A NOVELIST WHO PAINTED HER WORKS:
A POLYCHROMATIC READING OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
by
Song Yajie
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Associate Professor Xu Libing
Shanghai International Studies University
May 2010
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Associate Prof. Xu
Libing, without whose help it’s impossible for me to accomplish my thesis. During
the two years of my study in Shanghai International Studies University, she helps me
selflessly in many aspects. She provides me with many materials about Virginia Woolf,
and I benefit much from them. What’s more, she directs me with great patience in my
research and often encourages me to carry my research further, which are the
substantial factors that bring the fulfillment of my thesis. Besides, she even shows
great care for my daily life and aids me by many kinds of ways.
My special thanks also go to all the other professors in SISU whose passion for
literature and illuminating lectures did a great deal for cultivating my perception and
ability for academic research.
i
Abstract
Virginia Woolf is one of the most outstanding writers and critics in English
literature, and a key member of the Bloomsbury Group of the 20th century. She is
believed to be one of the four “Stream of Consciousness novel writers” together with
her contemporaries James Joyce ， William Faulkner and Marcel Proust. Her
achievements in literature still have enormous influence, so she has always been the
concern of scholars at home and abroad. She has contributed a lot in the development
of modern novel writings. All through her life, she had devoted herself to
experimenting in modernist novel- writing both in theories and in practice. She
maintained that novels should reveal the inner side of the human beings and also
challenged the traditional novel writing technique.
In Woolf’s works, readers can find the painting elements frequently. The
members of the Bloomsbury Group are artists and art theorists, so Woolf is, in a large
extent, influenced by those Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and other painters.
She tries to put the fleeting impressions of moments of people’s life down on the
paper with her subtle sensibility and makes her works eternal paintings out of her pen.
This thesis consists of four parts, which mainly discusses the painting elements
in Woolf’s fictional works.
The introduction talks about Virginia Woolf’s life and works, the literature
review on Woolf studies and the influence of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
Chapter one aims at the world of paintings in Woolf’s writing. And the artistic
influence from her families and the Bloomsbury Group, especially the Impressionist
and Post-Impressionist aesthetic theories brought to her by Roger Fry and Clive Bell.
Chapter two focuses on Woolf’s employment of two painting elements, light and
colours, which makes readers see Woolf’s “paintings” while she depicting the inner
side of her characters.
Chapter three discusses Woolf’s tendency to capture the transient moment and
her experiment on applying various imageries, showing her individual sensations of a
ii
specific transitory moment and the characters’ mental activities that permeate into the
transitory moments.
From the discussion above, a conclusion is reached that Woolf’s fictional works
are works of verbal paintings. Woolf skillfully employs a number of Impressionist and
Post-Impressionist painting techniques in portraying characters’ psychological
activities and their inquiry into the meaning of life. So after the polychromatic reading
of Virginia Woolf’s fictional works, we can say that she is a real artist in the literature
world who painted her works.
Key words: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, light, colours, transient
moment, imagery
iii
摘要
弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫是 20 世纪英国文学史上最杰出的作家和评论家之一，也
是布鲁斯伯里团体的核心成员之一。她与同时代的詹姆斯·乔伊斯、威廉·福克
纳和马赛尔·普鲁斯特一起被称为“四大意识流小说作家”。她的文学成就至今
影响巨大，她也因此成为国内外学者长期关注的对象。她为现代小说的发展作出
了重大贡献。弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫毕生致力于对现代小说的理论和创作实验。她挑
战传统的小说写作技巧，主张小说应该注重人物内心的描写和刻画。
在伍尔夫的作品中，读者经常可以发现绘画的元素。布鲁斯伯里团体的成
员都是艺术家或艺术评论家，因此伍尔夫受到了印象派、后印象派或其他画家的
影响。她以细腻的情感描绘日常生活中的瞬间印象，在笔下描绘出永恒的画卷。
本文由四部分组成，主要探讨伍尔夫小说中的绘画元素。引言部分着重介绍
伍尔夫的生平和作品，回顾对伍尔夫的理论研究，以及印象派和后印象派绘画的
影响。
第一章研究伍尔夫作品的绘画世界，分析了她的家庭，布鲁斯伯里团体，尤
其是罗杰·费莱和克莱夫·贝尔提出的印象派、后印象派的美学理论在艺术上对
伍尔夫产生的影响。
第二章探析伍尔夫在其作品中对两个重要的绘画元素——光线和色彩的运
用，在描写小说人物内心世界时使得读者能够欣赏她作的“画”。
第三章探讨伍尔夫捕捉短暂瞬间的倾向，她运用各种意象表现某一特定瞬
间，描绘人物瞬间的思想活动。
综上所述，我们可以得出结论——伍尔夫的小说创作也是语言作画的过程。
在描写人物心理活动以及他们对生命意义的探寻过程中，伍尔夫巧妙地运用了众
多印象派、后印象派的绘画技巧，通过色彩与光影刻画人物内在心理及思想活动。
通过对伍尔夫小说的多彩解读，我们可以说她是文学界的一名真正的艺术家，一
个书中作画的小说家。
关键词：印象派，后印象派，光线，色彩，短暂瞬间，意象
iv
Contents
Acknowledgements...........................................................................................................................i
Abstract............................................................................................................................................ii
摘要 .................................................................................................................................................iv
Introduction.....................................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1 The World of Paintings in Woolf’s Writing................................................................7
1.1 Influence of Impressionism and Post-impressionism in Woolf’s Fiction......................8
1.2 Woolf’s Art Experience and Her Fictional Writing .....................................................11
1.2.1 Woolf’s Early Life with Her Family ...................................................................12
1.2.2 Bloomsbury Group...............................................................................................14
Chapter 2 The Integration of the Light and the Colour ............................................................17
2.1 The Impressionist Method in Integrating the Light and the Colour ..........................17
2.2 The Pursuit of the Changing Light and Shadow ..........................................................20
2.2.1 The Employment of Light....................................................................................20
2.2.2 The Chromatic Shadow .......................................................................................23
2.3 The Employment of Colours ..........................................................................................25
Chapter 3 Impressions and Images in Woolf’s “Paintings”......................................................31
3.1 Impressions of Transient Moment .................................................................................31
3.2 Images Shown on Woolf’s Canvas .................................................................................33
3.2.1 Images of Natural Scenery ..................................................................................34
3.2.2 Images of Artificial Substance.............................................................................36
Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................39
Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................42
Introduction
Virginia Woolf, one of the great innovative novelists and a great master of the
Stream-of-Consciousness novel, has been regarded as one of the principal modernist
literary figures of the twentieth century. She is also well known as an English essayist,
epistler, publisher, feminist, and short story writer. Woolf’s life spans Victorian and
modern times, and she is a significant figure in London literary society and a member
of Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf’s oeuvre is considerable, her best-known works
including the novels The Voyage Out (1915), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Wave
(1931), and the book-length feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929).
Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, a daughter of the distinguished critic, Sir
Leslie Stephen. She was brought up in London and educated privately. After the death
of her mother in 1895, Woolf had her first nervous breakdown. She suffered mental
illness all through her lifetime and she drowned herself in the River Ouse because of
insanity in 1941.
Following the death of her father in 1904, she moved to Bloomsbury, which later
became the first meeting place of the Bloomsbury Group—writers, artists and
intellectuals. Since 1905, Woolf founded, with her husband, Leonard Woolf, a civil
servant and political theorist, the Hogarth Press, which pioneered the publication of
experimental and controversial writers. The Hogarth Press became an influential
publishing house in the following decades. It was responsible for the first major works
of Freud in English, and published significant works by key modernist writers such as
T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein.
Virginia Woolf began her writing career professionally in 1905. In 1912, Virginia
Woolf began to publish her major work. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was
published in 1915, which was one of her wittiest, socially satirical novels. In 1919,
appeared Night and Day, a realistic novel set in London. Woolf was a significant
figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group between the
wars. And with To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Wave (1931), Woolf establishes
1
herself as one of the leading writers of modernism.
Woolf is also admired for her contributions to literary criticism and especially to
feminist criticism. A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) deal with
the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers and have examined the
necessity for women to make a claim for their own history and literature. By using the
stream of consciousness technique, Woolf reveals her own idea of life through the
mental processes of her characters and their emotional responses to existence. Her
stream of consciousness is flowing, poetic, feminine and, above all, painting-like and
aesthetic.
Woolf’s feminist thoughts and her unique writing techniques are given
preferential treatment by many scholars. From Woolf’s death in 1941 to the middle of
1970s, there appeared a few monographs to dedicate to Woolf and her works in the
Western literary world. In 1972, Qwentin Bell published a biography of Woolf, in
which Bell collected a lot of Woolf’s private materials. In 1990, Mitchell Leaska
edited and published Woolf’s diaries from 1897-1907 as well as her essay collective A
Passionate Apprentie. These materials make the objective and reasonable comments
on Woolf and her works.
Studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her
works, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian
Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. Louise A. DeSalvo offers
treatment of the incestuous sexual abuse Woolf has been subject to as a young woman
in her book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and
Work.
Woolf’s most controversial feminist idea is her androgynous theory. American
feminist critic Elaine Showalter points out in A Literature of Their Own, that
androgyny was the myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful
femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and ambition.
Woolf’s fiction has also studied for its insight into shell shock, war, class, reality,
and modern British society. Her best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One’s Own
(1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties female writers and
2
intellectuals face, and the future of women in education and society. Jean Guiguet, in
his Virginia Woolf and Her Works, holds the opinion that Woolf’s works are the
philosophical explorations about self, life, art and reality.
In Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, famous scholars show their various
aspects of Woolf studies. In Bloomsbury, the author Andrew McNeillie analysed
Bloomsbury group’s intellectual background, which showed that English aestheticism
was influenced by Kant and re-awakened by G. E. Moore at the turn of the century.
“For the young Virginia Stephen, the search for truth therefore had a classical history
and a modern application.”1 In “The Impact of Post-impressionism”, Sue Roe showed
up the extent to which Virginia Woolf visualized and designed in her fiction and, “like
post-impressionist painters, experienced with her own classical past while at the same
time ceaselessly trying for a new quality of immediacy.”2
In China, Woolfian study began in 1930s, but it was not until 1980s that the
research on Woolf reached an upsurge. Mr. Qu Shijing contributed a lot in Woolf
studies in China because he was the first who introduced and studied Woolf’s fictional
theories. More studies of Woolf were focused on her feminism and androgyny. In
1999, Jiang Yunfei dealt with the poetic narration in “Virginia Woolf’s Feminist
Poetics: Androgyny and Originality”.
Woolf’s literary impressionism developed through short story experiments, each
moment she depicts is like an Impressionist canvas. Woolf’s connection to
impressionism and post-impressionism is directly revealed in her sister Vanessa Bell’s
painting passion and Roger “Fry’s lectures on aesthetic form stimulated a wealth of
new ideas about how to make new experiments in writing”. 3 As an artist Virginia
Woolf was influenced by contemporary painting as well as by politics or philosophy,
and the unique language of her essay has a visual application and register.
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose
association of Paris-based artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name
1
2
3
Roe, Sue, and Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 上海外语教育出版社，2005 年,
Preface xiv
Ibid
Ibid, p169
3
of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression: soleil
lecant, which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review
published in Le Charivari.
Radicals in their time, early Impressionists broke the rules of academic painting.
Their aim was to render the effects of light on objects rather than the objects
themselves. They began by giving colours, freely brushed, primacy over line, drawing
inspiration from the work of painters such as Eugène Delacroix. The Impressionists
found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by
painting “en plein air”, which means painting in the open air. Painting realistic scenes
of modern life, they emphasises vivid overall effects rather than details. They use
short, “broken” brush strokes of pure and unmixed colour, not smoothly blended, as is
customary, in order to achieve the effect of intense colour vibration.
In impressionistic painting, short, thick strokes of paint are applied to quickly
capture the essence of a subject, rather than its details. And colours are applied
side-by-side with as little mixing as possible, creating a vibrant surface. The optical
mixing of colours occurs in the eye of the viewer.
Painting in the evening to get effets de soir- the shadowy effects of the light in
the evening or twilight is another technique of the impressionistic painting. On the
other hand, the play of natural light is emphasized. Close attention is paid to the
reflection of colours from object to object. Besides, shadows are boldly painted with
the blue of the sky as it is reflected onto surfaces, giving a sense of freshness and
openness that was not captured in painting previously.
Post-Impressionism is a term coined by a British artist and art critic Roger Fry, a
friend of Virginia Woolf, in 1910 to describe the development of French art since
Manet. Post-Impressionists extend Impressionism while rejecting its limitations: they
continue using vivid colours, thick application of paints, distinctive brushstrokes and
real-life subject matter, but they were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, to
distort form for expressive effect, and to use unnatural or arbitrary colour. Paul
Cézanne set out to restore a sense of order and structure to painting. He achieved this
by reducing objects to their basic shapes while retaining the bright fresh colours of
4
Impressionism.
And in Woolf’s works, she employs the impressionistic techniques to embody
the inner spiritual world of human being. In Modern Fiction, Woolf describes fiction
in terms of light—coming from within in a theatrical way. She maintains that, if the
writer were “a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he
must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there
would be not plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors
would have it.”4 She claims that “life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”5
Although the researches on Virginia Woolf are abundant now, there are still some
aspects that deserve further study. This research is carried out to explore the
connection between Woolf’s works and Impressionism and Post-impressionism
because we live in a colourful world and everything in it has its own colour from the
original form. Woolf has employed all kinds of colours to present the spiritual flows
of human. While using the intense colours like red and purple to show the egocentric,
arrogant or impetuous feelings, Woolf also uses such tranquil colours as blue and
green to express the unconventional, unruffled or serene feelings.
When the impressionistic painters make a screen by dissolving colours into bits
through optical analysis, Woolf creates her picture of characters’ mentality by
dissolving it into transitory moments through interior analysis. The impressionistic
painters like to capture their images without detail but with bold colours while Woolf
offers transient glimpses into several of her characters’ mental activities.
In this thesis, with three chapters, the author maintains that, in her works, Woolf
is influenced by both Impressionism and Post-impressionism. Each story and each
moment is a combination of a variety of impressionistic painting features. In my
thesis, great attention is paid to the painting elements, such as colour, light and image,
which are employed in Woolf’s works frequently, to explore the symbolic meaning of
4
5
Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader: First Series, Annotated Edition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002, p150
Ibid
5
these painting elements.
6
Chapter 1
The World of Paintings in Woolf’s Writing
Virginia Woolf attaches considerable importance to the style and technique of
writing. She concentrates great efforts on exploring and innovating the style of her
writing, being in touch with the art world. It is commonly assumed that being inspired
by the exhibition “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” held by Roger Fry at the
Grafton Galleries in 1910, Virginia Woolf, in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, writes
that “in or around December 1910 human character changed.”6 This place in time
comes to represent the influence of Post-Impressionism in Woolf’s fictional writing.
And Woolf further explains: “All human relations have shifted ---- those between
masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human
relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and
literature.”7
Woolf’s inclusion of painting elements in her works serves to accentuate the
subtle perceptions that make up daily life, and is too often disregarded only as the
background. And she represents the synaesthetic possibilities, which makes her
fictional works be something, rather than to describe something by presenting the
colour and the light of the real world, along with showing the way her characters
perceive and are influenced by the colour and the light.
Virginia Woolf deems that human character changes in pace with the aesthetic
diversification. Without denying the strong emphasis, in Woolf’s descriptive writing,
focusing specifically on painting style makes clear the way she is powerfully a
novelist who paints her works. While Duncan Grant was trying the
Post-Impressionist techniques, as Sue Roe mentions, “Virginia Woolf toiled with
the business of …creating colour and evoking light in writing. In a sense therefore
she was working as she moved into her new experimental phase with the ancient
6
7
Woolf, Virginia, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, in A Bloomsbury Group Reader, p235, ed. By S. P. Rosenbaum,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1993
Ibid
7
problems of picture-making.”8 We may see this from Woolf’s short stories with
paintings in her mind. For example, in her early short story “Blue and Green”,
Woolf “experiments with the depiction of pure colour”.9 And in “Kew Gardens”
she strews with the play of light upon colour, which makes the scenes in “Kew
Gardens” the synonyms to the paintings on a canvas. In “The Mark on the Wall”,
Virginia Woolf fully and precisely showed her pictorial experiment to us by the
painting mode: “In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw”.
The narrator fixed us in the present just as the impressionists and the
post-impressionists did on their canvas.
The way the Impressionism and the Post-Impressionism changes Virginia
Woolf’s perceptions of painting elements and the presentation of the painting
elements in her fictions will be talked over in detail in the following pages.
1.1 Influence of Impressionism and Post-impressionism in Woolf’s Fiction
Impressionism develops chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. The name is derived from the title of a Claud Monet (1840-1926) work,
Impression, Sunrise. Some of the central figures in Impressionism are Frédéric
Bazille (1841-1870), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Claud Monet, Camille Pissarro
(1830-1903) and Alfred Sisley (1839-1899).
The Impressionists break the rules of academic painting. Characteristics of
Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, ordinary subject matter,
emphasis on light and unusual visual angles, while the apparent feature of
Impressionism is an attempt to record visual reality precisely and objectively in terms
of transient effects of light and colour. The impressionists employ special techniques
to paint. Short, thick strokes of paints are used to quickly capture the essence of the
subject, rather than its details. Colours are applied side-by-side with as little mixing as
possible, creating a vibrant surface. The optical mixing of colours occurs in the eyes
of the viewer. In pure Impressionism the use of black paint is avoid.
8
9
Roe, Sue, and Susan Sellers,The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf,上海外语教育出版社，2005 年, p171
Roe, Sue, and Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 上海外语教育出版社，2005 年,
p172
8
Impressionist paintings do not exploit the transparency of thin paint films (glazes)
which earlier artists have built up carefully to produce effects. As a result, the surface
of an impressionist painting is typically opaque. In impressionist painting, the play of
natural light is emphasized and close attention is paid to the reflection of colours from
object to object. And in paintings made outdoors, shadows are boldly painted with the
blue of the sky as it is reflected onto surfaces, giving a sense of freshness and
openness that has not been captured in previous painting. The impressionistic style of
painting is characterized chiefly by concentration on the general impression produced
by a scene or object and use of unmixed primary colours and small strokes to simulate
actual reflected light. And it is an artistic form that emphasizes the artist’s transitory,
subjective, and human perception of the world, which may be altered by the point of
view, and the temperament of the perceiver. Furthermore, object and subject blur with
their surroundings, either objective settings or subjective emotions. When the
Impressionists represent what they actually experience, the objects of consciousness
they render become individual rather than universal.
Influenced by the impressionist art movement, many writers adopt a style with
which the author represents the object as it is heard, felt and seen in a single passing
moment. Thus, the original writing styles changes into a new artistic style, which
transforms from the exterior to the interior, and from rational knowledge to perceptual
perceptions. For the author who employs the impressionistic style, representing scene,
character, and action in his writing is a perceiving process instead of a conceiving one.
“The literary Impressionists meant that fiction should locate itself where we ‘have an
impression’: not in sense, nor in the moment that passes, nor in the decision that lasts,
but in the intuition that lingers.”10 Impressionistic literature can basically be defined
when an author centres his story’s attention on the character’s mental life such as the
character’s impressions, feelings, sensations and emotions, rather than trying to
interpret them. Virginia Woolf is among the foremost creators of the type.
Briefly, the literary impressionists hold that the expression of the fleeting
impression of the exterior world is more significant than the photographic
10
Matz, Jesse, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p1
9
presentation of the fact. It opens a new way to recognize the world and human
consciousness. That is to say, the truth of the outside world is the impression it
produces on the sensitive mind. Impression is the bridge connecting human being and
the world, the observer and the observed.
Virginia Woolf speaks of impressions in “Modern Novels”(1919), “she moves
dialectically through a range of possible perceptual slants, finally to say two things
about the Impressionist temperament: it is that which thrives on the thrill of dialectic
movement itself, and ends happily shaken into negative capability.”11 And she also
maintains in “Modern Fiction” that if we “look within” ourselves, we see “myriad
impressions”.
While in impressionistic paintings Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) loves to
show the effect of sunlight on flowers and figures, and Claud Monet was fond of
subtle changes in the atmosphere, Virginia Woolf in the literary field bears certain
similarity in that she caught the essence of what she was describing and what she had
seen in the world around her. “As early as 1931, William Empson haled Woolf as a
writer of Shakespeare’s stature, praising her symbolism, her impressionism”. 12
However, Woolf was not just copying what the life and the nature were, but tried to
construct a unity of artistic would through the impressionist form and logical
arrangement of structure. So, “Woolf commits herself to the free play of the
impression not because she revels in difference, but out of an effort to adumbrate a
new faculty, one that has the freedom perceptually to range.”13
From the 1880s, several artists began to develop different precepts for the use of
colour, pattern, form and line, derived from the Impressionist examples. The
representative Post-impressionists are Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and Vincent van
Gough (1853-1890), who exploited colour and vibrant swirling brush strokes to
convey his feelings and his state of mind. These artists were slightly younger than the
Impressionists.
11
12
13
Matz, Jesse, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p177
Goldman, Jane, 剑桥文学名家研习系列（英国卷）之五《弗吉尼亚.伍尔夫》
，上海外语教育出版社，2008，
p128
Matz, Jesse, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p178
10