Virginia Woolf isn't a Writer
Virigina Woolf isn’t a writer
She’s an actress!
And also a sock puppeteer (read to the end to see why).
I’ve been consuming an increasing amount of media about acting lately, because I think it’s cool. As a result, I’ve begun to realize the introspective aspect of acting. A good actor knows themself very well in order to pull bits of that self into a character (or so I’m told). And that is exactly what Virginia Woolf does in Mrs. Dalloway! She draws on her own experiences, views, and feelings, and wraps them into characters that exist both fundamentally tied to her and as their own separate entities! Then, in doing so her finished work is a spectacular insight into her own self as well as an interesting exploration of different facets of human experience in general. Acting. Boom.
In Mrs. Dalloway, the characters have so many different life experiences, and yet many of them have suspiciously significant ties to Woolf. Septimus struggles with a misunderstood mental illness, as Woolf herself did. Clarissa experiences complicated maybe romantic feelings towards women, and is recovering from influenza on bedrest, just like Woolf. With these experiences forming cores of the characters in the novel, I think it is reasonable to guess that other characters have similar emotional cores drawn from Woolf in some way. That is what makes the characters seem so vivid and human: Virginia Woolf’s own very real human experience is woven into each of them. She expresses herself as the characters express themselves separate from her, and then writes it down so we can see that too! It is genius!
In this way, the novel is not just a novel, but a performance. The narrative style is very similar to what, I think, actors do. Woolf drops into the mind of a character, and then navigates the world through their eyes. Woolf is creating a sort of map of the same world through each different person's eyes by completely emerging the reader in their experience. In narrating this in such a way, she brings the audience on this empathetic human journey with her. We emerge from the book knowing her characters and her very well.
So as you can tell, I really like the combination Virginia Woolf strikes in her novel of exploring the experiences and thoughts of her own characters while also subtly baring her own soul to us. It is an enthralling consideration of the human experience-- at the time and in general-- and I love it!
Now I’m going to continue with my visual metaphors from last time. Imagine, if you will: Virginia Woolf’s characters are sock puppets. They all have their own appearance, actions, personalities, which are immediately visible to anyone living within the world of her novel (the sock). But then each of them has a core of Woolf-- the hand controlling each sock puppet belongs to the same body. She then adds layers of socks and googly eyes to fully submerge us in each sock’s consciousness, but the core of the sock is a part of her. And then she places us somewhere within the sock, with her, so we can observe its inner workings. This sounded better in my head but I still stand by it.
In summary: Woolf pulls parts of herself into the novel, into her characters, to make them very vividly human. And in doing so, and sharing those humans with us, she allows us to know her and these other people she is portraying.
I loved your post Fallon!! You brought up so many great key points and the connections you made to Woolf being an actress and sock puppeteer were really well thought out. I also stand by Woolf being a puppeteer. I completely agree on how readers can see Woolf's own personal experiences through the characters that she writes about.
ReplyDeleteYour puppeteer analogy is really interesting! In class we mentioned that Woolf often uses a method of internal/implicit conversations between characters and the natural flow from the thoughts of one character to another. Acknowledging that it's just one person, Woolf, controlling character/sock puppet from underneath really helps explain how the thoughts of the characters fit in with each other so nicely (ex. the thoughts of Clarissa are directly responded by the thoughts of Peter as if they were actually conversing out loud).
ReplyDeleteI really like your metaphor of Woolf as a sock puppeteer, acting out a story that's informed on a lot of levels by her own experience! I think this idea of the novel reading a little bit like a play makes a lot of sense, especially considering the way we're constantly seeing the characters from both the interior and the exterior—in a sense, they're all "acting" to some degree, and the degree to which their internal reality lines up with the appearance they're projecting is something Woolf seems really interested in exploring.
ReplyDeleteExcellent blog post, and a beautiful metaphor! I particularly agree that, while every character is different, Woolf's own experience and personality is still central to each character; to elaborate further, I can sometimes feel myself putting a "spotlight" on certain characters, or imagining their internal monologue in a theater-like setting, as if they're "performing" for the reader, which is exactly how Woolf intended to write the novel, with such strong character connections, which only strengthens your point. It feels like I'm reading a movie, almost. Great post.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I love the metaphor and the tone of this post. It's easy to connect the author to characters, especially in this book and the Mezzanine, but I never thought about it as acting. I suppose it is, like writing a show for the reader. Makes me wonder about other books with flatter characters. Twilight *cough cough*. Maybe the author had a harder time acting and making the characters interesting.
ReplyDeleteI really like the metaphor of acting because there were scenes in the novel where I felt that the description of the surroundings made you think of how a camera would move in a movie. The scenes describing various characters walks around London especially seemed like they had an almost cinematic aspect to them.
ReplyDeleteOne of Woolf's last novels is titled _Between the Acts_, and it's been many ages since I've read it--but as I recall it does concern characters who are putting on a play, and we see them in the interstices between performances (as the title suggests). It was never finished, and it was published after her death--but it might be interesting to think about in light of your comparison of Woolf's authorial presence to that of an actor. She is clearly thinking of the blurred lines between fictional and nonfictional "performance" of self or personality, and I like this way of seeing the characters in _Mrs. Dalloway._
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