back cover promises and physical heft in my palms, deciding after a time to purchase Night and Day. I expected to read something like Mrs. Dalloway or perhaps something more like The Death of the Moth. Yet from the first page, I found that Night and Day did not sound like Woolf. The sentences felt too straight except in a few spots. The narrative was large. Woolfs name was on the novels cover and spine, but I could not believe that she was writing in her own voice. Something wavered on the page. Wondering if her first novel would show me a text closer to her later works, I returned to the bookstore for The Voyage

Eliades 2 Out. There I felt more undiscovered authenticity in the narrative. Woolfs apprentice novels revealed a writer with immense potential but without an appropriate medium. I could not help but wonder what was getting in her way. Holding the novels in my mind, I turned the pieces against one another and realized: Woolf had been working in the wrong form. Woolf had been working in the shadow of a mans shape and in the three-volume nineteenth-century novel, which did not allow for a narrative to move by a means other than linear plot and authoritative omniscience. In a 1908 letter, Woolf wrote that she thought of how I shall re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, & shape infinite strange shapes (Woolf, Letters I 356). She was in the midst of writing what would become The Voyage Out and already knew she wanted to change what she had been given by creating her own shapes to capture life better. At the same time, however, Woolf also wrote that she longed for the old decorums and env[ied] the indolence of [her] ancestors, the Victorians (Mr Bennett 85). She was caught between revering past forms and content and desiring her own forms for contemporary content. Yet as a woman born into a changing social sphere, her attempts to depict gender inequalities in early twentieth century British society clashed with an admiration for the male form of the realist novel. She needed to create her own form to write her narratives. The questions of gendered form arise from Woolfs struggles. To say that the realist form is male and thereby unsuited to Woolf implies that form is based in the body, a dichotomous identity that dictates an underlying imprint or signature as Monique Wittig and other feminist critics would argue (67). Gendered form can also be looked at as a cultural construct that affects not only personal identity, outward behavior and appearance but also the internal self which is the basis for every voicing and thus every shape that

Eliades 3 appears on the page. The latter consideration is perhaps more useful when considering the female element in writing that shows itself in Woolfs work as she evolves in her approach to writing. Woolf seemed to have realized that the path to a form of ones own is a process that cannot happen the instant the writer decides he or she needs it. First, old ways must be unlearned, thrown off. New forms must be tried on, bits of those forms are taken and altered or taken and placed on a closet hanger to await further alterations or fittings. New techniques are created. Those too hang in the closet, open, waiting. When the wardrobe has been filled to the writers liking, the combinations may be tried on, first awkwardly, then tweaked and finally all at once in a manner appropriate to the writer. In the interests of catching Woolf as she developed different narrative techniques, I will trace her developing narratives and evolving forms through her initial novel, The Voyage Out, to her second, Night and Day, and a selection of her short stories before her arrival at Mrs. Dalloway, her emergent master work. I am intentionally omitting examination of Jacobs Room to allow a sampling of her growing repertoire of techniques for form seen through her various short stories of the same period. I have also chosen to eliminate the consideration of To the Lighthouses narrative shape to reduced redundancy. As Mrs. Dalloway is the first site of a Woolf form, To the Lighthouse is a continuation of Woolfs display of craft. My approach to Woolfs texts outlined in my choices of inclusion and exclusion, engages in a close reading of her work through the methods of a scholar and the aesthetics of a writer. My training as a writer, couched with its own biases through extensive reading, involvement in literary groups and workshops as well as practice in different genres, has led to this examination of Woolfs work on a structural narrative level. It is my hope that

Eliades 4 this cross-pollinated examination of Woolfs development will open other discussions on the relations between form, content and gender in both writerly and scholarly fields. Above all, Cut adrift from the eternal tea-table is the culmination of a years apprenticeship to Woolf, an homage to the style, structure and innovation that has affected not only the way that writers tackle narrative, but also the way that readers and scholars approach the novel with the emergence of a female form.

Eliades 5 Inheritance Woolf began her education as a writer under her father, Leslie Stephen, who saw her as his literary successor (Hill 351). When Woolf was eleven, he wrote to his wife, Julia, that to be an author is a thing for ladies and Ginia will do well in that line (qtd. in 351). Woolfs diaries reveal Stephens tutelage: a diet of history, biography and literature, all chosen from his library. Her guided reading grounded her literary development in the art of biography, as Stephen himself was editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (353). Yet while this training gave Woolf an immense background in her world and in sketching character, she reflected in A Room of Ones Own and in letters that she did not receive an education like her brothers as she was not sent to Oxbridge. think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my fathers books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools throwing balls; ragging: slang; vulgarity; scene; jealousies only rages with my half brothers, and being walked off my legs round the Serpentine by my father. This is an excuse. I am often conscious of the lack of jolly vulgarity (Woolf, Letters III, 247) The letter displays a consciousness of missing more of a social education than of a bookbased one and yet it also comments on the exclusion of women from the classical education and experience afforded to men. While women were being admitted to study at universities by the time Woolf would have been eligible to do so, neither she nor her sister, Vanessa, were sent, which made her feel as if she was shut out of the male academic community (361) which admitted her brothers, a practice that was a matter of course for upper-middle-class English boys (Bowlby xx-xxi). This education created the backdrop for the glorification of

Eliades 6 ancient Greek culture and a divisive and one-sided view built on wealth, continued in a mans education and writing(xxi; Woolf, Leaning 166), in the building of structures not only physical but mental. The tower in which a man sat decide[d] his angle of vision; it affect[ed] his power of communication (166). [I]f you look closely, Woolf adds, almost every writer who has practiced his art successfully has been taught from such a nurturing or even self-serving view (166). The view was bolstered by the training given by the education provided a method to organize, allowing thought, or as she states in A Room of Ones Own, a question to run into an answer as a sheep runs into its pen (28). The ability to put thought into a pen implies a sanctioned order created by the education, imprinted in and giving structure to the works of men. Evidence of the order can be seen in the literary world Woolf entered. Mostly male dominated, the Victorian Canon included men such as Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and George Robert Gissing (Wheeler xi). Their novels, mostly written under the influence of the leaning tower, strove to include as much of the world as possible and to contextualize that world for its audience. Woolf admired some of the authors like James, Gissing and Charles De Quincey, though De Quincey was admittedly not of that era, for the techniques of the time. She remarked that James was still toiling to say all he means, to leave nothing unsaid that can by any possibility complete the picture and that Gissing went about the world seeing squares and circles where the ordinary person [saw] mere snowdrift. The wildest extravagance of life in the moon can be complete, or the most shattered fragment. When a book has this quality it seems unsinkable (Henry James 22, Novels 361). She enjoyed the canvas upon which they worked, found Charles De Quincys writing strong

Eliades 7 because in it, it is not the actual sight or sound that matters, but the reverberations it makes as it travels through our minds (qtd. in Shaw 232). Yet while she admired all these writers, she came to sense that what she had been born into was faulted in its form and was not useful for her as a woman. Her dissatisfaction with their writing, the novels of Hardy, for example, came from the novels lacking shape (Mr Howell 326). The three-volume Victorian novel, which Henry James terms as loose baggy monsters or monstrous bags into which almost anything could be crammed as Michael Wheeler re-terms them (2), tried to integrate all experience into three volumes or more, not to capture the truth of experience as the individual saw it but to afford amusement (Walter Besant qtd. in Wheeler 174). As Besant also said, the novel was to convert abstract ideas into living models; it gives ideas, it strengthens faith, it preaches a higher morality than is seen in the actual world; it commands the emotions of pity, admiration, and terror; it creates and keeps alive the sense of sympathy; it is the universal teacher (qtd. in 174) This realist novel was given an authority that allowed it to depict life values. It provided for its reader a scene, an ordered sense of time and space dictated by dominant standards, a portrayal of the ambitions of the growing middle class and above all, a leisure activity in the hope of being a part of a great tradition alive to its time, according to Paul Cobley (F. R. Leavis qtd in 89). The narrative sought contemporality and longevity simultaneously, so that contemporary society could be forever seen in all its gradations (89-90). What allowed the narrative to contextualize a large canvas minutely detailed to give a sense of richness: with moralistic tones and omniscient narration to take huge issues, such as history

Eliades 8 and politics, to the personal and individual level (Cobley 89, 93, 97), was the omniscient narrator, who required the authoritative voice to maintain a consistent and continuous narrative. The establishment of such a voice tried to create a hierarchical relationship between the reader and writer and was believed to give unity to the work (Whitcomb in Friedman 138), despite the different locales, characters or planes of the novel due to serialization or other plot constraints. Omniscience, one of several options for the narrator, was highly valued as it allowed the narrator to be everywhere, to know everything and to show the events of the novel like history, in a broadly progressive sweep towards an enlightened present (Wheeler 6). Gradations of the omniscient narrator were revealed through intrusion or distance. The editorial or intrusive omniscient narrator criticizes actions and appears as an I or we in the text (Friedman 145; Prince 10). The neutral narrator speaks in the third person and is imbued with the authors voice (Friedman 148). There is also the first person narration, a limited view, which may be used, or the more complex multiple selective in which the author or narrator does not directly appear but exists within the guidance of which characters are seen and when (152). There was also another element holding many Victorian novels together, which was the male plot, otherwise known as linear design, key in structuring the entire narrative. Linear design is based on what is also known as the Freitag triangle, in which the narrative arc is broken into five parts along the legs of a triangle, beginning with an inciting incident at the left-most point, increasing in tension with the rising action in the first leg, climaxing at the greatest point of tension in the angle and then quickly dropping off as falling action into the conclusion, also known as the resolution, in the other leg (Bell 27). At its barest level,

Eliades 9 the male structure works in the linear because it is inseparable from time and temporal order (29), modeled after the pattern of the male orgasm. While this is not the only male form if one were ascribing form to the body, it is when male form is defined as a dominant or allencasing pattern, one in which there was little room for ambiguity or alternative points of view that would undermine patriarchal authority. On a grander structural scale, the Victorian novel used Freitag triangles on smaller scales or narrative arcs within the larger scope of the text to serve the serialized form. Serialization, particularly popular in the 1830s with Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers (Wheeler 4), required each section of the novel to build suspense and for each arc in the magazine issue to finish with a moment of tension or rest to encourage further reading (4). The novel would be ideally broken through the practice of serialization into several levels. First, the overall arc of the novel over three volumes, which likely did not form a cohesive Freitag triangle; then the arc of each volume; further, the arcs within a volume made from the serializations and finally the arc of each chapter. The shape of each was rendered by the sentence in relation to the word choice of the author. Most important was the beginning and end of each arc, as needed for suspense in serialization, which are decisive moments of any narration, giving frame, perspective and [a] field of possibility to each work (Moretti 123), ultimately giving the shape and impression the reader carries when thinking of the novel. Woolf would later write that these forms had a tendency to put emphasis on all the wrong places, throwing fragments together at random (Woolf, Mr Howell 326) and thus not achieving the united effect the novelist meant to project. Her perception of beginning with the wrong forms entered through her own writing, sensing that unlike an ordered painting, she attain[ed] a different kind of beauty, achieve[d] a symmetry by means

Eliades 10 of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the minds passage through the world; & achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments (Passionate 393). She had developed a sense of her own writing as different from that of her male predecessors. For though she had female writers of the Victorian Canon like Mary Gaskell and George Eliot (Wheeler 1) to look to for a female form, Woolf found that few female writers wrote as women write, not as men write (Woolf, Room 74-5) because of the influence of a male model. Even a writer like Eliot, used the narrative of authority in Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861), which Woolf found faulty. She thought the writing of Elizabeth Robins, for example, is that of a mans, for it had the kind of bare brevity which marks the talk even of undergraduates. The idea may be commonplace, the knowledge superficial, but it stands unpalliated by superfluous phrases (Mills 228). Robins and Eliot had mimicked the works of male writers, which Woolf thought is useless for the female writer (Room 76). She comes to find that the weight, the pace, the stride of a mans mind are too unlike a womans (76), for their writing to be a useful model. The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success. (76) She mimics a straight tone that falls staccato in clear progression, bullet after bullet to pin down meaning and an expression in an entirely logic-based system designed to capture existence. Built by the male sentence Woolf models, behind [which] one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest (76), the sentence projects of the overall narrative structure of a novel with a large form, as each structure depends on the shape of its parts. Woolf called novels

Eliades 11 constructed from that model books [made with] so many sentences absolutely struck with an axe out of crystal (Diary III 219). She implies that the books were created out of a sentence unit made of a fine material, but a material that has been hacked at, worked at by a hand that is given the gift of writing wielded through an often destructive but powerful tool. Woolfs prior imitation of what she perceived to be the male voice proves to be keen when viewing Thackerays eulogy for Charlotte Bront, in which he writes, Of the multitude that has read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate? Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who has not known her books has not admired the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of the family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors! (qtd. in Wheeler 62) The prose runs grandiose and lofty. His claim that Bronts work was imbued with the burning love of truth speaks both as an oversaturated and dramatic line and as a claimant over Bront and her writing. He folds her into his values by way of his sentence and phrase, reshaping Bront to fit into what is considered the proper form for the female body: small, emotional and of good effort against the male: large, hulking and all-encompassing pinnacle of artistic achievement. Woolf felt the female need to write against such a sentence. Though George Eliot appropriated a tone like Thackerays, likely because she was writing as a man, using the tone to be a thinker: meditative, moral and philosophical (133), she did so to subvert the dominant style much like female authors from the eighteenth century tradition when the

Eliades 12 novel was actually novel, prior to the establishment of the novel industry. Female authors of the eighteenth century wrote of domestic and social issues, taking on the genre forms of the gothic and epistolary novel. They also wrote in their own voice, according to Susan Lanser (25). Jane Austen, for example, focused on social commentary and subjects deemed trivial by men, depicting not football and sport, but the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes (Woolf, Room 73). Yet though womens voices were allowed and an audience for such concerns existed, female writers began to disappear behind the men, relegated to sign their works as a class of lady authors (Lanser 36). Susan Lanser claims for example, that women wrote in a female voice that imitates a mans imitation of a female voice, speaking much as Woolf does of female writers (38). Even prior to the perceived clash of forms in the writing of the female Victorian novelist, Woolf and Lanser both wrote that Jane Austen concealed her identity; most of her works are written by a lady or by the author of any one of her prior texts. She too succumbed to patriarchal pressure to conceal her identity as fitting her gender. Yet Austen, according to Woolf, took the male sentence and laughed at it and developed a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it (Room 77). She drew upon a tradition of personal authority that existed from 1780 to 1815 in which prefaces to female writing did not apologize for the writing due to gender but celebrated being analyzed on the basis of talent alone (Lanser 64). By this time, however, the celebration of female writing was on the decline as the novel came to be viewed as a professional and not as a domestic endeavor with the increasing profitability and industrialization of fiction (88). The female writer, separated from the profession, ventured into that sphere only with apologies. Her voice was constantly admitting that she was only a woman, or protesting that she was as good as a man,

Eliades 13 which, according to Woolf, created a blemish in the books center when created under such strain (Room 74). The female writer taking up her pen after such a time faced a conflict of voice and form which Woolf would later address in the figure of Mary Carmichael who had something not quite in order in her novel (80). The pattern in her sentences is interrupted (80). Though Woolf sees Carmichaels torn narrative arising from a selfconsciousness, she also sees a much larger reason for the jolts: Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she has broken the sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating. (81) Woolfs portrayal of the female novelist tampering with the expected sequence reflects the battle of the female writer that Woolf went through with tradition looming around her. She came to see the sentence as the basis for form, noting the importance of watching a writer like Carmichael so as to catch those unrecorded gestures made of the unsaid when women are alone, unlit by the capriciousness and the coloured light of the other sex (84). Woolf is recognizing the female fledgling writer needing a space to write in and speak about what had not been before. For when the pen was previously in a mans hand, even when it was taken up by a woman, the shape assumed was that of a mans or an expected male form. What the female writer needed was a narrative form that would allow her to speak on her own. Woolfs own narrative battle between the preference for the authoritative narrator and the declining female novel tradition began as soon as she began writing. However, she was also caught with a limited access to the male world through her fathers tutelage which

Eliades 14 allowed a critical view created from a simultaneous insider and outsider perspective. Also through Stephen, Woolf believed that a critic of the self-conscious historical vision ought to be a sympathetic reader of experiments in new literary forms (Hill 354-5), which fostered an openness to the new alongside an admiration of the old. These views, as well as a basis in biography, the framer of character through words, began Woolfs writing and continued shaping her sensibilities in criticism and in practice with the novel. As irregular as her education was, Woolfs background formed her own sense of shape; her training in writing essays, the quintessential genre for views and opinions, (Lanser 109) and her fathers belief in the suitability of the profession of writing for women, giving her a belief in the worth of her own writing, especially through the authority and unity of author and narrative of biography over a figure and subject (Cobley 118). Since Woolf was surrounded by the male structure in narration and plot and an apologetic female tradition, her first venture into the world of fiction would engage the narratives and shapes of realism according to her gender and her desire for innovation. Her form would begin to emerge from what she had been given and what she had been denied.

Eliades 15

Apprenticeship As Woolf continued the education her father had begun, she embarked on her apprentice period of writing in January of 1897 with the seeds of the novel that would become her first, The Voyage Out. Her training worked through the arts of fiction and nonfiction in short stories and essays (Leaska xv and xlviii). But the apprenticeship was not easy. Her diaries attest to many struggles as she screwed out a page or had a page strangled in the birth (Letters I 340, 345). She once wasted all [her] time trying to begin things & taking up different points of view, & dropping them & grinding out the dullest stuff, which [made her] blood run thick (315-6). She tussled with her work; she was constantly insecure. In a dream, she saw herself showing her work to Leslie Stephen, now deceased. Upon seeing the manuscript, he snorted, & dropped it onto a table which Woolf said made her melancholy & [so she] read it [that] morning, & thought it bad (325). She reports wondering if she shall ever dare print her pages after she completed her first draft (367; Lee 232). Her boldness terrifie[d] her in her writing (Woolf, Letters I 383). She constantly feared negative review, which was as difficult as to ignore the opinion of probable readers (383). At the same time, that which fed her writing, her feminism, was said to come out too much. A review from Clive Bell, for example, pointed out that her prejudice against men ... [made her] didactic, an opinion she rebutted with the claim that she never meant to preach (383). Yet under the circumstances, one would find it impossible for her writing not to take on such a slant. She wrote of what concerned her

Eliades 16 deeply. The Voyage Out, which began as Melymbrosia, Honey-ambrosia, is ultimately concerned with the balance of inter-gender relations and roles in Georgian society. Structurally, she intended for the work to run for three volumes (Letters II 82) and found after writing one hundred pages that there was something of a structure in it though there are such lapses that I almost fall wide awake (Letters I 343). She had wanted to give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various & disorderly as possible in a sort of pattern which was cut short for a moment by Rachel Vinraces death (Letters II 82). The narrative cut highlights the negotiations between forms in Voyage, which both rebels against and uses prevailing techniques, narrative structure and voice of the period. Yet due to Woolfs concerns, Voyage is didactic, grinding against a form she works in, the text in a state of partial-metamorphosis. Voyage can be broken into five sections. The first four are actual narrative arcs. The last is not, lacking a true conclusion. In detail, each section contains small arcs which are separated into blocks as they fall stagnant between chapters. The first section, for example, uses Chapter One as a prologue; Chapter Two as a scene and character setter; Chapters Three to Six to introduce the major action, the Bildungsroman theme and the Dalloway section. Chapter Seven serves as a quick falling action. From there, the second section settles the Ambroses and Rachel within the island and a British colonial exploratory mode which positions Rachel for the major thrust of the novel of the third section, which pursues courtship and further social education. The conclusions of this third section are cemented by the fourth, but before a final conclusion can follow Rachel and Terences engagement, Woolf sabotages her own novel with Rachels illness in Chapter Twenty-five. The last section is only a response to that sudden change. After the announcement, the plot stagnates. The

Eliades 17 aftermath of Rachels death becomes not a denouement but a series of plunging and falling lines tracing the characters lives just before they disembark. The novel can also be divided between the time leading up to Rachels engagement and the decline after, allowing one to look at the novel as divided in half between plots: the female Bildungsroman and Woolfs reaction to that form. As the novel begins, Woolf establishes the narrative authority. As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers clerks will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand. (Woolf, Voyage 9) The reader is held at a distance by those first lines. The novelist takes her role as a moral compass, her authority is established on the direct address of readers as you and the advice dispensed in the clause it is better not to (9). The lines evoke Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice, in which she states It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife (Austen 3). Austens starting line establishes authoritative distance that is maintained throughout, echoed in Woolfs Voyage. The initial sentence tints the rest of the readers experience, indicating the framework and tone. Set within a classical tradition, Voyage primarily works through the structure of the Bildungsroman, one of the first established stories that may be seen in portions of the first form of the novel, The Odyssey and The Iliad, narratives considered to be the basis for the

Eliades 18 Western narrative tradition (Cobley 41). Woolfs title and subject directly draws on The Odyssey, which featured the Bildungsroman of Telemachus path as a complimenting narrative to Odysseus homebound journey. Rachels story, however, cannot follow that of Telemachus, who like his successors, is shown to develop through a society that allows him to move from ignorance and innocence to wisdom and maturity (Voyage In 6). Most literary definitions of the Bildungsroman in fact, do not acknowledge the possibility of a heroine, noting only male examples (Beckson and Ganz 26) or that the tale usually applies to a hero rather than heroine (Brownstein 82). The conclusions of these definitions reflect a bias of the form towards the male. For if Telemachus had been female, say named Telemachia, end-maker, she would have married someone to end the threat to her mother, rather than join her father in slaughtering the suitors threatening Ithaca. The epic as known to the contemporary world ends in a reaffirmation of the old order where Telemachus is allowed to discover his personal identity, but a Telemachia would fade into that worlds narratives threads, becoming static [and] ahistorical (Hirsch 23). There is more at stake in the female narrative because the female protagonist needs to negotiate claiming individual identity in sexuality, independence and breaking with society or assuming a submerged sexuality, dependence and acceptance of what was usually a diminutive role, sacrificing integrity and work through marriage (Voyage In 6). The path to such a decision begins in personal development, in which the protagonist is prepared for marriage through an education. The development or awakening, which is not as linear as the male Bildungsroman (11), occurs for the express purpose of passing into a new social sphere. One either marries, or, in one way or another, must leave social life, either in the form of

Eliades 19 voluntary expulsion or death, as in the case of Rachel Vinrace (Brownstein 23). The latter fate was far more common in a nineteenth century Bildungsroman (Stimpson 192). Woolfs use of a female protagonist forces her to contend with the restrictions of the female Bildungsroman that Jane Austens narratives engaged. Such a novel developed within a setting where a womans inheritance always indicated her proper rank in the marriage market, but special beauty and social charm could increase her desirability (Wheeler 26). Austen places her work in what can be considered the womans sphere taken from the epistolary tradition. Charles Dickens, in comparison, set many novels in motion, in journeys by railroad and coach (26). Though both were equally aware of social and political changes, the contrast reveals the limits of their worlds as prescribed to them by their gender (26). The limits are not only of an expected end, but of an entire range of possible movements. The male coming of age story at the end of the nineteenth century allowed the character to travel out of his milieu, breaking away from social convention and his old society to create one of his own, culminating in his successful independence and new livelihood. He may or may not get married in the end; such an ingredient is not necessary to the recipe. A female coming of age story, however, did not allow the subject to break away from her family quite so much. She may go traveling, but will do so chaperoned. Guided and initiated by an elder character, as Rachel is by Helen Ambrose, St. John Hirst and Terence Hewet, she breaks away from her own family and old milieu through marriage but is folded into a new familial structure, following the ancient historical model of the Athenian womans path from the rear rooms of her fathers household to the rear rooms of her husbands household, never to the outside, unless she lost her station as a lady. The cycle

Eliades 20 continued with her daughters and their female offspring just as Woolf continued with this mold for her first novel. The biggest conflict between Voyage and the Bildungsroman is that the content tries to give proper attention to womens rights, gender relations, gender inequality and gender roles but within a structure meant to affirm concepts of progress and patriarchal structure. The subversion of form, for example, schisms the work in the aftermath of Rachels death as if Woolf could not bear to sacrifice her protagonist. From the beginning, Willoughby Vinrace wishes for Rachel to be educated to aid him in his posturing for politicians of Parliament, a Tory hostess, fitting with traditional gender roles (Woolf, Voyage 86). Attempts to remove Rachel from this life by Helen, Rachels savior, educator and aunt occur through nearly needing to promise a complete course of instruction in the feminine graces (86). Any deviations form a standard female role must be done under the auspices of the expected form. As long as Rachel appears to follow the model, she is allowed to escape. This commentary mirrors the structural issues of Voyage, which also commented on the unsuitability of the male structure on a closer level. When Rachel is introduced to Edward Gibbons The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by St. John Hirst, she is not able to grasp the meaning with her mind. It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil cloth, she hazarded. Ugly in body, repulsive in mind thought Hirst says Gibbons work written in the most perfect stylethats ever been inventedEvery sentence is practically perfect (201). Rachels interpretation of the books shape reveals the reaction of the female to the male shape and subject. The volumes Woolf chose to use represent the classical male education and his tower, from which Hirst, the insider, cannot see out of. The sentences are practically perfect (201) to Hirst because they fit his pace and stride

Eliades 21 (Room 76). His education and background, afforded to him by his gender, allows him to find the structure in line with his own, while Rachel cannot deal with those patterns because they are not her own. The incident works within the dominant form to critique the male world. Yet Woolfs didacticism does not always run so smoothly. When Hewet is actively seen writing a book on the sexes in his post-engagement phase, Woolfs opinions come out of his mouth. In pausing, he says to Rachel, The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for men, he went on. I believe we must have some sort of power over you that were said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as we are or theyd never obey us. For that very reason, Im inclined to doubt that youll ever do anything even when you have the vote. Itll take at least six generations before youre sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law-courts and business offices. Consider what a bully the ordinary man is (Voyage 212) Woolfs own beliefs on the male sentence via the authoritative narrative which calls for one to do something as she would later say, take steps or write a check, a system she will come to say is imperfect (qtd. in Friedman 77), come directly in the passage. She uses the dialogue to tell and not to show the reader the inequality she wishes to fight against, that which she outlines in The Leaning Tower. Yet the form of dialogue and the novel is not that of the essay where opinion may be expressed. Dialogue, according to Woolf, set the writer in a different state of mind from that in which you describe [the character] indirectly (Letters V 334). It is the site of the characters genesis, as all the great Victorians, Dickens, Trollope, to some extent Hardy all created their characters through dialogue, according to Woolf (334). If the character is not his or her own voice but that of

Eliades 22 the authors, the chance to create a character is lost. For there are things that cant be said by the character himself (334) such as direct opinion. The problem comes form a basis in a materialism of the English novel which Woolf writes looks too much to the physical elements or appearance of life rather than to the spiritual or the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its myriad messages through the brain (Modern Novels 34). The materialism furthermore does not transcend the physical due to its reliance on the linear plot, which concerns itself with finding the solutions to characters problems and mapping their growth (Welty 26). As much as Woolf is hampered by her attachment to the realist or materialist form, she begins to try to capture the experiences and occurrences of life with that form in Voyage. The storm depicted in Chapter Five, for example, is framed by the lines of the second paragraph: Even at tea the floor rose beneath their feet and pitched too low again, and at dinner the ship seemed to groan and strain as though a lash were descending. She who had been a broad-backed dray-horse, upon whose hind-quarters pierrots might waltz, became a colt in the field. The plates slanted away from the knives, and Mrs. Dalloways face blanched for a second as she helped herself and saw the potatoes roll this way and that. Willoughby, of course, extolled the virtues of his ship, and quoted what had been said of her by experts and distinguished passengers, for he loved his own possessions. (Woolf, Voyage 70) The narration takes care to note its occupants and uses them as a projection of the outer climate. Selective in its gaze, the narrative views the somersaults of the ship in the physical

Eliades 23 effects on the characters and objects. In the storms abatement, for example, Wind and space were banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of men, which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old beliefs (72). The storm gives Woolf the perfect opportunity to concern herself not with the perspective or figures of the characters in their plot-view, but as breathing people, not ventriloquists dolls but human beings. The focus on the image, with nothing that need not be there (Mrs Gaskell 341), allows a shifting in the narrative gaze, an alternative view that could make way for the more tentative outlines of belief (Howell 324). The whole of Chapter Twenty in fact allows the gaze to run further, as Woolf takes advantage of dialogue in Terence and Rachels encounter to leave out what is not useful in portraying male-female relations: She repeated I like it. She was waling fast, and holding herself more erect than usual. You like being with me? Terence asked. Yes, with you, she replied. He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the world. This is what I have felt ever since I knew you, he replied. We are happy together. He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing. Very happy, she answered. They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their steps unconsciously quickened. We love each other, Terence said.

Eliades 24 We love each other, she repeated. The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. Faster and faster they walked; simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other in their arms, then, releasing themselves, dropped to the earth. They sat side by side. Sounds stood out from the background making a bridge across their silence; they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a remote world. (Voyage 271) The passage does not note what Rachel or Terence are wearing, nor the expressions on their faces but sound. Description only enters when necessary; Rachel becomes only a figure or a reflection of Terence as the scene progresses. Even from the excerpts initiation, Rachel is represented on the page as she, the universal female pronoun, rather than Rachel, the individual female. As soon as she admits her feelings for Terence, she ceases to be a distinct figure, disappearing into Terence himself with the pronoun they. Though Terence emerges from the union intact, Rachel vanishes from the novel entirely with her death, revealing Woolfs views of the effects of the female role in the heterosexual romantic couple in Victorian society on women. Under Woolfs control, the sentences wind around the characters without pretension or pedantry at this pivot and final ebbing of plot before the crash, the takeover of illness and the second plot, the post-Edenic aftermath not portrayed in the marriage plot which so willingly devours the female figure. From the aftermath of the union, the narrative style changes. Though Woolf had shifted from one character to the other in a distanced third person, chapter Twenty-five finds her at times much closer to her characters. Rachels sickness, which was not attached to the

Eliades 25 projected path of the novels first four sections, comes as a movement outside of the plot, enabling Woolf to narrate without depicting the motions required for the social interactions that lead to marriage. She may instead portray the world through one character: The glassy, cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at the end of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool she tried to keep her mind fixed upon it. Helen was here, and Helen was there all day long; sometimes she said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was teatime; but by the next day all landmarks were obliterated, and the outer world was so far away that the different sounds, such as the sounds of people passing on the stairs, and the sounds of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their cause by a great effort of memory. (329-30) Rachels illness comes in portrayals of impressions. Very slowly, she is removed from the structures of the world through her illness. The meals which divide the day only exist when Helen tells Rachel they occur and the movement of the people only makes sense when Rachels memory supplies the reason for their steps. The structures are not natural. If they were, Rachel would not strain to remember them, nor would she need to be told of them. The structures are imposed and composed by her society, as much as gender, the marriage plot and the male form are imposed constructs with value only within their own contexts. Thus Voyage, once rid of the original structure, enables Woolf to get closer to her spiritual view of the world (Modern Novels 34). Though it can be said that The Voyage Out, Woolfs eerily conventional first novel (Brownstein 277), is disjointed due to negotiations between narrative forms, Woolfs delving into such forms in her first long work begins her battle with old assumptions and old forms.

Eliades 26 Rachels illness and death jettisons the original plot to begin to work in a new form that engaged Woolfs subject and personal view of the world more than the elder form which assumed that all lives may be shown in its portrayal alone, a built-in assumption that could not to mate with Woolfs content. Woolf began negotiating with the demands of linear form in Phyllis and Rosamond (1906) through the narrative of authority. The distanced, omniscient and moralizing tone works through an interfering authorial narrative. Woolf tries on that narrating voice in three preambles before launching into the main story, much as Voyage did in its vague focus of the first lines which eventually attach height and cloak to Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose. In Phyllis, she writes, In this very curious age, when we are beginning to require pictures of people, their minds and their coats, a faithful outline, drawn with no skill but veracity, may possibly have some value (17). The line establishes authority through its inclusion of the reader in the collective pronoun we which also assumes the reader require[s] pictures of people, their minds and their coats (17). Simultaneously, the sentence adopts a self-consciousness that undoes its authority to maintain modesty and social acceptance, mimicking the prefaces by other women of the late nineteenth century, signaling a subjective narrator (Friedman 134). The opening sentence is a site for Woolfs negotiations with form through the narrative. Though the piece is united in the authoritative voice, the retracting phrase, drawn with no skill but veracity (17), and other phrases in the story, come from Woolfs consciousness of her gender and the old female model she tries to follow, further discussed within the story itself. The narrator continuously writes to justify her subject, noting that the audience and narrator are to investigate the scene, that the girls seem indigenous to the drawing-room and that they are condemned to be what in the slang of the century is called

Eliades 27 the daughters at home (18). The attention is drawn so that the audience may calculate the values of those impressions (18). The language becomes scientific to establish authority, creating sentences and apologies that are not of Woolfs making. Her narrative of detachment delays the true beginning of the story until the end of the fifth paragraph, as the characters are established. Only then does the omniscient narrator describe the situation further: You must be in a position to follow those young ladies home You must be by them when they wake next morning; and you must attend their progress throughout the day. (18) She demands that the reader listen through her use of the imperative You must (18) as emphasized through its placement at the beginning of each clause. Her establishment of authority as a female writer occurs through brandishing details and the totality of experience on the narrative. As the narrator is the chosen viewpoint of the author, the details and movement reveal that Woolf is not comfortable enough with the narration she has chosen to tell her story (Friedman 137). She is negotiating with a female identity, much as she would continue to do in Voyage. From the beginning, according to Rachel Bowlby, her female identity forces her to take on a phantom identity an essence impossibly held within quotation marks, of whom writing is always trying to grasp (xviii-xix). This is the earliest cohesive example of Woolf in realisms form, one which limits the full effect of the hopelessness of her protagonists situation and stiffens the portrayal. Both Woolf and her characters, Phyllis and Rosamond, who were only educated for marriage, rock back and forth between forms they cannot fit in and those they long after. With the Hibbard sisters, this is embodied in the content of the story as they enter the Bloomsbury home of the writer,

Eliades 28 Sylvia Tristram (22), social commentary which works very well within this structure, but lacks the vitality needed for full effect. Woolf is allowed to gather near her characters as narrator in dialogue, but that effect is also stilted, despite how authentic her portrayal of the speech is. In the two full pages of the sisters dialogue, their opinions spur the story; there is hope of movement, but as their situation does not change, the narration drags. Woolfs longer work, The Journal of Mistress Martyn (1906), works less off of a single line of plot and more on a dual line. The form is split in half due to two distinct narrators. Both are in the first person, but the former, Miss Rosamond Merridew, is an omniscient character narrator and the latter, Mistress Joan Martyn, is a limited first person narrator arising from a journal. Each represents a shift in Woolfs narration, a trying on of narrative distance and tone. Miss Merridew greets the reader: My readers know perhaps, who I am. Therefore, although such a practice is unusual and unnatural for we know how modest writers are I will not hesitate to explain that I am Miss Rosamond Merridew, aged forty-five my frankness is consistent! and that I have won considerable fame among my profession for the researches I have made into the system of land tenure in mediaeval England. (Journal 33) Once again, Woolf sets up the narrator, but immediately narrows the site of narration through the first person. Yet Miss Merridews giggles both knock down and set up her authority in the phrase for we know how modest writers are, an almost conscious mockery of the modesty of the female writer (33). Her narrative begins to feel like a secondary fabrication when Joan Martyn begins narrating in her journal. The state of times, Joan starts, which my mother tells me, is less safe and less happy than when she was a girl, makes it necessary

Eliades 29 for us to keep much within our own lands (45). Her introduction does not give an immediate historical context but launches the reader into her concerns. Her narrative is written for itself and thus imbues its own authority on its speech, without concern for the critics [who] threaten with two rods that Miss Merridew must be conscious of due to her position as a female academic (35). Since Joans narrative does not shrink due to a potential audience, it allows Woolf to get closer to the thoughts of her character, more vital than that of Miss Merridew, who wraps around the journal and does not return when the journal is finished. Miss Merridews final absence signals that though she was set up the authoritative framework guiding the reader to the journal, her authoritative narration is not valued above the limited narration. In fact, since the length of the journal exceeds the frame narrative, one might say that Woolf valued the former more because of its proximity. Though she took on the distant, moralizing and omnipotent narrative to assure the reader that despite trauma possibly experienced during the story, the conclusion will reaffirm the life and social cycle of their society. More importantly, the structure of Journal anticipates Voyage. Since Joans narrative ends with marriage, the end for the heroine of the Bildungsroman, she represents the desire and issues Woolf went at in her novel in a smaller scope. Moreover, the outer shell of Miss Merridews narrative imposed onto Joans more life-like journal reveals that the dead figure is more alive than her discoverer, blocked by her own flesh and circumstance but also by narrative convention. Joan makes no excuses for her narrative, she proudly awaits an audience. As Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa, the truth is we are too intimate for letter writing; style dissolves as though in a furnace; all the blood and bones come through; now, to write well there should be a perfect balance (Letters I 343). An established form did not

Eliades 30 help Woolf or her narrators; she needed that new form to work, to give balance. What she began to work with in Journal in narrative voice and structure passed on to Voyage and her future novel attempts. Woolfs negotiations with form and narrative in The Voyage Out and her early stories reveal her neophyte issues of traversing the accepted role of female authority in narrative and that of patriarchal authority and its established forms. As Woolf pushes through adopted paths and narratives, she begins to work through the volume in sleek, yellow calf, which had a directly sedative effect (Woolf, Night 104), into a more engaging, more flexible and balanced narrative of shifting polyphony encountered in her next novel attempt, Night and Day.

Eliades 31

Continuing Education When Woolf wrote Night and Day from 1916 to 1918, she found that the effect of her writing was complicated by the form which must sit too tight, perhaps too tight in Night and Day as it was too loose in The Voyage Out (Woolf, Letters II 400). The new novel rocked between Victorian and Modernist forms in greater intensity than Voyage, compressing the three-volume Victorian novel into three movements swung by location, a city-country-city formation which shapes the narrative arcs. Some critics refer to this structure as circular and align it with a comic, operatic form or see it as purely fantastical (Marcus 40, 18). Woolf uses this structure, though, due to the works expansiveness. She thought that a novelist is bound to build up his structure with much very perishable material, which begins by lending it reality, and ends by cumbering its form (Woolf, Charlotte Bront 27). The material held within her narrative form owed itself to her form and she continued thinking of different ways to manage scenes; conceiving endless possibilities; to take life asan immense opaque block of material and express it in its equivalent of language as she wrote Night and Day (Diary I 214). She was trying to depict a body of life on the scale of the material held in The Voyage Out, but wanted to manage it closer so as to capture life more accurately through attention to the structural unit of the chapter, multiple protagonists and subversions of established narrative techniques. The map of Night and Day places the arcs in different locations to call upon the tradition of place to dictate tone and to manage each character, social concerns and the fall

Eliades 32 and completion of the chapter within the arc. She became more attuned to the mechanics of the unit of the chapter, not only as a break of space, physically and temporally, but also as an artificial quantifier of human experience into separate sections. Her attention to the chapter as a building block led her to the greater narrative arc, but also to the chapter arcs, a search to know what it is that gives the period to the clause, that ends the fiddling at some point (Lohafer 25). On several occasions, Woolfs chapter endings, or closings as they would be better termed, are abrupt. Her breath-span or maintenance of the narrative seems to be short. Chapter Two, for example, ends Katherine Hilbery, he thought, would condemn it off-hand (35), after riding entirely in Ralph Denhams mind from the beginning of his exit out of the Hilbery residence through his journey home. Since the narrative so quickly shuts with mention of Katherine, it is allowed to move immediately into discussing the genealogical history of her family in the following chapter. The narration shifts from a close third person to a distanced and omnipotent third person after the break. Likewise, Chapter Four ends: She left with Rodney (63), which seems determined to detach from Ralph not to give a genealogy but to firm the narrative after many shifts to a close third person narration for several characters in Mary Datchetts space. Both chapters and their endings cut action to move into the next projected sections. The practice is a new means of organizing her narrative, one which kept with the conventional unit of the chapter and arc, within which Woolf also began to work through line breaks to change scene without breaking the sequence (Room 81). Thrice Woolf employs the line break: first to introduce the letter that confirms Katherines engagement to Rodney (Night 142), then to allow Aunt Cecilia to perform the act of gossip that propels the conclusion just after Katherine explains her plan for Rodney and

Eliades 33 Cassandra to Cassandra (404) and finally to re-introduce Ralph into the plot after his exile from the Hilbery residence and the novels world (485). In each there is an overcoming of space and time in a way that is possible with the chapter, but not possible in those particular spaces. Though Woolfs line breaks are uneven, they serve to allow a transcendence of space in a way that chapters do not, eliminating the projected need for narrative arabesques or abrupt endings. Her breaks begin to allow her to have a more elegant and subtle handling of an otherwise clumsy & half extinct monster (Letters III 391). But these line breaks do not come frequently as Woolf is still working in the nineteenth century form. Strings of her hand are still visible despite her new use of the chapter and arc units as she maneuvers Cassandra Otway into the plot. Cassandras existence allows for two untraditional ends to occur: Katherines pairing with Ralph without marriage and Marys life alone. Cassandra acts as a foil and appeasement, so she must be introduced without merely appearing in the last portion of the book to marry Rodney and allow the other characters to realize their unconventional ends. For this to happen, Woolf mentions Cassandras family as early as Chapter One, she frames Cassandras world in Chapter Twenty-six and places the Otway family within that world in Chapter Fifteen. Each mention of her name or patronymic motions her closer to the main action of the novel. By the last section, Cassandra enters Rodneys consciousness (280) through her relationship to Katherine herself until the final pairings can be made by the goddess-like hands of Mrs. Hilbery, whose carriage ride with Ralph conveniently passes Rodney and Cassandra in the chapter just next to the last. The maneuvers bring attention to the novelist and her structure, removing the reader from the reality created by the novel. Additionally, Woolf still negotiates with the use of dialogue yet

Eliades 34 tries to frame internal narration to capture character motivation, as seen when Katherine first meets Ralph: Here she stopped for a moment, wondering why it was that Mr. Denham said nothing. Her feeling that he was antagonistic to her, which had lapsed while she thought of her family possessions, returned so keenly that she stopped in the middle of her catalog and looked at him. (16) The inclusion of feeling, the sense of Ralphs attitude toward Katherine, tries to give access to the emotional basis of the situation and overcome the barrier of the body to move along the piece and allow the writer to move the plot with those tones. Yet the method of exposition, necessary to the realist novel which Woolf may be mocking in that passage, is among what marks the form as incongruous to her aim and cause. However, at the end of the novel, Woolf depicts Marys figure alone to convey her own relationship and conclusion without accessing how Mary feels through the omniscient narrator. She writes that Ralph had waited some time before a figure detached itself from a doorway and came across the road, slowly and reluctantly, to where she stood (506). The method is impressionistic. There is no Mary present as a voice or eyes, ears and nose but as a shape, her representation lingering at the novels edge. The use of the technique trains the reader to approach writing like music, a constant process of interpretation to render life in its truest state. This edge use where Woolf works at the twilight and on the thresholds of lighted rooms and darkened streets (Marcus 23), signals the beginnings of a new form. As the form of Voyage, comments on its culture and emerging art forms with the texture and movement of a realist novel, so too does Night and Day. Particularly, this novel employs the Bildungsroman for its plot but has several characters negotiating the path to self-

Eliades 35 realization against the limits of gender and prescribed endings. Like the fifty thousand young men seeking their fortune in that narrative (Moretti 147), Katherine is positioned as one of many young women in London, in common with many other young ladies of her class pouring out tea for her mothers afternoon gathering (Woolf, Night 9). The universality of the occasion and the occurrence is implied in the first sentence, as the novel begins with the day, time and month, a Sunday evening in October, and moves to grouping a certain type of woman on a leisure day before moving very specifically to one woman on whom the narrative will focus. The use of the Bildungsroman technique in the narratives of Katherine, Ralph and Mary allows Night and Day to work through a narrative voice similar to that of Voyage, indicating Woolfs impulse to retain the kind of voice associated with the realist novel of the nineteenth century (Lanser 113). That type of voice is necessary in navigating the world of Phyllis and Rosamond in which the novel is set, marked by a large frame and scale negotiable with an omniscient and authoritative narrator. Woolfs management of this totalizing scope allows her to make a broad outline without erasing crucial realities of lived experience, already tinkering with the systemic representation of social life (Anderson 4, 45) through engaging the distance as a membrane. Unlike in Mrs. Dalloway, the flow from character to character is not used to facilitate an entire jump from head to head but to give a larger sense of the protagonists world, broadening what is possible, making anything likely. Any meeting and any situation may occur through Woolfs narrative movement in which she begins to avoid presenting a shop keepers view of literature; with the rudiments, covered over with fat & prosperity & the desire for hideous Empire furniture (Woolf, Diary IV 16). She criticizes excess which she tries to pare down in the opening scene through controlling her narrative frame:

Eliades 36 A single glance was enough to show that Mrs. Hilbery was so rich in the gifts which make tea-parties of elderly distinguished people successful, that she scarcely needed any help from her daughter, provided that the tiresome business of teacups and bread and butter was discharged for her. (Night 9) The first and second clauses of this sentence border the practice of omniscience, flicking off what occurs in the scene. The end sets up a spreading of the narrator as omniscient, as the tea scene was established without need for a specific view, which also allows Woolf to use the city and its meandering scope to let her characters and narrative likewise meander, reflecting the city novel tradition Charles Dickens most uses, an act that infringes upon male pathways as much as it enforces them. Her reliance on a strong sense of place, implicit in the realist novel and on the contrast between city and country action enables action. Night and Days representation of outposts of action plays upon the external as barometer of internal climate and new modes in scene changes. Different codes and symbols are projected in each outposts identity, working on an awareness of social class. The outposts include the Hilbery residence in Chelsea, the Denham residence in Highgate, Marys apartment, Rodneys apartment, the Strand, the Suffragette office, Kew Gardens in London and the Otway residence as well as the Datchett home in the country. Overall, London serves as the most important site for the workings of the characters for its many possibilities and transfer points between its center, the Hilbery home and the many streets that enable character contact. The locations emphasize social stratification along the Embankment and the streets which sit between the established homes, each mini-sites of social class and the resulting gender codes. The symbolism of place engages the use of signs by the novelist to convey the intricate change of inner action associated with each place. The Hilbery house, as

Eliades 37 noted before, is an established home of the old order. There are distinct zones within the house, such as the servants room downstairs, the dining room and Katherines room, each with their own connotations. In contrast, there is Marys flat. Without multiple stories, relatives or servants, Marys home is an equalizing haven, representing the new. Likewise Woolf draws attention to the conventions of action in a novel, noting a time in which Katherine forgets to pour tea while holding out her cup, which because they had glanced, [made] her position impossible. If one forgot to pour out a cup of tea, they rushed to the conclusion that she was engaged to Ralph Denham (438). Motion or action was tied to a specific reading within the realist tradition as Katherine status is slotted, regardless of actual validity. The standard renders the novel capable of being read (Re-reading Novels 342), giving the reader what is expected to move the plot. Katherines irritation with the symbols reveals Woolfs issues with convention as a means of reading. The convention formed a tyranny of symbols that Woolf learned to work with in Night and Days symbollayered structure, writing which taught certain elements of composition (Letters IV 231), what to leave out: by putting it all in (Letters VI 216), the entire novel a training ground for concision. Her training is not unlike George Merediths writing in The Egoist in which the protagonist doted on her cheek, her ear, and the softly dusky nape of her neck where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot-curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps waved or fell, waved over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading,

Eliades 38 cunninger than long round locks of gold to trick the heart. (qtd. in Wheeler 165) The passage stretches eight lines as if afraid of missing some light particle of Clara Middletons hair, carried on by commas, adjectives and conjunctions to re-enforce its own significance. The attention to appearance reveals little of the inner self save the interest of one figure in another, the tresses taking over consciousness without connection, the characters gaze possessing the image of Clara without penetrating her character, likening her to a series of animals hunted and ruled over by man. The coding of her figure in the inclusion of that much detail does not give way to new readings. Woolfs exercise in the conventional style (Letters IV 231) allowed her to step into those conventions and gazes built in the male narrative and begin bending them toward her own conceptions and purposes, a necessary re-shaping which permitted her to criticize binding conventions, her own voice slipping onto the page. Her focus moved to technique and imagery to explore and mock conventions, placing the drawing of meaning from her presentation of a tense interplay of multiple plots, making [the novel] the basis of selfconscious formal experimentation (Voyage In 17). By the third paragraph of Night and Day, she indicates that her narrative will not solely trail a single character as the focus moves from Katherine to Ralph Denham. Though the first sentence the novel seemed to indicate Katherine would be the only protagonist, the shift shows that the novel holds at least one, if not more characters of equal importance in the narratives thrust. The narrative moves according to the lives of its five central figures. Katherine Hilbery, Ralph Denham, Mary Datchett, William Rodney and Cassandra Otway and their romantic intentions displace the traditional omniscient narrator, proposing that the world is

Eliades 39 driven by the actions and consciousnesses of many. Her departure from monomania as locus and central causation is not new, but the change yields narrative freedom. Dorothy Richardson, for example, began to move away from a focalized authoritative narrative in 1915 with her twelve volume work, Pilgrimage, in the first use of the stream of consciousness technique in English literature, a technique Woolf would later use in her own way. Though Richardsons use of the method ran much closer to her subjects than Woolfs eventual and initial uses, her work represented a shift into subverting the male narrative tradition (Lanser 106 and 102). As Woolf said, to go to men [such as H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, the most prominent and successful novelists in the year 1910] and ask them to teach you how to create characters that are real is precisely like going to a bootmaker and asking him to teach you how to make a watch (Mr Bennet 76). The exercise is pointless: their forms, however well executed, will not work for Woolf as they are so unlike. Thus she uses their patterns only to disrupt them or reveal their significance (Abel 161) in the narrative interpretation of character and setting. Though Woolf largely employed the outposts of residence to stake connotations of characters moods, potential actions and social stratifications, she also used it to mark the effects of setting on the plot. While in the country, the plot rests, drops off into a steady holiday mood, whereas in the city, the plot mimics the constant movement of its characters, the energy the characters dash around with. The motion works alongside an awareness of the artifice of setting and perhaps as much as an awareness of or appearance of the unreality of real settings, like the City of London, which wore, at this moment, the appearance of a town cut out of gray-blue cardboard, and pasted flat against the sky, which was of a deeper blue (Woolf, Night 72). The view momentarily reduces the city so that it is not large but rather

Eliades 40 small, capable of being held by any individual. Simultaneously, Woolf shows the city with its uncontrolled elements. Its effect is best captured in a walk of Katherines, in which The great torrent of vans and carts was sweeping down Kingsway; pedestrians were streaming in two currents along the pavements The deep roar filled her ears; the changing tumult had the inexpressible fascination of varied life pouring ceaselessly with a purpose which, as she looked, seemed to her, somehow, the normal purpose to which life is framed; its complete indifference to the individuals, whom it swallowed up and rolled onwards, filled her with at least a temporary exaltation. The blend of daylight and of lamplight made her an invisible spectator, just as it gave people who passed her a semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in which the eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the current the great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. She stood unobserved and absorbed, glorying openly in the rapture that had run subterraneously all day. (439) Though the action is impersonal and detailed, it is not arbitrarily so. The city is a framework, as much as art and its methods serve as a framework and legitimate expression of emotion. The faces of people are not organized into sexes, occupations or classes but as Pale ivory ovals marked only by eyes (439). Rather than describing all of the characters backgrounds and placements, which would require Woolf to manufacture a three-volume novel about a character such as Mrs Brown of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, about her offspring, her occupation, her entire past, which appears to be among the most dreary, irrelevant and humbugging affairs in the world (Woolf 82), she begins to work through setting as canvas.

Eliades 41 Objects are no longer materials just implications of her characters occupations, pasts and moods. As Mary gazes at the Elgin marbles, for example, the shapes of stone seemed to make her life at once become solemn and beautiful. The presence of this immense and enduring beauty made her almost alarmingly conscious of her desire (82). Her life is transformed and transfigured through art, captured by its encasement. The outer conjures the inner, as impressionism represented one thing at a given moment in time, a effect of light and colour created by the artists eye and the sensuous efficiency of his brushstrokes, knitting their pattern swiftly across the canvas (Hughes 113). Marys mood transformed by the stone represents Woolf trying to approach Merediths depiction of a tea party, where he will begin by destroying everything which it is easy to recognize a tea party chairs, tables, cups, and the rest; he will represent the scene merely by a ring on a finger and a plume passing the window (Woolf, Re-reading 274). Woolfs play with this technique bestows motion in her sentences. Early in the novel, Katherines mind playfully leapt over the little barrier of the day (Night 9), depicting thought as a transcendent and flightful animal given to overcoming solid objects. Later, as servants had brushed away sixty years or so with the first flick of their damp dusters (428), time is imagined in layers, as past and present at once even though the real image is the servants cleaning the house. With its first flick the sentence moves around the reader like a breath of steam from a tea cup, light but with the tips of scent reaching the nostrils, indicating the taste of the rest of the brew in a molecule, conveyable only through the workings of a bare sentence. The representation of much in little is part of a new current of the novel, which also moves via a play on color. While Woolf engages in the signs through associating certain colors with certain characters as used in the realist novel to guide the reader, functioning as

Eliades 42 leitmotifs of opera in a work in association with one setting, personage or theme to indicate importance, character or eventual fate, she also inverts that standard. Katherines yellow, for example, is associated with neither male nor female. While she enjoys mathematics and is not particularly feminine, she must write biography. Though yellow is seen in the old yellow-tinted lace for ornament and her yellow scarf (13, 82), it is also used with Rodney, removing light yellow gloves and slapping his knees with them (172) to strike the reader as feminine and soft. Yet the dominant mention of yellow conjures the character of Katherine, who is seen by Ralph not in the body; he seemed curiously to see her as a shape of light, the light itself; he seemed, simplified and exhausted as he was, to be like one of those lost birds fascinated by the lighthouse and held to the glass by the splendor of the blaze. (395) The narrative gaze through Ralph looks at Katherine in relation to her parts, not as the parts head, shoulder or neck but as the parts of shadow and light, blur and association with objects and creatures far removed from that scene itself. He sees her as a shape of light which is frequently yellow. The imagery does for the novel what language does for the human being, making visible non-present objects or ideas. Rodneys red, for example, the symbol of passion, is contrary to his temperament. He becomes flustered and passive rather than enraged and active. The color is employed ironically. Lastly, Marys multi-colors evidence her position as a character of the new. She cannot be defined in one role but remains flexible and undefined through the end in which her future is left open. She does not marry, does not become folded into a new family but stands in the frame of a door, a figure rather than eyes

Eliades 43 or lips or skirt-covered leg. The use of color as symbol makes up the fabric of the novel in a way that places it within the realist tradition even as that tradition is subverted. Woolfs other uses of the artistic to break conventional structure are reinforced through the characters and the events themselves. For instance, when Mr. Hilbery discovers the unusual love plot his daughter and niece have involved themselves in, he states, Civilization had been very profoundly and unpleasantly overthrown that evening His house was in a state of revolutionhis meals would be poisoned for days to come (477). Woolfs depiction of Hilberys reaction directly states how he feels with a tickle of laughter. The narrative is on the edge of omnipotence. It curls around Hilbery, lets the reader hear Hilbery pacing about as he turns his thoughts and give access to his character through phrasing which is channeled through the narrative. Though Woolf is battling the authoritative narrative, its rules allow Woolf to portray Hilberys thoughts, confer[ing] dignity and order upon their subject; they admit her to a place in civilized society; they prove that she is worthy of consideration (Woolf qtd. in Bowlby xxx). The very system she is demolishing enables her own commentary, allows her to show the plotting of the young while engaging the reaction of the old through omniscience, which also enables her to comment on the state of literature. For example, The Hilberys subscribed to a library, which delivered books on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Katherine did her best to interest her parents in the works of living and highly respectable authors; but Mrs. Hilbery was perturbed by the very look of the light, gold-wreathed volumes, and would make little faces as if she tasted something bitter as the reading went on; while Mr. Hilbery would treat the moderns with a curious elaborate banter such as one might apply to

Eliades 44 the antics of a promising child. So this evening, after five pages or so of one of these masters, Mrs. Hilbery protested that it was all too clever and cheap and nasty for words. Please, Katherine, read us something real. Katherine had to go to the bookcase and choose a portly volume in sleek, yellow calf, which had directly a sedative effect upon both her parents. But the delivery of the evening post broke in upon periods of Henry Fielding, and Katharine found that her letters needed all her attention. (Night 104) The passage evokes the volumes in Rachels education but also Cassandras education by Rodney with Lord Macaulays History of England, a huge volume of a dull red color (429), red invoked again as not passion but tradition. The passage and examples above tip to Woolfs literary lineage, background and criticism of the works through the adjectives portly, dark, yellow calf and sedative (104), displaying the effects of their length though their appearance. Though the works are esteemed, the preference of the elder generation for such polished-looking but large writings instead of the light gold-wreathed volumes by contemporary authors remarks on the resistance to the novel without large frames. Likewise, the techniques of the elder authors themselves and their penchant for unnecessary detail for commentary are seen through the figure of the novelist, Mr. Fortescue, for example. In the middle of Mrs. Hilberys tea party, his narration seems ironic: In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katherine decidedly hits the mark, he said, and lying back in his chair.he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live, and

Eliades 45 then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to the more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit her, and how her appearance would change by degrees, and how she would fly to London, and how Katherine would have to lead her about, as one leads an eager dog on a chain, past rows of clamorous butchers shops, poor dear creature. (11-2) He accuses Katherine of exaggeration, but then allows his imagination to embellish the space, all from one off-hand comment of Katherines on the lack of conversation partners in Manchester, which marks how the realist author, represented in the speaker, is prone to exaggeration himself, creating rounded structure[s] of words (12), one of Woolfs many acidic statements on that style. The tendency towards detail was a criticism of the female writer as the male writer loomed over the female author. There is something of a mans manner or writing, Woolf seems to claim, that wants to make detail relevant if only to capture everything. Yet wrapped in his way of declaring football and sport important; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes trivial, (Room 73-4), the emphasis is placed not in all objects, but those valued by the male narrative gaze. The capture of sport players blurs do not seem to require detail, but the clothing, objects which function without motion may be more readily scrutinized. A slight irregularity in a seam can be the difference between a well-made garment and rubbish, whereas a slight fumble in a game of American football will not matter if the carrier runs into the end zone untouched. The male writer Woolf portrays seems to forget the necessity of detail as soon as it leaves the areas he is used to categorizing. Mary is later accused by Ralph of the crime of detail which makes the great writer. The ability to make much of detail, to be aware of the ramifications of each word upon the

Eliades 46 next and the proper or unusual relations invoked in an entire sentence by the alteration or inclusion of a word, should be necessary to writing and even to life. Mary, however, as symbol of the female writer battling against the world and even herself, faces criticism and interruption. Both make her smooth down the sheet of blotting-paper over the manuscript (Woolf, Night 268), like Woolfs imagining of Austen, who wrote in the common sitting room. careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party, hid[ing] her manuscripts or cover[ing] them with a piece of blotting paper. (Room 66-7, James Edward Austen-Leigh qtd.) Though Mary has her own space in London, separate from her family, she is still prone to interruptions, self-consciousness and the difficulties of language as it is constructed. Ralph tells her that she couldnt write English (267), a direct comment on the unsuitability of mens language and form, which is accepted to be English, for the female writer, as well as his other comment that she has the feminine habit of making too much of details (133) and thus dwells in the significance of what makes up an object or even a word in all of its nuances. In the midst of her difficulties, She half held a vision; the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished she had a pencil and a piece of paper to help her to give a form to this conception which composed itself as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. But if she talked to any one, the conception might escape her. Her vision seemed to lay out the lines of her life until death in a way which satisfied her sense of harmony. (Night 259-60)

Eliades 47 Her writing is a means of solidification, produced by wandering in London, this strong sense of place that she must capture in words, in the intangible, that ultimate challenge faced by the writer herself. So many interruptions and barriers sat in the female writers way, Woolfs text says in its examples and heft. The shape and pace of the vision was still unrealized. Woolfs continued work with the structure of the novel of authority and its threearced narrative in Night and Day gave her another turn at fitting her writing into those structures. Yet, she found that form too tight as she negotiated with the conventional uses of color, character and setting in a layered effort to depicting life in its enormity (Letters II 400; Diary I 214). These negotiations would lead to further work to subvert the form and sentence, but in shorter stretches as she entered the next phase of her writing, marked by experimentation built on elements of fiction already moved by Night and Day.

Eliades 48

Experimenter After writing Night and Day, Woolf began drafting Jacobs Room and many short stories, entering the most changeling part of her path to master form. In her work, she came to see immense possibilities in the form [she] hit upon more or less by chance seeking a shape pliant & rich enough to provide a wall for her narrative (Woolf, Diary II 14). She came to believe that fiction did not have a singular correct form, content or means of expression. The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; she wrote, everything is the proper stuff of fiction; whatever one honestly thinks, whatever one honestly feels (Woolf, Modern Novels 36). Playing with fiction allows for its future to remain relevant and pliable, perpetually renewed (36), extending not only to its content, but also to the forms. Woolf began to play with fictions forms and content in short stories during two distinct periods. The first stretched from 1917 to 1920 beginning with The Mark on the Wall, making use of a writing impressionism which focused on color, narrative shifts and detachments as well as polyphony to construct social commentary. Woolfs second short story period began in 1921 near the completion of Jacobs Room and lasted until just before the conception of Mrs. Dalloway in 1922. The latter period turned the focus on color into one on sound as well to gradually shatter the absolute narrative and displace character and plot, finally ridding Woolf of the tyranny of the authoritative narrative.

Eliades 49 Woolf created her stories from sketches she filed away until she needed a rest from working on a novel (Leonard Woolf qtd. in Beer 329). Her labor on the short stories concentrated on maintaining unity, the hallmark of the short form. Unlike the novel, which required an endurance of effort which seemed to slip from her, Woolf found the shorts to be easier to work with. Novels, she wrote, are frightfully clumsy and overpowering (Woolf qtd. in Shaw 22). She wished to get hold of them, but the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly on beginning quiets down after a time, & one gets on more steadily (22; Diary II 35). Yet she kept writing due to the sense of an impending shape (35) which bound her text. Since the novel is by definition longer than the short story, Woolf found the maintenance of such a shape difficult. In the short story, however, she was able to sketch narrative for a brief span, creating a flicker to capture one feeling or a singular instance that may act as a prism for larger ideas and situations as she had begun to do in Night and Day. The morphic nature of the short work also allowed any tale to be told, whether of first love or death, driven with plot or without it (Lohafer 7), but the length demands intensity, requiring the same attention to language that a poem calls for: Every word is important, none may be wasted else the writer risks losing momentum and valuable page space by meandering elements not important to the text or falsify life as it feels, the inner life, and character as the realists did (Brownstein 278). Furthermore, Woolf wanted fiction to reach a higher level of acuteness to life. She even renamed the writer an artist who sits with a sheet of paper in front of him trying to copy what he sees without the still models afforded to painters or illustrators (Woolf, Leaning 159). As Woolf began the first period of short story experiments, she was well into working on Night and Day. The Mark on the Wall published in July of 1917 by the Hogarth Press

Eliades 50 (Dick 240), however, was an escape from the demands of the larger work. The tone and shape of Mark is like that of an essay, which is unsurprising considering Woolfs training as a biographer and essayist and the flexibility of that form. The essay is known for its openness to any subject at all [which] brings it close to the capaciousness and adaptability associated with the novel (Bowlby xii). The mutability of the essay and its name literally binds it to trials or attempts at new kinds of style (xii) and its detached narrative allows great motion. Mark begins, Perhaps it was the middle of January in the middle of the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw (Woolf, Mark 78). Though the narrator has a personality revealed through the phrasing shown in the close first-person narration, he or she is also distant from the object in view, not reporting on the emotion felt at that time or engaging with it, which is what Woolf believes creates a well-written essay: a blend of detachment & individuality (Shaw 227). The narrator also barely appears in body throughout the story; the reader never views his or her face and does not get definite indications of gender. The physical is only revealed in the smoking of a cigarette and the taking of tea. This detached, disembodied narrator allows Woolf to follow the thoughts that emerge from viewing the mark, which propels the entire story, the pondering which gives the story its shape. Mark moves according to its narrators turns of mind in multiple ways, as it says, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number (Woolf, Mark 79). The focus on perception follows the mark as a possible nail hole, dry leaf, protruding object and nail. Resulting thoughts from those changes in perception allow the distracted mind to make associations beyond the physical object. Take for example Woolfs third turn at the mark:

Eliades 51 In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf. There must be some book about it. (80) Woolf begins the narrative so that the reader is located in the narrators physical space before she lets the sentence follow the conjectured physical space and leap into the space beyond her, imagined space which gives way to thoughts that are fulcrums for new and seemingly unrelated thoughts shown through the ellipses. The development of these turns eventually leads to the narrative transfers that shape the work. The narratory movement is wide and rambling to hold in as many impressions as possible, to try to catch the world in a short span but with shorter strokes, those that will enable movement. For Woolf senses that there is much to be included in a story, much that she wishes to include as there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavements, living rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. I should like to take each one separately but something is getting in the way. Where was I? What has it all been about? I cant remember a thing. Everythings moving, falling, slipping, vanishingThere is a vast upheaval of matter. (83)

Eliades 52 The narrator constantly slips from place to place, attention point to attention point because she is trying to follow thought and life which do not stay still. Since the writer is an artist who must capture movement (Leaning 159), Woolfs essay form brush lets her weave a spell with the first word which allows the reader to wake, refreshed, with its last (Modern Essay 40). The shape is made through the narrative starting in a camera haze that rapidly focuses in three sentences. The reader sees the mark on the wall at the end of the first sentence and is given a driving point not based in what Norman Friedman defines as a plot of circumstance, character or thought, a series of incidents [this] gives rise to, plus the moving powers of this action (75) but in the turning of thought itself, a mystery of images and possible realities that turns into a solid reality: a snail, once the narrator is compelled to see it in this way due to an outer character. In the end, her impressionism, once knocked away by dialogue, congeals. The narrator is jolted to the present, to the body of her self and her companion. All the same, the disembodied voice says, I dont see why we should have a snail on our wall. Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail the narrator says, closing the narration (Woolf, Mark 83). Once the item has been defined by the dialogue, it can no longer change. The impressionism Woolf employs to grab at the human experience finally holds life still if only for the moments captured on the page. Woolf knew she was working against formal depictions of life and commonly-held literary assumptions as seen in realist novels. If the novelist, she wrote, cut adrift from the eternal tea-table and the plausible and preposterous formulas which are supposed to represent the whole of our human adventurethe story might wobble; the plot might crumble; ruin might seize

Eliades 53 upon characters. The novel in short might become a work of art. (Woolf, Art of Fiction 125) She envisioned a fully aesthetic story that might contain life not through preposterous formulas which ape all experiences (125), but one that captures it without plot. She begins exploring the story as a work of art in Kew Gardens (August 1917), employing the techniques used in visual art as an alternative presentation of reality. Primarily, she begins to use color, not as symbol but as fulcrum, tone-maker and narration-enabler, freeing it from traditional interpretation. Objects serve as fulcrums of character focus, allowing Woolf to jump from person to person, group to group in Kew. The shifts are what give shape to the story. The narration begins From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. (Woolf, Kew 84, emphasis mine) The dense layering of color emphasizes the visual element of experience designed to give an impressionistic effect of sensory information as perceived by Woolf while simultaneously presenting the process by which this information assembles itself into distinctive shapes and patterns (Shaw 13). Focusing on color rather than character personalities and histories

Eliades 54 destabilizes the notion of the story as plot- and character-centric. The shapes surrounding the human figures and not the figures themselves are the prime focus of Kew. But though Woolf destabilizes the plot and character in the story, she does so to get closer to characters, who are never fully absent from the narrative. They are actually the aim of the shifting focus directed by passing over the flower bed, above which: the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July. The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. (84) The focus may seem detached and distracted by the butterflies, which are given more detail than the men and women, but Woolf gives the men and women more attention through her indirect approach. The men and women at first merely walk. The verb is neutral, it says very little. Then they straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement. Straggled is certainly more interesting than walk, giving texture and specific motion to the figures. The final detail is added when she writes that they were like the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights. Now the reader sees the men and women with blue suits, white dresses, or with white suits, blue dresses strolling haphazardly through the park. There are two images to interpret as the focus is drawn on the human figures and not the colors, insects or plants that cover the text. The inversion is a means of drawing attention to the human, a use of metaphor that does not alter the texture of the narrative. Woolfs work is also built out of a melding of poetry and prose due to her belief that the distinction was being made too strenuously (Shaw 231). The non-plot centric stories

Eliades 55 use imagery to harbor many characters and voices and also as line breaks. As the third group passes by the bed, the heavy woman came to a stand-still and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying. She stood there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. He had just inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting to the cool brown light when the two other people came past outside the turf. (Woolf, Kew 87-8) Now the focus goes to these characters, delving into their dialogue and immediate thoughts but not into their histories. The reader does not know where they have been before now, but can glean from their relationship from the immediate images and thoughts Woolf presents. Here she begins to use color in an image-driven, rather than symbolism-driven way by giving the reader the primary colors in different groupings and separations. The pink, white and crimson in the couples section in the end hints to innocence and a hint of passion, much like the pure red of the first couples section, impressing the reader with a tone without stating he longed ardently for her or she desired him. Woolfs color undertones in the scenes evade the readers awareness until closer examination of the items manipulating language creating unconscious interpretation. Likewise, the conclusion bursts away from the couple, back into viewing the passing pairs and individuals as anonymous and indistinct, as the largest mention of color erupts in the last paragraph,

Eliades 56 Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women and children, were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue. (89, emphasis mine) The color riot launches the piece into the world, dissipating its impressions not so suddenly into the air, allowing the words and the body of the story to disappear like notes dispersing into particles, the tone and feeling remembered but the actual voice and solidity gone. The view given by the detached narrator is continued in the anonymous figures of men and women (84) of Kew Gardens to the very specific man and woman named Simon and Eleanor strolling with their two children. Once the quad leaves the range of the flowerbed, the narrator looks again to the bed itself, to the snail. From the snail the narrator deals with two men, then a womans purple black dress, which swings the narration slowly to two women, then back to the snail again for a paragraph longer than the first before resting with the last figures, a young couple, reflecting the married couple without their younger duplicates. As the beginning is born from a ball of the primary wheel, the rest of Kew follows as strands of color in character to character, the groups mirror gendered people: first a married couple with two children and two men, followed by two women and an unmarried couple, each rendered with enough variation so as to seem unique. Their end comes as a tassel of color binding color, people and nature together, with nature as the unseen fulcrum Woolf weaves with her impressionist perambulations. Her work rendered on color without an account of the sequential events leading up to these visual events, where reason and rhapsody were assimilated rather than set at variance, a blend of poetry and prose to picture

Eliades 57 reality in a sharper and more concrete way than possible through realism (Shaw 13, 231). Impressionism allowed her to fulfill her demand for indirection in art by depending on the consciously wrought quality of its prose-style for unity rather than on the stated presence of a narrating consciousness (231). She had tossed out the authoritative narrative. Yet prose is not poetry or painting and the physical tools it works with are the pen or typewriter on paper and not the brush on canvas. Woolf returned to the close and bodied first person narrator and a more concentrated attempt at mind jumps in An Unwritten Novel (January 1920). The focus again was character with Minnie Marsh as a historical body that did not drag in so many dull facts (Woolf qtd. in Shaw 119) of novels listing the entire genealogy of a character before getting to what they were actually doing in the present of the story (Woolf, Mr Bennet). To avoid this, Woolf places the narration within a bodied narrator who cannot possibly know the characters history. Removing the omniscience through the narrator a body forced Woolf to work with the cues of the actual setting. As the essay is rendered by the physical body of the narrator, so too is Unwritten, garbed in a body, one which Susan Lanser calls explicitly female (111), if only due to her knowledge of the domestic and her often breathy exclamations, ending with its you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, its you I embrace, you I draw to me adorable world! (Woolf, Unwritten 115), which helps avoid absolutism. Again, the reader is reminded of the storys purpose: to focus on the possibility of character and the narrative voice in fiction. An Unwritten Novel begins to shift its use of Woolfs prior techniques. The drapers window looped with violet thatll do; a little cheap perhaps, a little commonplace since one has a choice of crimes, but then so many (let me peep across again still sleeping, or pretending sleep! white, worn, the

Eliades 58 mouth closed a touch of obstinacy, more than one would think no hint of sex) so many crimes arent your crime; your crime was cheap; only the retribution solemn; for now the church door opens, the hard wooden pew receives her; on the brown tiles she kneels; every day, winter, summer, dusk, dawn (here shes at it) prays. (110) The impressionism based on color as well as the symbolism associated with such broad strokes is largely gone: the work of a late Monet. The very abstract image of A Mark on the Wall has vanished. What remains is another type of impressionism and imagining, born out of realisms attention to detail but tempered with sparing lines, a concentration on such details to hold meaning without the guiding authoritative narration to lock in a readers interpretation of the text. Here the reader is forced to piece together what Woolfs narrator provides. The opinions are largely relegated to the parenthesis which speak like Mistress Merridew but phrase themselves without completion, almost as if they were plopped onto page directly from the narrators mind, sans the filters of syntax and grammar. The parenthesis, much like asides, allow Woolf to jump quickly from one style of narration to another, from one narrative voice to another, without consequence, in a way that intuitively shapes the narrative. Down they get (Bob and Barbara), hold out hands stiffly; back again to their chairs, staring between the resumed mouthfuls. [But this well skip; ornaments, curtains, trefoil kitchen plate, yellow oblongs of cheese, white squares of biscuit (108) With (Bob and Barbara), she brings the act of the writer to the readers attention, the act of artifice and construction made visible with the brackets which are the interrupting comments

Eliades 59 of the narrators personal self, subjective rather than objective. The construct allows Woolf to skim over the material rather than spend pages on as her predecessors would have, but also allows her to subvert the narrative and draw in detail amore detached narrator might leave out. Unwritten uses slight shifts of Marshs body to shift the narrators imaginings of her life. It moves in relation to Marshs potential inner self and The Mark on the Wall moves in relation to the possible outer object which depends on shifts in perception. But heres a jerk, for example, moves the narrators speech from hairdressers and shops to eggs and timeliness for lunch (110-1). All this work showed Woolf in one secondhow I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it (Letters IV 231). She began to take different angles, combinations of her skills to build a slightly longer work and approach the problem of depicting character without using prior forms. Woolfs first stage of short story experiments at that point did not try to engage plot as The Voyage Out and Night and Day had. A Society (September 1920) however, depended on plot for structure and criticized patriarchal society while encountering many characters with distinct voices. The key to the power of A Society is in the bodied first person narrator able to take on a plural first person to include not only the immediate story but also the four side-narratives of the womens ventures into the world, each channeling a slightly different voice. This is how it all came about, she lays the story flat, smoothing it like a map in her first sentence before defining the players, Six or seven of us in the domestic sphere of a London home, indicated by the women idly occupied in building little towers of sugar upon the edge of a tea tray (A Society 118). The number of women expands to fifteen in named persons. The characters inhabiting the piece itself multiply in the personal narratives of the characters. Though A Society is reminiscent of the world

Eliades 60 and style of Night and Day, it expands into greater polyphony and spread of characters. The plot rests not on their personal outcomes but on that of the world and its status to dictate pace, grounded in the First World War breaking the end and causing the women to abandon their search. The shape coils around gender so that the story serves to allow the questioning of the common order without death or stiffness. The work is certain of itself. It is also a revision of Woolfs use of dialogue, turning away from prior attempts to catch & consolidate & consummate those splashes of the painters so as to depart from the falsity of the past Woolf says was created by Bennett, Galsworthy and others who adhere to a formal railway line of sentence (Woolf, Letters III 135-6). That male sentence does not allow the more natural depiction of character she wishes to engage. In viewing Woolfs dialogue, one can see her trying to pull the writing closer to gendered experience. In the end of A Society, the narrator, Cassandra, and one of the women, Castalia, discuss the future of Castalias daughter after not being able to find, among all their questions and explorations in the mens world, what the point to life was. How can I bring my daughter up to believe in nothing? [Castalia] demanded. Surely you could teach her to believe that a mans intellect is, and always will be, fundamentally superior to a womans? I suggested. She brightened at this and began to turn over our old minutes again. Yes, she said, think of their discoveries, their mathematics, their science, their philosophy, their scholarship and then she began to laugh, I shall never forget old Hobkin and the hairpin, she said, and went on reading and

Eliades 61 laughing and I thought she was quite happy, when suddenly she threw the book from her and burst out, Oh, Cassandra, why do you torment me? Dont you know that our belief in mans intellect is the greatest fallacy of them all? What? I exclaimed. Ask any journalist, schoolmaster, politician or public house keeper in the land and they will tell you that men are much more cleverer than women. As if I doubted it, she said scornfully. How could they help it? Havent we bred them and fed and kept them in comfort since the beginning of time so that they may be clever even if theyre nothing else? Its all our doing! she cried. We insisted upon having intellect and now weve got it. And its intellect, she continued, thats at the bottom of it (Woolf, Society 128-9) Each character has a view, however contrary to Woolfs own, that reveals itself as real. There is no hint of falsehood. The reader may watch Castalia change her mind, rage and rethink, drawing the dialogue closer to Woolfs art. The plot-driven but polyphonic text of A Society points out that England is under the rule of a patriarchy maintained by the upkeep of the idea of mens superiority to women (Room 33), enabled through her own length and mode. The characters exclamations drive the conclusion, the shape metered by their speech which is only occasionally interrupted by minimal notes by the narrator, who does not intrude but catches the ends of the speech sentences through what she notices as a character. The limited narrator avoids the male sentence by engaging with the womens voices directly. Emphasis is placed not on their surroundings but on themselves through the few bodily caps.

Eliades 62 Woolfs second short story period which begins in 1921 with Cracked Fiddles, turns sound as color and image and narrative presentation to displace the human being. The sketches of Cracked Fiddles explore narrative through subversive sensory means, particularly through sound depicted as image and a shattering of the absolute narrative viewpoint, applying color and shape as a means to viewing. In the first section, The Evening Party, attention is directed there, rising in a mound against the sky (Woolf, Cracked: Evening 307). The mound is the earth, already revealed in the second sentence not to be the center of the story, a signal that the entire piece will be looking at the world on a slant. She continues, On every chair there is a soft mound. Pale wisps of gauze are curled upon bright silks (307). She speaks of ladies in evening gowns with shawls, reducing them to soft mounds, a way of getting closer to life by discarding most of the conventions which are commonly observed by writers (307; Modern Novels 33). She also returns to color. The street is almost empty; the blinds are drawn in the windows; the yellow and red panes of the ocean liners cast for a moment a spot upon the swimming blue (Cracked: Evening 307, emphasis mine). Unlike the fixedness of Kew Gardens on primary colors, this narrative floats over color in little flashes. Woolf writes as if she can move anywhere, without fear of stepping into impropriety. Glimpses of color in Holborn Viaduct, the fourth section, show a home where the bootboy lifting the concertina, squeezes out a melody. The kitchen table, with its yellow loaf, white aprons and pots of jam, is rooted to the heart of the world (308). The servants quarters is represented in miniature strokes, the objects of bread, aprons and jam standing in for their figures. Woolf also begins to play with sound in this piece, as death casts the tones and The organ peals skeleton music.Wheels and cries sound now low, now high; all in harmony. One bee hums through

Eliades 63 the room and again out away. The flowers bend their heads in time (Cracked: Death 308). The feeling of death represented in sound and tone makes this read like poetry, with the same finesse and grace afforded to verse but often removed from prose. One could insert line breaks in these sentences. Woolfs foray into sound allows her to make the scenes she has been setting since A Voyage Out more plausible and flexible. Though the four sketches are not connected, they are part of an essentially poetic compression of a single narrative which blends different tones and textures together (Shaw 3), afforded by the spaces and new titles in between. The reader does not expect solid connection in this collection but some sort of commonality, either in theme or in viewpoint in these domestic vignettes. The String Quartet (1921) makes further use of sound as a means of depicting the experience of a concert, a plotless prose-sketch (Shaw 232) used to depict different states of perception without dramatic framework (Beer 331). Unencumbered by a bodied narrator, the piece leaps from dialogue to dialogue, single lines, whole pieces presented, then back to the vessel of the narrator again to present the music: Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet; drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and deep, race under arches, and sweep the trailing water leaves, washing shadows over the silver fish, the spotted fish rushed down by the swift waters, now swept into an eddy where its difficult this conglomeration of fish all in a pool; leaping, splashing, scraping sharp fins; and such a boil of current that the yellow pebbles are churned round and round, round and round free now, rushing downwards, or even somehow ascending in exquisite spirals into the air; curled like thin shavings from under a plane; up and up. (String 133)

Eliades 64 The joy in the movement of the bows is traced in the energy of the words, the opening line of the paragraph rocking between two syllables, one syllable then two again and then one with the jaw relaxed in the u to mimic a boat tipping into the current of the Rhone River and the listener plunged with the boat carried by the motions of the strings. A high amount of reader interpretation is required here as Woolf does not mention an exact location nor character names, but paints the joys of London in the people passing by the concert. She is able to do this through her displacement of the narrator, who appears in body only with the line, if the ties of blood require me, leaning forward, to accept cordially the hand which is perhaps offered hesitatingly (132). The body of the narrator leans forward, but there is no glimpse of specific features, no eyes, lips or arms to be shown, which roots the reader in the anonymous figure sitting at a concert with relatives while allowing a limited view that permits the writer to explore sound as viewed by the comparisons of that particular narrator. But it is not merely the narrator, but also the people who become just forms and bodies, so featureless that when Woolf writes: The gentleman replies so fast to the lady, and she runs up the scale with such witty exchange of compliment now culminating in a sob of passion, that the words are indistinguishable though the meaning is plain enough love, laughter, flight, pursuit, celestial bliss all floated out on the gayest ripple of tender endearment until the sound of the silver horns, at first far distant, gradually sounds more and more distinctly, as if the seneschals were saluting the dawn or proclaiming ominously the escape of the lovers (135) The figures presented are more vivid than those in the rest of the story who have no relations to one another but voices. The sounds are given a relationship, accorded a type of

Eliades 65 communication, even though they are not characters. The gentleman and lady are personifications of the notes which run up the scale. What is interpreted by the narrator is shown to be more important than the reality around him or her. Woolfs ability to get away from a plot- and character-based work is what allows her finally, In the Orchard, written in August of 1922 just after the finish of Jacobs Room and about a year after her initial contemplation of Mrs. Dalloway (Dick 295, Lee 227, 192), to turn over narrative presentation without having to put in the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story [which] seems to come from the writers idea that a plot without tragedy, comedy and excitement as well as an air of probability so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of the fashion of the hour he has not done his duty (Modern Novels 33). Woolfs final state in her experimentation contemplates modes of narrative presentation and the resulting shapes. Orchard, for example, works best through its tri-fold views of Miranda under the apple tree, first in a detailed account, then less certain and more tentative. In the first section, Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree (143). The area, character and characters action is established, the narrator is firm. In the second section, made so by a line break, Miranda slept in the orchard or perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved very slightly, her actions are rendered uncertain by the or. In the final section, once again separated by a line break, Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep, or was she not asleep? (144), twice the first clause is contradicted by the or and the last clause reverts the sentences meaning to that set by the very first. The shifts unsettle the reader; reality is not constant. Reality is only a constant from each viewpoint. As Miranda is pared farther and farther from the piece, she is

Eliades 66 represented in the end across the corner of the orchard the blue-green was slit [by] a purple streak (144-5). Oh, I shall be late for tea! (145), her only line in that section, is encased in parenthesis. She is removed from the main action and narrative scope, her figure appears as a shape and not as a body, built out of Woolfs ability to displace the human and decrease its significance. Woolf also displaces the narrative as she depicts time as sound and image, creating a palimpsestic layering (Able 161). Mirandas shifting features do not just indicate the minimalization of the human, but are a means of working at different narrative distances. The first section is in the third person but hovers over Miranda and flies in the area, above the apple-tree and the pear-tree two hundred feet above Miranda lying asleep in the orchard bells thudded (Woolf, Orchard 143). The figure of Miranda is always kept in view, a hearthstone for the reader. Thus the narrative begins again after the section break with Miranda, but now follows the scene in a close third person, so that the narration is filtered through her thoughts before the last section, an utterly distant third person that pulls a panoramic view of Mirandas surroundings. The reader knows that these shifts are made through the shifts in sound. If one were to follow the first sound, for example, one would hear in the first section a shrill clamour as if they were gongs of brass beaten violently, irregularly, and brutally. It was only the school-children saying the multiplication table in unison, stopped by the teacher, scolded, and beginning to say the multiplication table over again. (143) There is a limited omniscience here that privileges the human and centers the human in the narrative. The narrator knows what is going on around Miranda but does not enter in any of

Eliades 67 the characters thoughts or tell their histories. The next section, in a close third, shows Miranda thinking if I were a leaf or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table) (144). The sound is no longer important, reflected by its silence and by the parenthesis wrapped around it. The shrill clamour has shrunk to the periphery. Likewise, by the final section, the panorama, the sound does not register at all and the reader is left with scenery. Woolfs turning of technique in all these stories affirms her statement that Any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express (Modern Novels 34). Through her experimentation, she has a gathering of techniques and forms that enable her to express fiction in a way more real than realism, subverting the dominant methods. Her new use of color, polyphony and narrative detachments and displacements have finally made her ready to create the tensely structured but polyphonic and shifting narration of Mrs. Dalloway.

Eliades 68

Master Watching Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway is like watching a skier maneuver through moguls; not reliant upon chapters to move her narrative, she uses line breaks and techniques learned in her prior works like the poles and muscles of the skier to pivot and turn. The initial push is controlled; a rhythm builds in the next push before the tumble of the first mogul run, the second jump and the path between poles. All looks effortless and nearly uncontrolled, but the motion fully is within the skiers grasp. So too is Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway where the form of her narrative encloses life and expands on it, that luminous halo not lined up but modally distributed (Woolf, Modern 154). Woolfs work on Mrs. Dalloway was made possible by her work in her short stories, but also by Jacobs Room, in which she says she was writing without the old banisters which caused her to makejumps and jerks [which] are unnecessary with the knowledge that she would improve in her next work (qtd. in Beer 3). Her reference to leaving behind old banisters is tied to her growth out of old structure, which created a few necessary starts into working on her own without guidance, as evidenced by her prior writings. In 1920, she wrote that she conceived of a new form for a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another as in An Unwritten Novel only not for 10 pages but for 200 or so doesnt that give the looseness and lightness I want: doesnt that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything? I figure that the approach

Eliades 69 will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist. conceive mark on the wall, K[ew] G[ardens]. & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity. (Diary II 13-4) She conceived of Mrs. Dalloway as a culminating work, one which took the free and disembodied movement of Mark, the raw colors and figure forces of Kew under the length on Unwritten to create envelopes of being opening out of one another to supply the whole. Mrs. Dalloway was to be a combination of her most technically formative stories of that time with a full awareness of the importance of the novels shape to its content. Though she would later note that The design is so queer & so masterful. Im always having to wrench my substance to fit it (249), she also compares the books form to the soul and its content to the body (249). One can breathe as a body but one does not exist on the unseen or spiritual plane without a soul. A book that lacks form lacks transcendence and exists as kitsch or acceptable art (Abraham Moles qtd. in Moretti 36). It has human proportions (36) or merely a body, without a soul, whereas art, or the ideal form for the novel, has both. Mrs. Dalloway assumes the ideal form for Woolfs story and voice through structure. The multiplicity of the novel yields two ways of looking at its body. The first observes that the novel is composed of nine sections, none of which are separated by chapter number or letter, but instead by the visual spacing afforded by line breaks. The second views the division through the dual protagonists, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. Both features are key to understanding the narrative and aesthetic of the structure. In the first, line breaks unite the experience of the novel despite the jumps in location or narrative. The sections are unnumbered so that they cannot be mistaken for chapters, forcing the reader to break from

Eliades 70 the narrative briefly. Unlike the chapter, the use of sections allows a loose connection to be held between the blank space, ideas of the prior section transferred on to the new with association. Take for example the first break: and it lifted her up and up when oh! a pistol shot in the street outside! Dear, those motor cars, said Miss Pym, going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all her fault.

The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss Pym go to the window and apologize came from a motor car which had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberrys shop window. Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there was nothing to see except a square of dove grey. (Woolf, Dalloway 13-4) In the paragraph before the break, there is no mention of where the car is or of Mrs. Dalloway jumping. The reader is within Mulberrys shop. The space allows one to move out of the shop without needing to follow Clarissa Dalloway. The reader has been detached from her with the empty space, but still remembers her and is reminded of her as the narrative gaze shifts to the Passers-by and the man inside the car hidden by a blind of grey. Were this new section presented as a chapter, the impression of the sound of the car and the shop space would be wiped away entirely. Instead, there would be an expectation of an entire switch in space or a continuation of the Clarissa narrative. What Woolf does instead allows her to

Eliades 71 shift, which would not have been possible with the chapter. The subject and image would have been obliterated from the readers mind in a new chapter, a fumbling of re-orientation from the page break to a numbered section known as the chapter. For Woolf to use the chapter, her ending line of that first section would be too brief. There is an expectation of a tie-in, a narrative tuck that allows the reader to feel closure before launching to the next movement. The chapter also carries expectations of length. A uniformity of length was often the decisive form of the chapter according to the older formula of the serialized novel, as if the key to the creation and maintenance of a successful novel could be contained in a kit: a box of worksheets with blank spaces for character names, setting and main problem, each chapter even-lengthed because ten or twenty pages were the number of sheets the form-creator believed were the correct length. While the average section length in Mrs. Dalloway is twenty-one pages, the largest section, VII, totals at 84 and the smallest, V, totals at two, a length that would not be approved of in the model. Obviously, the novel does not fit within the conventions, for as Woolf said, life refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide (Modern Novels 33). Yet, she wrote, the writer had continued to construct thirty-two chapters after a design which more & more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds (33). Woolf undoes the convention and escapes the boxes via her varying lengths and utter refusal of the chapter to make the form match the vision. The structure of a novel, Woolf writes, leav[es] a shape on the minds eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings & arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the Cathedral of St. Sophia at Constantinople (Room 71). The myriad of shapes in each vision suits the shape of Mrs. Dalloway, which uses its shortest section, V, to pivot

Eliades 72 the narrative. Most proselike, the section is driven by the repetition Such are the visions, sandwiched with the nurse knitting as Peter dozes, the language arcs out, then in, tightened to the pegs of the narrative structure again in the sixth section, which again begins with the knitting and Peter dozing, but ends with Peter awake, mind in the past, once more in the past which makes much of Mrs. Dalloway. The repetition has been used more to bind poetry structure than prose structure, but the technique functions in the fifth section and in the entire novel according to Woolfs use of the section break where each section acts as a stanza. Woolf even thought that in poetry you get greater intensity than in prose, & have the right to be more jerky & disconnected (Letters III 432). The intensity of Mrs. Dalloway can be attributed to this way of structuring, so that the work is a prose poem. The other way of viewing Mrs. Dalloway is in seeing it through the twin structure built by Clarissa and Septimus Smith, which Woolf referred to as the novels two parts (Friedman 331). She conceived of Septimus as Clarissas double after the first version of Mrs. Dalloway (qtd. in 331). Representatively, Septimus is death to Clarissas life. As one ends, the other is in a state of perpetual continuation. As protagonists, they supply two distinct forms of plot, which may be linked to their genders. Clarissa, the life representative, exists in the novel to get to her party. Her narrative becomes most vivid when it passes from present to past and then back again. The entire novel is enmeshed in her presence, marked by the last section occurring at the party. The narrative swirls around her and tosses together all elements of the novel in a final swell of feeling in the concluding section. Yet the end-tie which comes through Peter still sees Clarissa. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?

Eliades 73 It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was. (Woolf, Dalloway 194) The narrative ends, without gasp or strain but in knowing that the elements of Clarissas life story have met, that the movements it has shown are most important to her in bringing together her past and present. The plot cannot be said to be forward-moving, but rocks back and forth, spirals through the novel. Septimuss constant death-threat, however, is pointed and self-propelled. Though he too moves between past and present in his narrative, his movement is much briefer and constantly points to an end. His issue climaxes until he literally bursts from the narrative structure, flung himself vigorously, violently down (149). Septimus physically acts out his plots falling action, his conclusion forms as the reader hears of his death at Clarissas party. He is a line pointing through Clarissas spiral, providing the movement in the other expression for the plot and form. The ending line, For there she was sets Mrs. Dalloway complete in the readers hands. The novel sits as a marvel of budding circles encased in a larger circle, veins and swirls further in, creation held in concentrate, the lighter, but more world-filled descendent of the loose baggy monsters Woolf had left behind by 1919. The novel embraces the male and female to achieve wholeness. The length of Mrs. Dalloway fits with Woolfs idea that womens books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of study and uninterrupted work (Room 78). This idea is mainly centered in a practical knowledge of the interruption of a womans duty to family, either in child care or home maintenance, that takes a woman away from writing but also rests in the differences in thought rendered by such constrictions, via the formation of gender which had affected Woolf as she tried to write in larger forms.

Eliades 74 Yet she would say that to think consciously in this way, either as male or female, is fatal (104). The writer must be woman-manly or man-womanly to allow their work to flourish in the readers mind (104). Such collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and man before the act of creation can be accomplished (104). There must be a blend of both minds for the writer to grasp all parts of life and display them in his or her work. This distinction, which Woolf makes and breaks out of, is visible in the gendered plots of Clarissa and Septimus and is embodied in fulfilling her personal philosophy for the length of a womans work. What else may qualify Woolfs writing in Mrs. Dalloway as distinctly female could be drawn from Nancy K. Millers argument that such a text is categorized by an idiosyncratically feminine emphasis or inflection the sign of an ironic apprehension of conventional concepts of characters and plot (qtd. in Brownstein xxvii). If ironic can be seen as a non-dominant viewpoint, Millers classification fits Woolfs work, not only in its technique but also in its actual subject focus, dislocating female writing or the feminine mark from being biologically centered to being socially centered. Yet Woolf has distinct apprehensions of the male and female in relation to one another which she displays in the voices of her characters. Sir William Bradshaw for example, whom Woolf reports, not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, share his sense of proportion his if they were men (Dalloway 99). The sentence drones to the next page, separated by commas, one instance of parenthesis and a single use of the semicolon. Sir Bradshaws proportion orders the sentence. His viewpoints and values

Eliades 75 order dominant life and give it subject. One word follows the next; the commas fall one after the other. In comparison there is his wife, who waited with the rugs above her knees an hour or more, leaning back, thinking sometimes of the patient, sometimes, excusably, of the wall of gold, mounting minute by minute while she waited; the wall of gold that was mounting between them and all the shifts and anxieties (she had borne them bravely; they had had their struggles) until she felt wedged on a calm ocean, where only spice winds blow, respected, admired, envied, with scarcely anything left to wish for, though she regretted her stoutness; large dinner-parties every Thursday night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened; Royalty greeted; too little time, alas, with her husband, whose work grew and grew; a boy doing well at Eton; she would have liked a daughter too; interests she had, however in plenty; child welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and photography (94-5) Her speech tumults out, the first clause prior to the semi-colon mirroring itself, beginning and ending with waited, repeating wall of gold to weigh the woman into her seat before a flurry of commas followed by increasing semi-colons which indicate her increased mania against the rigidity of thought, a dash here and there of a phrase to represent her life, one which may be called multi-tasking presently, what was then seen as unevenly ordered. The use of the semi-colon here is not for grammar; Woolf does not separate her clauses to please the reader or publisher but separates them to please herself and give her characters voice and to display the distinctions of gender created by the patriarchal structure she has been trying to criticize from The Voyage Out.

Eliades 76 Woolf is able to criticize the patriarchal structure not only through these distinctions and the form of her plot but also by several other bolts which pin her novel together. As Mrs. Dalloway was originally called The Hours for its span of a single day, her play with time, narrative and character are the mechanics of the forms. Her depiction of time, that which normally binds a day, allows an iconoclastic plot to weave its course covertly through the narrative grid (Abel 161). The unusual plot structures regulation resonates in her use of Big Ben and several other clocks to mark the actual and apprehended time in the novel as perceived by the characters. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in air (4). Big Ben stakes the actual temporal space of the novels day against the characters perceptions and narrators presentations of the temporal, the impression of sound and times echoes dissipating, though the fact of time, noon or three oclock, does not melt. At first, time is seen frequently, first on page four, then signaling eleven on page twenty-one, then a half hour on page forty-eight, slowing with noon appearing on page ninety-four, quickening on page 117 and then again on 118 as three oclock, on the half hour on 127 and in its last definite as six oclock on 150 just after Septimus has killed himself, after which time is no longer defined. The mention of time at Clarissas party, for example, does not link with a number but falls away, obscured by Clarissas thoughts. For Clarissa does not work in hours but in people and moments. Time does not only serve to sew Mrs. Dalloways form into place but also to allow the form to exist. While Big Bens rings are absolute, there are several other clocks chiming alternate and contradicting times. The late clock, for example, had its lap full of trifles. Beaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages the last relics of this lap full of odds and

Eliades 77 ends seemed to break (128). The late clock is alternate time, time as another sound. Likewise there are the clocks of Harley Street (102). Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was halfpast one. (102) These clocks do not boom or click, but their sounds cut up the day according to the hours mounted on their faces, time itself being both a man-made construct and a socially measured structure. The context is key. What Woolf suggests in this passage is that many different times exist. Some are official, like Big Ben. Those which ring afterwards, are thus considered late or deviant. Those on Harley Street, little multiples of time, ring at their own hours, less official but no less valid as they are sanctioned by commerce, which receives authority through money. But time detached from clocks does not mark itself in sound. The concept of time, which is man-made, culminates in an image created by Septimus: The word time split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal code to Time. (69-70)

Eliades 78 The word is broken into what it sounds like, the sign considered as sound-concept and soundimage at once. The reader experiences what time feels like on the movement of the lips through the image of time breaking open like corn, the letters the kernels broken and reconfigured so that the word is tied not to clocks but to language. Time, as considered in its dominant space, then in its alternates and then as concept, shapes the narrative structure by establishing a series of subversions. The subversions of the novel do not merely work in time, but begin on the first page. Woolfs first parenthesized line, (for a girl of eighteen as she then was), prompts the reader to ask, What age is she now? and When are we now? (3). This change in the narrative layout of time depends on the sound of doors moving off their hinges in the present, which prompts Clarissa to think: What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen (3) The shift into the next paragraph tips the narrative into the more abstract, passing the woman through the ages, the mutability of the feminine and female in the sphere of the historic and contemporary. This abstract displacement is enabled by the sound techniques cultivated in her short stories and introduces multi-chrononomy as a chief narrative element which gives Woolf the freedom not only to explore realities beyond present, but minds beyond the present

Eliades 79 very fluidly. Her displacement of time and mind makes Mrs. Dalloway a multi- rather than mono-narrative. The narrative both withholds knowledge and presents it in terms of its sense rather than its strict identity, which draws the reader closer to the experience and validates the authority of the narrator in a way that does not mirror the absolutism of the earlier authorial narrative. While what is presented is not strictly stream of consciousness, the multiple strands are governed by Woolfs authority, a membrane which collectivizes authoriality without ceding it, giving a different shape to authorial imperatives rather than refusing them (Lanser 119). The narrative gaze is directed and is selective, but the gaze is allowed to wander across the scene and taste its colors. The experience of the novel is so utterly changed by this ability to shift and juggle, which Woolf furthermore displays in section IV under the gaze of Peter Walsh: The way she said Here is my Elizabeth! that amazed him. Why not Heres Elizabeth simply? It was insincere. Elizabeth didnt like it either. (Still, the last tremors of the great booming voice shook the air round him; the halfhour; still early; only half-past eleven still.) (Woolf, Dalloway 49) The outside intersects, as it does when Woolf notes As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind (49). There she casts her narrative in the authorial voice. There the narrative flows and drifts before being caught again into Peters thoughts and experience. She has once more turned it beyond the mind, beyond the first person narrative wound to many other first person narratives by the membrane of the third person, which allows her to roam into the landscape and survey the populace before diving into the coated first person again, a first person which, according to her method, allows the reader to dwell between the characters ear and brain, thoughts not completely stream of consciousness so

Eliades 80 as to appear in pictorial fragments or unrelated words, as represented by Joyce, but thoughts unfiltered, the unbidden thoughts the character would not dare speak aloud. Woolf knows that these thoughts, a part of the secret life of human beings, are what create the outward appearances beyond the exterior that says, I love walking in London, to a good morning. An interior calls the speaker very well-covered, perfectly upholstered (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court) (5-6). There are inner lives that do not spill into the outer, cannot spill into the dialogue her earlier novels would have the reader believe would actually be said, so eloquent and perfect in their movement of the plot. Real dialogue, she knows, is not eloquent and usually not interesting and cannot be as controlled as prose itself without appearing contrived. To jump from dialogue to dialogue to give another character voice is not as possible, for while dialogue is speech, what the character says is mediated by the persons present and how they wish to appear. It is performance. To go beyond performance, to the truth of the character, requires delving into the characters minds, unencumbered with worry of how others may think of the thought. If encumbered, the corrections are laid visible for the reader to see by the authors hand. The inability of escaping personal interiority is registered by Clarissa in Section III, for She could not see what she lacked. It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together (31). The new shape of dialogue does not control Woolf but allows her to control its content which drives the characters and shapes the movements. If all the undercurrents of thought and the casts into the past were taken away in Mrs. Dalloway, the reader would be

Eliades 81 left with text that looked very much like that of The Voyage Out or Night and Day. Take for example the dialogue between Peter and Clarissa with the undercurrents removed: Richards very well. Richards at a Committee, said Clarissa. did he mind her just finishing what she was doing to her dress, for they had a party that night? Which I shant ask you to, she said. My dear Peter! she said. Why wouldnt she ask him to her party? he asked. But its so extraordinary that you should have come this morning! she cried. Do you remember, she said, how the blinds used to flap at Bourton? They did, he said. I often wish Id gotten on better with your father, he said. But he never liked anyone whoour friends, said Clarissa. Hubert has it now, she said. I never go there now, she said. Do you remember the lake? she said, almost in an abrupt voice Yes, said Peter. Yes, yes, yes, he said. Well, and whats happened to you? she said. Millions of things! he exclaimed. Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath. I am in love, he said. In love, he repeated, in love with a girl in India. In love! she said. And who is she?

Eliades 82 A married woman, unfortunately, he said, the wife of a Major in the Indian Army. (41-5) This is, of course, only a part of the scene, cut down so that the dialogue and a few authorial glosses remain. What can be gleaned from this stripped-down version of the scene is the present. Led by this, one could guess that there is history between the characters, but the actual romantic past is removed. The dialogue alone leads the story to being concerned with Peters legal maneuvers and Clarissas hostess prattle, not much more. When the internal narrative is reinserted, the characters real voices and concerns emerge. Take for example the emotional middle of the passage: But he never liked any one who-our friends, said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her. Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart, too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than Ive ever been since, he thought. And as if he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight. Herbert has it now, she said. I never go there now, she said. (42) Neither appear as unfeeling as they did, nor so abrupt or arbitrary in their speech with the narrative casting beyond their surfaces, taking on a very close third person and then layering that close third person with a distanced third person watching the actual movements in

Eliades 83 Clarissas drawing-room objectively. Peter moves closer to Clarissa in the passage seeing himself in Bourton as the reader sees him in both Bourton and Clarissas drawing room simultaneously under the narratives flexibility. The undercurrents of Peters thoughts rest beneath the surface of his dialogue, undercurrents which lap against her own thoughts and dialogue, so that when she says Herbert has it now, the line does not come out of awkward silence, but from the glow of the moon on the terrace. Through the oscillating narration, Woolf depicts the actual scene, acting as translator for her characters (J. W. Graham qtd. in Lanser 114), creating a vivid text through their motives and pasts. This way of working through characters was one of Woolfs chief aims in Mrs. Dalloway, of which she said: I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense (Woolf, Diary II 248). She wished to give her work form through her characters which had always been paramount in the work. Of Clarissa, she tunnels through and says, She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. (Dalloway 8-9) There is an internal detail allowed here that would not come from elsewhere but from an authoritative narrative. This consciousness would not be observed without Woolfs avoidance of creating, as she says, personality (Diary II 265). Characters are to be merely views, she wrote, for Directly you specify hair, age &c something frivolous, or irrelevant, gets into the book (265). While Mrs. Dalloway is stuffed with characters, it is always with their voices ringing out: Clarissa, Peter, Lucrezia, an old man speaking, the reader catching a

Eliades 84 gloved hand, a chocolate clair, red nostrils but not a police profile description, a thin man of average build standing at five foot ten with grey-streaked hair. Her characters are always shifting, not concrete enough to pin to the entomologists block, but full of the twists and turns of minds encased in names and bodies. The voice of no age or sex heard by Peter Walsh near Regents Park Tube station (Dalloway 80), for example, does not attach itself to a physical figure until a page passes. Like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing ee um fah um so foo swee too eem oo and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze. (81) The depiction of the woman as a sound and not as a person thwarts the desire to exact knowledge. Her words, which may yield meaning or character, evade even those aspects, as they are not words in a recognizable Western tongue, but syllables, the chanting of nature that has not conformed to the constructs of human language or the male form. Experience is kept in the realm of the abstract. Similarly, the first page dances away from immediate identification, beginning with the line: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself (3). The reader knows exactly with whom the novel is concerned through passing around Clarissa but does not have an immediate grip on the physical end. Experience is to be seen instead through a palate of color and shape. Woolfs reasoning for this arises out of the idea that No one can see [the human soul] wholeThe best of us catch a glimpse of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement. Still, it

Eliades 85 seems better to me to catch this glimpse, than to sit down with Hugh Walpole, Wells, etc. etc. & make large oil paintings of fabulously fleshy monsters from top to toe. (Letters II 598) Once again, she avoids not only the descriptions of her Victorian predecessors but also the scope of the texts they worked in. Though she calls the works fabulously fleshy monsters, which implies an indulgent fondness for their breadth, she seems resigned to getting a portion of the motions of character into her writing rather than all of them crowding her page (598). Yet Woolf does not avoid detail. In an impressionistic fashion cultivated in Kew Gardens, she captures the flower shop proprietor of Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilacs with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays, the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale (Dalloway 13) The color focus centers the reader in a very specific atmosphere and guides the narrative to look at aspects of the shop to gain not only place but person. However, her attention to detail was criticized by W. L. Courtney in his review of The Feminine Note in Fiction as the element which prevents women from being artists because a passion for details conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work (Womans 3), which may be one of the obstacles faced by Woolf in her work, if one were to accept a passion for details as a female trait. That opinion, however, can be disputed by any glance at a Charles Dickens

Eliades 86 novel. The specifically honed attention to detail, controlled use and momentary indulgences pulse Woolfs narrative in glimpses and intense bursts around her characters. Her work with Lucrezia, for instance, further does away with the necessity of physical presence. Once more the narrative ebbs around direct present thought, as if Lucrezia were speaking and past images conjured in her mind. It was she who suffered but she had nobody to tell. Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her sisters sat making hats, and the streets crowded every evening with people walking, laughing out loud, not half alive like people here, huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at a few ugly flowers stuck in pots! (Dalloway 23) Detail allows Woolf to cast out, to bring up the past as vividly, if not more vividly than the present. Remove the detail and the passage is left: Far was Italy and the houses and the room and the streets not like people here looking at flowers in pots! The transfer is possible, but the passage lacks body, without the specifics wrought in A Mark in the Wall and employed here. This mark of the advanced language, the ability to speak of that which is not present weaves the rest of the text, allowing a revis[ion of] traditional modes of character drawing (Brownstein 276) and signaling that the matters of time, established social order and novel structure are no longer applicable or usable and the people, sights and sounds, unofficial swirling patterns, are the new mode of the novel now appropriated for the furthest expression of reality, away from the old emphasis on setting. Mrs. Dalloway does make use of space, however for coloring the narrative and its motions, but does not specify location until the end of the second page, after which it has been alluded to previously in the mention of Westminster, Big Ben and Victoria Street.

Eliades 87 Setting is a backdrop, a space to play and to pass from character to character. As Woolf used the snail in Kew Gardens to pass from character to character, she uses setting in Mrs. Dalloway to jump minds. When the reader inhabits Mulberrys shop, prior to the first section, for example, they are roused from it by the bang of a car, which turns them to the street in the next section, which passes from Edgar J. Watkiss, then to Septimus and then to the general crowd. The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberrys shop window; old ladies on top of omnibuses spread their black parasolsMrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out (Woolf, Dalloway 15). The narrative has passed from Clarissa, to Watkiss, to Septimus, to the collective and back to Clarissa again because of the use of setting as an active medium. What matters is not the scenery but the characters inhabit that space, an interactive canvas that does not merely furnish tone but also a means to access the details of human existence. Woolfs constant displacement of the traditional narrative structure is remarkable as it thwarts the readers expectations to build not the anticipated structure but the needed structure. When the reader desires the most definition and description, as when the woman of no age or sex chants, the translation is removed, as in an Ancient Greek text where the meaning of chant is not found. The reader must make his or her own translation based on the elements provided in the rest of the text. The reason for the womans speech is not given even in the sound, allowing it to be drawn into symbolizing the meaninglessness of modern life or the power of woman. The ambiguity of the speech as it is presented affirms rather than negates Woolfs power as narrator. She creates spaces for interpretation in all of her weaving, refusing to answer questions of whether Peter marries his Daisy or not, or whether

Eliades 88 Clarissa and Sally will become friends again. Such is not the concern of this novel. What matters in Mrs. Dalloway are the events of a single day in preparation for the party that forms a final climax, an ending that does not climax in the straight sense, but blossoms. The conclusion is a final welling of sensation, expression and color, a culmination of the novels world and the writers work before the reader is cast off the page.

Eliades 89

Coda The path to creating a text about Virginia Woolfs forms has been a task that has demanded a consciousness about my own writing that was previously unaccessed. The process was one of stepping back, them a submergence, then stepping back again from the texts to pin down Woolfs forms and techniques into coherent and well-reasoned sentences. Woolfs constant channeling of voice, overturning of the authoritative narrative and overall displacement of the prevailing techniques and values of fiction creates both a space and an example of a non-dominant text, one which does not need the traditional narrative arc to carry the novel, formulas which are supposed to represent the whole of our human experience (Woolf, Art of Fiction 125) but do not do so for every writer. Woolf is an inspiration in her development of techniques and methods that may be applied by contemporary writers for the continued creation of new forms. As Woolf once said, the shape of a book was made by men out of their own needs for their own uses. There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of poetry play suits a woman any more than the sentence suits her (Room 77). Every form and any form is accessible and proper for the female narrative and female voice, as Woolf discovered. In her journey from The Voyage Out to Mrs. Dalloway, she reclaimed fiction for her own diction, breath and subject, reforming the shape of the British novel.

Eliades 90

APPENDIX A Graphic Chronology Dates June 1906 August 1906 August 1922 1924 1925 Short Stories 1908 December 1910 Summer 1912 1915 1916 July 1917 August 1917 1918 1919 January 1920 September 1920 January 1921 Early 1921 An Unwritten Novel The Mark on the Wall Kew Gardens The Voyage Out, complete Night and Day, developing Melymbrosia, first draft Melymbrosia, fifth draft Phyllis and Rosamond The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn Novels A Society The String Quartet Cracked Fiddles In the Orchard

Eliades 91 Night and Day, completed Night and Day Mrs. Dalloway, developing Mrs. Dalloway

APPENDIX B Narrative Shapes

Eliades 92

Eliades 93 WORKS CITED Abel, Elizabeth. Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of Mrs. Dalloway. The Voyage In: Fictions in Female Development. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland. 161-185. Hanover, NH: University Press, 1983. Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2001. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. The Novels of Jane Austen: The text Based on Collation of the Early Editions. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Vol. 2. London: Oxford, 1933. Beckson, Karl and Arthur Ganz. Literary terms: A Dictionary. Third Ed. New York: Noonday, 1991. Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Great Britain: University of Michigan, 1996. Bell, Madison Smartt. Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form. New York: Norton, 1997. Bowlby, Rachel. Introduction. A Womans Essays. Selected Essays, Volume One. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. ix-xxxiii. London: Penguin, 1992. Brownstein, Rachel M. Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels. New York: Viking, 1982. Cobley, Paul. Narrative. New York: Routledge, 2001. Friedman, Norman. Form and Meaning in Fiction. Athens, GA: Georgia, 1975.

Eliades 94 Hill, Katherine. Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: History and Literary Revolution. PMLA. 96 (1981): 351-362. JSTOR. 22 October 2007. Hirsch, Marianne. Spiritual Bildung: The Beautiful Soul as Paradigm. The Voyage In: Fictions in Female Development. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland. 23-48. Hanover, NH: University Press, 1983. Hughes, Robert. The Landscape of Pleasure. The Shock of the New. P. 112-163. Revised Edition. New York: Knopf, 1991. Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cornell, 1992. Leaska, Mitchell A. Introduction. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals. 1897 -1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. xv-xlv. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1990. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf, 1996. Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana, 1983. Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Indiana: Indiana, 1987. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987. Prince, Gerald. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. New York: Mouton, 1982. Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. New York: Longman, 1983. Stimpson, Catherine R. Doris Lessing and the Parables of Growth. The Voyage In: Fictions in Female Development. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland. 186-205. Hanover, NH: University Press, 1983.

Eliades 95 The Voyage In: Fictions in Female Development. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland. Hanover, NH: University Press, 1983. Welty, Eudora. The Short Story. Three Papers on Fiction. 26-46. Northampton, MA: Metcalf, 1962. Wheeler, Michael. English Fiction of the Victorian Period: 1830 -1890. Second Ed. New York: Longman, 1994. Wittig, Monique. The Mark of Gender. The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. 6373. New York: Columbia, 1986. Woolf, Virginia. The Art of Fiction. A Womans Essays. Selected Essays, Volume One. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. 121-125. London: Penguin, 1992. ---. Charlotte Bront. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume II: 1912-1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 26-31. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1987. ---. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ---. Cracked Fiddles. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 307-308. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume One. 1915-1919. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1977. ---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two. 1920-1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Assist. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harvest, 1978. ---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Four. 1931-1935. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Assist. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1982.

Eliades 96 ---. In the Orchard. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 143-145. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ---. Kew Gardens. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 849. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume I: 1888-1912 (Virginia Stephen). Ed. Nigel Nicolson. New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1975. ---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume II: 1912-1922. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976. ---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1923-1928. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978. ---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume IV: 1929-1931. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978. ---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume V: 1932-1935. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979. ---. The Leaning Tower. A Womans Essays. Selected Essays, Volume One. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. 159-178. London: Penguin, 1992. ---. The Mark on the Wall. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 78-83. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ---. The Modern Essay. A Womans Essays. Selected Essays, Volume One. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. 40-49. London: Penguin, 1992. ---. The Mills of the Gods. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 228-229. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988.

Eliades 97 ---. Modern Fiction. The Common Reader. First Series. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 146154. New York: Harvest, 1984. ---. Modern Novels. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 30-37. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988. ---. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. A Womans Essays. Selected Essays, Volume One. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. 63-87. London: Penguin, 1992. ---. Mr Henry Jamess Latest Novel. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume I: 19041912. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 22-24. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986. ---. Mr Howell on Form. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume II: 1912-1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 324-326. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1987. ---. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1981. ---. Mrs Gaskell. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume I: 1904-1912. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 340-344. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986. ---. Night and Day. New York: Harcourt, 1948. ---. The Novels of George Gissing. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume I: 19041912. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 355-362. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986. ---. On Re-reading Meredith. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume II: 1912-1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 272-277. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1987. ---. On Re-reading Novels. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 336-346. New York: Harcourt, 1988. ---. Phyllis and Rosamond. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 17-29. New York: Harcourt, 1985.

Eliades 98 ---. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals. 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1990. ---. A Room of Ones Own. New York: Harcourt, 1981. ---. A Society. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 118130. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ---. The String Quartet. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 132-135. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ---. An Unwritten Novel. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 106-115. New York: Harcourt, 1985. ---. The Voyage Out. New York: Harcourt, 1948.

Eliades 99

WORKS CONSULTED Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Ed. Kathy Menzei. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina, 1996. The American Heritage College Dictionary. Fourth Ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Bal, Mieke. On Story-Telling: Essays in Narratology. Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1991. Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford, 1990. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Chicago, 1961. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1992. Cuddon, J.A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Fourth Ed. Revised C. E. Preston. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998. DiBattista, Maria. Virginia Woolfs Major Novels: The Fables of Anon. New Haven: Yale, 1980. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of TwentiethCentury Women Writers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana, 1985. Froula, Christine. Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolfs The Voyage Out. Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature. 5.1 (1986): 63-90. JSTOR. 9 December 2007.

Eliades 100 The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Indiana: Indiana, 1990. Guiget, Jean. Virginia Woolf and Her Works. Trans. Jean Stewart. New York: Harvest, 1965. Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, PostImpressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge, 1998. Levenson, Michael. Modernism and the fate of individuality: Character and novelistic from Conrad to Woolf. New York: Cambridge, 1991. Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana, 1983. Marcus, Jane. Art & Anger: Reading Like A Woman. Columbus, OH: Ohio State, 1988. New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jane Marcus. Hong Kong: Nebraska, 1981. Oxford English Dictionary. Online Edition. 14 September 2007. Oxford University Press. 31 October 2007. The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia, 1986. Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism. Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana, 1995. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton, 1977. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana, 1989. Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant. Ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska, 1983. Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity. Ed. Ralph Freedman. Berkeley, CA: California, 1980.

Eliades 101 Welty, Eudora. Place in Fiction. Three Papers on Fiction. P. 1-15. Northampton, MA: Metcalf, 1962. ---. Words into Fiction. Three Papers on Fiction. 16-25. Northampton, MA: Metcalf, 1962. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. United States: Harcourt, 1984. ---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three. 1925-1930. ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Assist. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1981. ---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Five. 1936-1941. ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Assist. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1985. ---. Jacobs Room. Great Britain: Vintage, 2004. ---. Melymbrosia. Ed. Louise A. DeSalvo. New York: Public Library, 1982. ---. Monday or Tuesday. New York: Harcourt, 1921. ---. Mrs. Dalloways Party. Ed. Stella McNichol. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1973. ---. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 1981. Wright, Austin M. The Formal Principle in the Novel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1982. Yaeger, Patricia. Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Womens Writing. New York: Columbia, 1988.