"The wave breaks. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Below is the PDF of Virginia Woolf's 1926 article "The Movies and Reality." The citation information is as follows: Woolf, Virginia. "The Movies and Reality," in Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. London: Verso, 2006 (230-234).
woolf_the_movies_and_reality.pdf | |
File Size: | 1213 kb |
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If you are interested in going deeper into the theory of Stream of Consciousness, you will want to read this piece by William James (the brother of Henry James and a famous psychologist) laying out his theories of the Stream of Consciousness. This is recommended but not required.
william_james_the_stream_of_consciousness.pdf | |
File Size: | 2825 kb |
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And here is a study of how the concept of Stream of Consciousness appears in Modernist novels like Woolf's:
stream_of_consciousness_in_the_modern_novel.pdf | |
File Size: | 5476 kb |
File Type: |
Rhoda (in the bathroom)
p. 56-57
“There are hours and hours,” said Rhoda, “before I can put out the light and lie suspended on my bed above the world, before I can let the day drop down, before I can let my tree grow, quivering in green pavilions above my head. Here I cannot let it grow. Somebody knocks through it. They ask questions, they interrupt, they throw it down.
“Now I will go to the bathroom and take off my shoes and wash; but as I wash, as I bend my head down over the basin, I will let the Russian Empress’s veil flow about my shoulders. The diamonds of the Imperial crown blaze on my forehead. I hear the roar of the hostile mob as I stop out on to the balcony. Now I dry my hands, vigorously, so that Miss, whose name I forget, cannot suspect that I am waving my fist at an infuriated mob. “I am your Empress, people.” My attitude is one of defiance. I am fearless. I conquer.
“But this is a thin dream. This is a papery tree. Miss Lambert blows it down. Even the sight of her vanishing down the corridor blows it to atoms. It is not solid; it gives me no satisfaction—the Empress dream. It leaves me, now that it has fallen, here in the passage rather shivering. Things seem paler. I will go now into the library and take out some book, and read and look. Here is a poem about a hedge. I will wander down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight colored may, wild roses and ivy [57] serpentine. I will clasp them in my hands and lay them on the desk’s shiny surface. I will sit by the river’s trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their own watery light. I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and present them—Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the center resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them—Oh! to whom?
“Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses rattle along the sea front to the town. I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them—Oh! to whom?” (56-57)
1. Circle the four most interesting, vivid, distinctive words in this passage (whether or not you know what they mean).
2. What are some elements of poetic language identifiable in the passage? Circle them and label them (ie. repetition, alliteration, metaphors, similes, rhyme, etc).
3. How do these words and poetic devices help to create the meaning of the passage and give a sense of the character and her relationship to the world?
4. Try to paraphrase the passage in ordinary language. What is happening?
Jinny (at a party)
p. 102
I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way, I say to this one, ‘Come.’ Rippling black, I say to that one, ‘No.’ One breaks off from his station under the glass cabinet. He approaches. He makes towards me. This is the most exciting moment I have ever known. I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, flowing this way, flowing that way, but rooted, so that he may come to me. ‘Come,’ I say, “come.’ Pale, with dark hair the [103] one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here; he stands at my side.
“Now with a little jerk, like a limpet broken from a rock, I am broken off: I fall with him; I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood. We go in and out of this hesitating music. Rocks break the current of the dance; it jars, it shivers. In and out, we are swept now into this large figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing, are pressed together within its body; it holds us together; and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. Suddenly the music breaks. My blood runs on but my body stands still. The room reels past my eyes. It stops.
“Come then, let us wander whirling to the gilt chairs. The body is stronger than I thought. I am dizzier than I supposed. I do not care for anything in this world. I do not care for anybody save this man whose name I do not know. Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white? My peers look back at me now. I look straight back at you, men and women. I am one of you. This is my world. Now I take this thin-stemmed glass and sip. Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Scent and flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, to a yellow liquid. (102-103).
1. Circle the four most interesting, vivid, distinctive words in this passage (whether or not you know what they mean).
2. What are some elements of poetic language identifiable in the passage? Circle them and label them (ie. repetition, alliteration, metaphors, similes, rhyme, etc).
3. How do these words help to create meaning (either helping to develop the character of the speaker or helping to create a sensory feeling about this scene)?
4. Try to paraphrase the passage in ordinary language. What is happening? What might this scene look like from the perspective of the men Jinny is dancing with?
Susan (at the dinner party for Percival)
p. 131
“When I came into the room tonight,” said Susan, “I stopped, I peered about like an animal with its eyes near to the ground. The smell of carpets and furniture and scent disgusts me. I like to walk through wet fields alone, or to stop at a gate and watch my setter nose in a circle, and to ask “Where is the hare? I like to be with people who twist herbs, and spit into the fire, and shuffle down long passages in slippers like my father. The only sayings I understand are cries of love, hate, rage and pain. This talking is undressing an old woman whose dress had seemed to be part of her, but now, as we talk, she turns pinkish underneath, and has wrinkled thighs and sagging breasts. I shall never have anything but natural happiness. It will almost content me. I shall go to bed tired. I shall lie like a field bearing crops in rotation; in the summer heat will dance over me; in the winter I shall be [132] cracked with the cold. But heat and cold will follow each other naturally without my willing or unwilling. My children will carry me on; their teething, their crying, their going to school and coming back will be like the waves of the sea under me. No day will be without its movement. I shall be lifted higher than any of you on the backs of the seasons. I shall possess more than Jinny, more than Rhoda, by the time I die. But on the other hand, where you are various and dimple a million times to the ideas and laughter of others, I shall be sullen, storm-tinted and all one purple. I shall be debased and hide-bound by the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity. I shall push the fortunes of my children unscrupulously. I shall hate those who see their faults. I shall lie basely to help them. I shall let them wall me away from you, from you and from you. Also, I am torn with jealously. I hate Jinny because she shows me that my hands are red, my nails bitten. I love with such ferocity that it kills me when the object of my love shows by a phrase that he can escape. He escapes, and I am left clutching at a string that slips in and out among the leaves on the tree-tops. I do not understand phrases” (131-2).
1. Circle the four most interesting, vivid, distinctive words in this passage (whether or not you know what they mean).
2. What are some elements of poetic language identifiable in the passage? Circle them and label them (ie. repetition, alliteration, metaphors, similes, rhyme, etc).
3. How do these words help to create meaning (either helping to develop the character of the speaker or helping to create a sensory feeling about this scene)?
4. Try to paraphrase the passage in ordinary language. What is happening? How do you imagine Susan looking, moving, or inhabiting the space at Percival’s party while she has these thoughts?
p. 56-57
“There are hours and hours,” said Rhoda, “before I can put out the light and lie suspended on my bed above the world, before I can let the day drop down, before I can let my tree grow, quivering in green pavilions above my head. Here I cannot let it grow. Somebody knocks through it. They ask questions, they interrupt, they throw it down.
“Now I will go to the bathroom and take off my shoes and wash; but as I wash, as I bend my head down over the basin, I will let the Russian Empress’s veil flow about my shoulders. The diamonds of the Imperial crown blaze on my forehead. I hear the roar of the hostile mob as I stop out on to the balcony. Now I dry my hands, vigorously, so that Miss, whose name I forget, cannot suspect that I am waving my fist at an infuriated mob. “I am your Empress, people.” My attitude is one of defiance. I am fearless. I conquer.
“But this is a thin dream. This is a papery tree. Miss Lambert blows it down. Even the sight of her vanishing down the corridor blows it to atoms. It is not solid; it gives me no satisfaction—the Empress dream. It leaves me, now that it has fallen, here in the passage rather shivering. Things seem paler. I will go now into the library and take out some book, and read and look. Here is a poem about a hedge. I will wander down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight colored may, wild roses and ivy [57] serpentine. I will clasp them in my hands and lay them on the desk’s shiny surface. I will sit by the river’s trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their own watery light. I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and present them—Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the center resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them—Oh! to whom?
“Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses rattle along the sea front to the town. I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them—Oh! to whom?” (56-57)
1. Circle the four most interesting, vivid, distinctive words in this passage (whether or not you know what they mean).
2. What are some elements of poetic language identifiable in the passage? Circle them and label them (ie. repetition, alliteration, metaphors, similes, rhyme, etc).
3. How do these words and poetic devices help to create the meaning of the passage and give a sense of the character and her relationship to the world?
4. Try to paraphrase the passage in ordinary language. What is happening?
Jinny (at a party)
p. 102
I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way, I say to this one, ‘Come.’ Rippling black, I say to that one, ‘No.’ One breaks off from his station under the glass cabinet. He approaches. He makes towards me. This is the most exciting moment I have ever known. I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, flowing this way, flowing that way, but rooted, so that he may come to me. ‘Come,’ I say, “come.’ Pale, with dark hair the [103] one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here; he stands at my side.
“Now with a little jerk, like a limpet broken from a rock, I am broken off: I fall with him; I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood. We go in and out of this hesitating music. Rocks break the current of the dance; it jars, it shivers. In and out, we are swept now into this large figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing, are pressed together within its body; it holds us together; and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. Suddenly the music breaks. My blood runs on but my body stands still. The room reels past my eyes. It stops.
“Come then, let us wander whirling to the gilt chairs. The body is stronger than I thought. I am dizzier than I supposed. I do not care for anything in this world. I do not care for anybody save this man whose name I do not know. Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white? My peers look back at me now. I look straight back at you, men and women. I am one of you. This is my world. Now I take this thin-stemmed glass and sip. Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Scent and flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, to a yellow liquid. (102-103).
1. Circle the four most interesting, vivid, distinctive words in this passage (whether or not you know what they mean).
2. What are some elements of poetic language identifiable in the passage? Circle them and label them (ie. repetition, alliteration, metaphors, similes, rhyme, etc).
3. How do these words help to create meaning (either helping to develop the character of the speaker or helping to create a sensory feeling about this scene)?
4. Try to paraphrase the passage in ordinary language. What is happening? What might this scene look like from the perspective of the men Jinny is dancing with?
Susan (at the dinner party for Percival)
p. 131
“When I came into the room tonight,” said Susan, “I stopped, I peered about like an animal with its eyes near to the ground. The smell of carpets and furniture and scent disgusts me. I like to walk through wet fields alone, or to stop at a gate and watch my setter nose in a circle, and to ask “Where is the hare? I like to be with people who twist herbs, and spit into the fire, and shuffle down long passages in slippers like my father. The only sayings I understand are cries of love, hate, rage and pain. This talking is undressing an old woman whose dress had seemed to be part of her, but now, as we talk, she turns pinkish underneath, and has wrinkled thighs and sagging breasts. I shall never have anything but natural happiness. It will almost content me. I shall go to bed tired. I shall lie like a field bearing crops in rotation; in the summer heat will dance over me; in the winter I shall be [132] cracked with the cold. But heat and cold will follow each other naturally without my willing or unwilling. My children will carry me on; their teething, their crying, their going to school and coming back will be like the waves of the sea under me. No day will be without its movement. I shall be lifted higher than any of you on the backs of the seasons. I shall possess more than Jinny, more than Rhoda, by the time I die. But on the other hand, where you are various and dimple a million times to the ideas and laughter of others, I shall be sullen, storm-tinted and all one purple. I shall be debased and hide-bound by the bestial and beautiful passion of maternity. I shall push the fortunes of my children unscrupulously. I shall hate those who see their faults. I shall lie basely to help them. I shall let them wall me away from you, from you and from you. Also, I am torn with jealously. I hate Jinny because she shows me that my hands are red, my nails bitten. I love with such ferocity that it kills me when the object of my love shows by a phrase that he can escape. He escapes, and I am left clutching at a string that slips in and out among the leaves on the tree-tops. I do not understand phrases” (131-2).
1. Circle the four most interesting, vivid, distinctive words in this passage (whether or not you know what they mean).
2. What are some elements of poetic language identifiable in the passage? Circle them and label them (ie. repetition, alliteration, metaphors, similes, rhyme, etc).
3. How do these words help to create meaning (either helping to develop the character of the speaker or helping to create a sensory feeling about this scene)?
4. Try to paraphrase the passage in ordinary language. What is happening? How do you imagine Susan looking, moving, or inhabiting the space at Percival’s party while she has these thoughts?
Bernard
127: There is a red carnation in that vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves—a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.
266: (of his friends)
All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying with fumbling fingers to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow—no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken—I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one [267] person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, so am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.