Stream of Consciousness in Psychological Novels: A Study of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Stream of Consciousness in Psychological Novels: A Study of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS The stream of consciousness is a narrative technique consisting in the free representation of a person's thoughts as they appear in the mind, before being logically reorganized into sentences. The flow of consciousness is achieved through the inner monologue in psychological novels, or in those works where the individual emerges in the foreground, with his inner conflicts and, in general, his emotions and feelings, passions and sensations. Technical features • Short sentences often without a main verb • A fragmented description often interruped by side comments • The idroduction of images or thoughts ffrom a character’s past • Questions in mind JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) He was born in Dublin in 1882 and he was educated at Jesuit schools and University college, where he studied French, Italian and German languages and literatures and English literature. His interest was in European culture, and this led him to begin to think of himself as a European rather than an Irishman. His attitude contrasted with that of literary contemporaries, who were trying to rediscover the Irish Celtic identity referring back to the past. Joyce, on the contrary, believed that the way to increase Ireland's awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European viewpoint. His achievement was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people. He was able to represent the whole of man's mental, emotional and biological reality and to fuse it with the cultural heritage of modern civilization and with the reality of the natural world around him. The facts become confused and explored from different points of view. He analyses the impressions and thoughts that an outer event has caused in the inner world of the character. Joyce's stories and novels open in medias res, so the reader is forced to discover the information from the development of the story. The portrait of the character is based on introspection. Time is perceived as subjective, indeed, in his works the time follows the thought of the characters. The description is derived from the characters' mind floating. So, the events are no longer arranged according to a chronological order, but according to an order due to the character's mind. DUBLINERS One of the most important of Joyce’s works is Dubliners. He writes this work during his exile. He wants to give a realistic portrait of ordinary life in Dublin. Dubliners consists of fifteen stories and in each of them there is an Ephiphany. Characters in Dubliners experience both great and small revelations in their everyday lives, moments that Joyce himself referred to as “epiphanies,” a word with connotations of religious revelation. These epiphanies do not bring new experiences and the possibility of reform, as one might expect such moments to. Rather, these epiphanies allow characters to better understand their particular circumstances, usually rife with sadness and routine, which they then return to with resignation and frustration. Sometimes epiphanies occur only on the narrative level, serving as signposts to the reader that a story’s character has missed a moment of self-reflection. The epiphany motif highlights the repeated routine of hope and passive acceptance that marks each of these portraits, as well as the general human condition. The stories are arranged into four groups: the four categories are childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The last story, The Dead, can be considered Joyce’s first masterpiece. The description of the stories is realistic, concise and detailed. He uses realism and disciplined prose with typical rules of grammar. The central theme of the story is Paralysis. The paralysis of Dublin is physical and moral, linked to religion, politics and culture. In most of the stories in Dubliners, a character has a desire, faces obstacles to it, then ultimately relents and suddenly stops all action. These moments of paralysis show the characters’ inability to change their lives and reverse the routines that hamper their wishes. Such immobility fixes the Dubliners in cycles of experience. Eveline freezes like an animal, fearing the possible new experience of life away from home. These moments evoke the theme of death in life as they show characters in a state of inaction and numbness. Throughout the collection, this stifling state appears as part of daily life in Dublin, which all Dubliners ultimately acknowledge and accept. Eveline Eveline is probably the most famous short story of Dubliners. It belongs to the "adolescence". Joyce tells the story of a young girl who has the opportunity to change her life, taking a decision: to run away with her boyfriend Frank in Buenos Aires and to start a new life with him or to take care of her home and her family as she promised to her mother on her deathbed. At first Eveline seems to choose the new and better life that Frank proposes, but arrived at the port she is unable to board the ship for South America. Here the theme of paralysis is evident, Eveline cannot change her life but remains immobile, paralyzed. Stream of Consciousness: the description of Eveline’s thoughts and emotions dominates the text; most of the “action” takes place inside Eveline's head. The words convey her thoughts, emotions and memories rather than describing a series of events. Epiphany: Eveline suddenly understands that her destiny is at home with her family, when she hears a melody in the street which is the same she heard when she promised to her mother to stay. Paralysis: because she cannot run away with Frank. The Dead “The Dead,” the final and longest story of his collection Dubliners, is considered one of themost beautifully executed stories in the English language and the culmination of Joyce’s critical and ironic portraits of everyday life in Dublin. Its subject is the epiphanic revelation of Gabriel Conroy, who, as his illusions are dispelled, realizes the shallowness of his love for his wife, Gretta. “The Dead” takes places on the religious feast of Epiphany, at the holiday party of Julia and Kate Morkan, the spinster aunts of Gabriel Conroy. Gabriel arrives at the party with an attitude of disdain for the provinciality of his aunts and their guests, although he keeps his thoughts largely to himself. His pomposity and self-centeredness appear in his several encounters with the other guests, including Miss Ivors who playfully rebukes him for his loyalties to England as a reviewer for the pro-British newspaper Daily Express, calling him a “West Briton.” Gabriel mistakes this banter for a personal attack and attempts to redeem himself before the gathered attendees in his annual speech, a smug and highly self- conscious display of rhetoric and cliché. Near the close of the party, Bartell D’Arcy, a noted tenor in attendance, sings an old Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim.” Later, after retreating to the Hotel Gresham, Gabriel speaks to his wife, Gretta, a beautiful woman from the Irish west. Distracted from the conversation, Gretta is haunted by the song, which has reminded her of a former love. When Gabriel presses the subject, she reveals that many years ago she knew a young man who worked in the gasworks named Michael Furey. Afflicted with consumption, Furey died after leaving his sickbed on a rainy night to keep vigil outside Gretta’s window on the eve of her leaving Galway for Dublin. Gretta later observes, “I think he died for me.” Gabriel, contemplating himself in a mirror, becomes aware of his own pettiness, and realizes that he has never loved his wife as Michael Furey did. VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) MRS DALLOWAY Mrs Dalloway starts with Clarissa’s interior monologue: here, Virginia Woolf uses the technique of stream of consciousness. One day, in morning, Clarissa goes out to buy flowers for her party and from line 3, with the sentence “thought Clarissa Dalloway”, we enter in Clarissa’s stream of thoughts, in her memories, evoked by “squeaking door hinges”, for example. Clarissa remembers when she was eighteen at her country house in Bourton, she remembers her young lover, Peter Walsh, his smile, eyes, pocket-knife, grumpiness, and there’s a flash-forward, a flash of the future, because Peter Walsh would be back from India one of these days, June or July. Mrs Dalloway is seen through the thoughts of Scrope Purvis, her neighbour, he sees her as a charming woman, she’s like a bird because of her vitality, vivacity, though she’s over fifty, and she’s white because of her illness, this