THE CONCEPT OF TIME IN THE NOVELS

OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
by
KELLI EGAN NELSON, B.S. in Ed.
A THESIS
IN
ENGLISH
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Technological College
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Approved

Accepted

August, 1969

PREFACE

Growing up in the intellectual environment of a literary

family, Virginia V7oolf was impressed by the need for contemporarywriters to formulate a new approach to the treatment of time in their
novels.

Conventional handling of time seemed a distortion of the way

in which time actually influences and is influenced by human lives.

Not only is time incapable of being measured by such symbolic representations as hours, days, or months, but a writer cannot refer accurately to such arbitrary divisions as past, present, and future.
Time flows in uninterrupted succession; yet the individual carried
along by time is not restricted to one dimension; through the use of
memory, he can travel back and exist in the past before being swept
along toward the future.

Since Virginia Woolf felt that time exists

only within the individual, she often chose experimental patterns of

time for her novels.
Virginia V/oolf's concept of time had a formative impact on her
novels, influencing both characterization and structural development.
The object of this paper is to analyze Virginia V/oolf's treatment of
time by a study which involves a contrast between conventional treatment of time and her own concept of time, factors influencing her philosophy about time, and an analysis of four of her time-oriented novels:
Jacob's R^oOTi, Orlando, The Waves, and The Years.

11

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
PREFACE
I.

II.

III.
IV.
V.
VI.

. .

A CONTRAST BETV/EEN TRADITIONAL AND MODERTJ

TREATMENTS OF TIME

ii

DIRECT INFLUENCES ON VIRGINIA WOOLF'S

PHILOSOPHY OF TIMS

10

JACOB'S ROOM

15

ORUNDO AND THE WAVES

22

THE YEARS

30

CONCLUSION

40

NOTES

in

BIBLIOGRAPHY

^5

111

CHAPTER I

A CONTRAST BETWEEN TRADITIONAL AND MODERN

TREATMNTS OF TIME

The traditional method of handling time sequence in literature was followed by centuries of writers before Virginia Woolf and
other time-conscious modem authors broke from its confinements.

Ac-

cording to the conventional view of time, the past, present, and future
exist in an unending chain, along which man moves at an even pace, because the present moment, the

"NOX-J,"

vealing what once was the future.

is moving steadily forward, re-

These "Now's," discovered by man's

successive motion, form the medium which runs regularly from birth to
death for the traditionalist.

It is, therefore, of necessity to him

that fiction express this orderly progression of time.

In the tradi-

tional novel, the structure is based on the chronological patterning

of a series of events.
The images that best express the traditionalist's view of
time are those involving moving water, such as rivers and streams.
Moving water suggests a steady, regular, and inevitable passing of
hours, days, and years.

A selection from Carlyle suras up the conven-

tional image of moving time :

That great mystery of time, wero there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time,
rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide.T
1

It was not until the Renaissance that any great emphasis on

time itself emerged in literature.

Reflecting the vast technical and

scientific changes to which Renaissance life was subject, mutability

was the primary theme of much of the current literature.

In the son-

net sequences, particularly, time is the agent of mutability, a force

which causes everything to undergo constant change.

Shakespeare's

Sonnet CXV is typical of the sonnet tradition based on the theme of

mutability :
But reckoning Time, whose million'd accidents
Creep in 'twixt VOXVTS and change decrees of kings.
Fan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents,
Divert strong minds to the course of altering things.^
In many of Shakespeare's plays, time is personified as a heartless
participant in life's journey, destructive for nature, in general,
and for individuals, in particular, as in this passage from Pericles ;
Time's the king of men:
He's both their parent, and he is their grave.
And gives them what he \irlll, not what they crave.

(Il,iii)

The theme of mutability is also present in most pastoral elegies,

such as Milton's "Lycidas," VTith the emphasis placed on changes in nature.

In addition, Milton was concerned with time as a measure of dura-

tion in Paradise Lost, and chose the traditional outlook of time as a

regular medium.

To Milton, as to other conventional thinkers, time has

but one dimension, a linear order from an indefinitely stretching past

to an indefinitely stretching future.

This concept of time was sup-

ported by the scientific theories of Newton in the seventeenth century.

Philosophers and writers cannot help being swayed by what is happening

around them in the fields of science, music and other arts; the same
attitudes that shape the scientist and the musician shape the writer
of literature.
The seventeenth century marked the emergence of the modem
world with its scientific and technological advances.

Seventeenth

and eighteenth century writers were, hovjever, still interested in the

past only as the history leading up to the present moment, rather than
as a part of the whole.

Classicism had developed a spatial sense of

time; the past was vievjed as a cumulation of independent events complete in themselves.

With the coming of the Romantic Age, the emphasis

shifted to the value of human nature and huiuan development in terms of

the organic unity underlying both the.process of history and the growth
of the individual.3

Thus, a sense of continuity and relationship with

the past was expressed in the literature of the Age of Romanticism.

William V/ordsv7orth expresses his faith in natural continuity
in "Tintern Abbey" and in these lines from "Peele Castle" :
So pure the sky, so great v/as the air I
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene'er I look'd, thy Image still was there;
It trembled, but it never pass'd away.^
The theme of transcendentalism is also mirrored in this selection;
that is, nature produces forces which can transcend the ravages of
time.

Transcendentalism goes beyond mutability by dissolving the bar-

riers betvxeen past, present, and future.

In attempting to find the

unity underlying an individual's grovjth from infancy to old age.

Wordsworth developed the living, human implication of the past, expressing relationships between the past and the present individual:
"The child is father of the Man."^
Wordsworth V7as one of the first vTriters to break the conventional rules regarding plot organization.

"Spots of time," as Words-

worth calls them, are interspersed throughout The Prelude; these moments usually precede a catastrophe, providing visionary foresight to
the boy in the poem.

The Prelude is the development of one experience

which is the nucleus of all experience.

Wordsworth recalls various

places that affected him in time past and still strongly influence his
consciousness,^
Lawrence Sterne, although writing a few years earlier than
Wordsworth, was far ahead of his contemporaries in the area of time
treatment; modem literature owes much to Sterne, the first writer to
expand the moment.

By delving into detail and by using frequent short

digressions, Sterne lengthens and vadens each minute so that, unlike

conventional plot structure in which years of time may be condensed
into a few pages, it actually may take more time to read about an event
in Tristram Shandy than it would take to experience it in real life.
Sterne's aim was to picture human life as it really is, shifting the
emphasis from outer trappings of fiction, such as plots with a definite
beginning, middle and end, to the inner workings of the human mind with
its digressions and its own unique structure.

The resulting charac-

terization in Tristram Shandy is a freer interpretation of the individual,

Rejecting the traditional principle of chronological succession, Sterne

uses the device of time-shift, moving backward and forward to the present moment; at times the flow of life in Tristram Shandy seems almost
at a standstill.
New theories in the fields of science and psychology in the latter nineteenth century have directed modern thought regarding time and
have influenced trends in modern fiction.

With the formulation of the

theory of quantum mechanics, the scientist has come up against the dilemma of time; no longer can time be considered an absolute.

According

to Einstein's theory of relativity, the amount of time an event takes

is dependent upon the observer's frame of reference; in other vjords,
time is relative, a concept which agrees with the modern writer's view
of time.
From the nineteenth century on, sociology and anthropology
began investigating the past and seeing significance for contemporary
man in the patterns of earlier or more primitive behavior and beliefs,'
Freudian psychology places its emphasis on the past's forming and influencing the present.

Carl Jung, following in the footsteps of Freud,

formulated his theory of the collective unconscious, and, consequently,

provided support for the modem writer's thoughts about cohesion between individuals living in the present and those of the historical past.
The scientists and psychologists of the nineteenth centuiy may
have established new theories regarding man's relationship \.'ith the
past and vTith present time, but it remained for the twentieth century

writers and philosophers to spread and popularize these new attitudes

toward time.

According to a contemporary writer, V/ilbur Urban, "the

demand that time shall be taken seriously is one of the fundamental

notes of modernism.""

New technical advances are occurring so rapidly

that man cannot, with any assurance, foresee his life as it will be
even five years in the future; the future, as V7ell as the past and present, is in a state of flux,

Man has, therefore, lost his sense of sta-

bility as he participates in the increased mobility of modern life and

in rapid social and economic change.

Whereas, in the past centuries,

great change was almost unknown during the comparatively short life of
a man, the modern man's life span has doubled; and the rate of change
has accelerated, so that he is confronted again and again with the reality of a changing world.

He has become, therefore, more aware of

time, which is the agent of change.

Virginia Woolf was the product of twentieth century society
and the recipient of hundreds of years of such time-oriented literature
as that of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Sterne,

More immediate

influences on her philosophy of time will be discussed in the next

chapter,

Virginia Woolf felt it was necessary for the modern fiction

writer to strike out on his own, to cast off conventional attitudes v:hen
they no longer serve the purpose of the wi^iter.

Stating the aims of

modern fiction writers, Virginia V/oolf asserted.

We do not come to write better; all that
we can be said to do is to keep moving,
now a little in this direction, now in
that. . . .9

Virginia Woolf views time as highly personal, subjective, and

variable, in contrast to time measured by the clock, V7hich is the concern of traditionalists.

She rebels against clock time's being im-

posed upon human beings since, for them, time based on observations
of physical science is not natural.

According to clock time, every day

is the same length, and every hour is exactly one twenty-fourth of this
interval.

This concept is the tim.e of matter in motion; it knows noth-

ing of the human being who is not governed by the same laws as objects
without life or spirit.

Just as clock tim^e is based upon repetition of

a spatial nature, so time in the mind gains form from its repetitive nature, but on a personal level. Virginia Woolf s original interest VTas
to express time as a flux; only in her later novels did she try to find
something permanent VTithin the flux.

It is the repetition of these

permanent, or stationary, moments that lends form to her more advanced

time novels.

Margaret Church says that V7oolf captures a sense of per-

manence in one of two ways : either by a sense of return to the past

or by an arrested moment within which the return is effected.'^

In

order for man to be able to assess his own personal time, there must
be a stationary standard by V7hich to measure it; Virginia Woolf s "moments" constitute this standard.
Even in the conventional novel, time treatment determines the
structure of the work, as well as how the characters will be presented
V7ithin that frameviork.

The traditional structure is based on a chrono-

logical pattern divided into a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Time

8
has a particularly profound influence on the structure of the modern
novel.

David Daiches, a student of the contemporary treatm.ent of time,

explains that Virginia V/oolf does not depend on a chronological pattern, but, rather, bases her insights into experience upon making patterns within time that do not depend on chronology.^ ^

Part of the new

pattern is formed by the use of unifying devices which occur repeatedly

in the midst of flux; one such device is the ringing of church bells in
The Years.

The "moment" of return to the past also helps create the

pattern by repeating the same memory in the minds of different characters.

Perhaps the one most obvious structural characteristic employed
by the modern writer is the stream of consciousness technique of expressing a character's thoughts.

Time seems to be in slow motion in the

writings of the moderns in much the same way as it was in Sterne's

Tristram Shandy.

This slomng down of time is necessary for stream of

consciousness narration, a method of writing which attempts to portray

time as it exists in the mind, free from the arbitrary divisions of
past, present, and future; in the mind, these dimensions flov7 together.
Virginia V/oolf does not actually use the stream of consciousness method
as it was employed by Joyce, who attempted to record the complete
thoughts of his characters, hovjever disorganized and confusing they
might seem to the reader.

The thoughts of Virginia Woolfs characters

are obviously edited; only a small portion of the character's thoughts

appears.

The author frequently intrudes with such phrases as "she

thought" or "he wondered."

As a result of these intrusions by Virginia

Woolf, she manages to put more direction and unity into her fiction
than does Joyce,

J. B. Priestly believes that the stream of conscious-

ness technique is representative of our modern age because it is a revolt against the tyranny of passing time.^^
The stream of consciousness m.ethod and the new structural patterns employed by Virginia Woolf affect her characters to a great extent,
Remote from conventional operations of time, her characters move in a
complex world of ever-changing flux, and they are, for the most part,
aware of its implications.

In each novel, there is one character who

understands time better than the others do: Jacob, Bernard, Orlando
and Eleanor in the novels analyzed in this study.

The central figure

helps other characters bring their oim time concepts into perspective.
As the first of Virginia Woolfs time novels, Jacob's Room is
a fitting representative of her earlier fiction, with stress on the
value of mind-time over clock-time.

With some experience and greater

confidence in her abilities, Virginia Woolf v:rote two of her middle

novels, Orlando and The Waves, in which she recognized the stationary
moment which can counteract the flux of time.

Finally, in her later

books, including The Years, Virginia Woolf, with the maturity and experience of almost thirty years of writing, recognized and captured
the eternal recurrence within the moment that can counteract the flux.
It is the purpose of this study to trace the development of the writer
through these four representative novels.

CHAPTER II

DIRECT INFLUENCES ON VIRGINIA WOOLF'S

PHILOSOPHY OF TIME

Virginia Woolf did not live in a literary vacuum:

philosophers

and other writers had been experimenting with a new approach to time
treatment years before she was born, and she was aware of their successes and failures.

In The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf expresses

her admiration for Sterne, a novelist who lived a hundred and fifty years
earlier; she respects him for his technical innovations and for his courage to write in a unique way.

More immediate influences on Woolf vrere

fellow V7riters Proust and Joyce, vjho V7ere, in turn, greatly affected by
the books of the French philosopher Bergson.

According to statements

by Margaret Church in Time and Reality, Virginia Woolfs emphasis on

the moment of recall is Proustian, while her emphasis on the unifying
quality of this moment is Joycean.

Woolfs recreation of the past is

Proustian; her sense of return, Joycean.

of intuition are Bergsonian.

Her sense of flux and sense

Her sense of an arrested instant is mys-

tical; her sense of the persistence of past ages is Joycean.

In his Time and Free V/ill, Bergson states that the general
conception of time is that of a medium in which impressions are arranged
in the same kind of order as is found in space : one impression directly

10

11

follows another.

With the exception of one or two innovating concepts,

Bergson is basically conventional in his theories about time.

His

greatest contribution to the contemporary V7riter V7as to free hLm from

the artificial distinctions of clock time by suggesting a sense of
time which is meaningful in terms of man's innermost experiences.

To

Bergson, the difference between time measured by a clock and time

actually experienced is the distinction betvTeen a time patterned upon
space and a time patterned upon pure duration.

He bases his whole

philosophy on the idea that chronological or clock time is unreal and

that reality can be found only in man's inner sense of duration or
duree,

Duree is a state of constant flow existing within the mind in

which the present, past, and future are not separate.

All states of

time floxvT together, ignoring the unnatural succession which clock time
attempts to impose.

Internal time is pure duration, which may, in a

single moment, contain the experience that gives significance to a

lifetime.
Marcel Proust was strongly influenced by Bergson in his youth;
Bergson was then more popular than any other French philosopher before
or since his time,^

Proust agreed with Bergson that real time is not

that which is imposed upon man by space, but that v;hich lives within
his mind.

Proust's writing puts emphasis on instants of recall, the

central theme of all his novels; the past is rediscovered by interrupting Bergson's duree.

Thus, in Proust's novels can be found a

restatement of Bergson's theory of duration as well as Bergson's theory

12

of the unity of the self achieved through the act of memory.

Proust

has been called a novelist of multiple time, dwelling on "involuntary

memory," which gives past persons and scenes a symbolic depth they
never had before.3

A section from Remembrance of Things Past shows

Proust's emphasis on memory as a method of interrupting time flux;

But let a sound already heard or an odor caught in bygone
years be sensed anew, simultaneously in the present and
the past, real without being of the present moment, ideal
but not abstract, and imoiediately the permanent essence
of things, usually concealed, is set free and our true
self, which had long seemed dead but was not dead in
other ways,'awakes, takes on fresh life as it receives
the celestial nourishnent brought to it. A single minute
released from the chronological order of time has been
recreated in us, the human being, similarly released in
order that he may sense that moment.^
Virginia Woolf first read Proust's novels in the original
French during 1922 vjhile she was completing work on Jacob's Room.

His

influence on The V/aves is particularly obvious in her discussion of

Proust's characters which, she observes, rise from the depths of perception "like waves forming, then break and sink again into the moving
sea of thought and comment and analysis which gave them birth."^

To

both Proust and Bergson, Virginia VJoolf owes her sense of recreation
of the past in the present and use of catalysts to cause this recreation.
She differs from Proust and Bergson in her use of the moment in the novel
which interruots the sense of continuous duration and makes life seem to
i.

stand still.
The writings of James Joyce also had a formative effect on
Virginia Woolfs development.

She refers to having read The Portrait

13
of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as "what promises to be a far more
interesting work, Ulysses." which was then appearing in serial form in
the Little Revievj.^

She often had complimentary remarks for some new

technique of Joyce's and, indeed, felt at times that she was only writing
a poor imitation of the Irishman's style.

In an essay on modern fiction

from The Common Reader, she justifies Joyce's stream of consciousness

technique:

"In contrast with those whom we have called materialists,

Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the

flickerings of that innermost flame vjhich flashes its messages through
the brain. . . ."7
While there is no specific evidence that Virginia Woolf read
Heidegger and other existentialists, it seems unlikely that she would
not have been aware of their works, especially since time v;as a frequent
subject of existentialist writings.

Heidegger concentrates on "existen-

tial or historical time : time as the span of my life, rather than the
indefinitely stretching medium measurable by clocks or planetary motions. " The span of an individual's life follows a personal time; he
is aware of the end of his time, death, and also its beginning,

great responsibility is implied because the individual is made avjare of

his potentialities during his allotment of time.
existential time is future :9

The basic tense of

it does not move in the conventional man-

ner from past through present to future, but out of the future, through
the past and then to the present.

After reaching out to the future,

time turns back to assimilate the past v;hich has produced the present.'^

14

The aforementioned fiction writers and philosophers undoubtedly

were influential on Virginia Woolf.

Yet this statement does not mean

that she depended upon them for inspiration.

For the most part, they

merely affirmed and further solidified ideas that vrere already taking
form in her mind, ideas which were to have their oim profound effect on
a new generation of writers.

The writings of V/oolf are prominent il-

lustrations of the development of time-oriented novelists.

CHAPTER III

JACOB'S ROOM

Virginia Woolf was searching for a new form when she began work
on Jacob's Room, a novel vjhich was to have "no scaffolding; scarcely a
brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour,
everything as bright as fire in the mist."'

She abandoned the more

traditional forms she had used in her first txTO novels, The Voyage Out
and Night and Day, to lay the foundation for a new technique which
would allow her to express her concept of the flux of life.

After the

first two novels, her books have no rigid plots; one event is neither
the cause nor the result of another event.

Facts, ideas, and events

are no longer precisely situated in time and space; and, therefore, her
works contain no real beginning and no definite conclusions.

With its

complete lack of plot and its avoidance of traditional characterization,

'

Jacob's Room is an attempt at the renunciation of all that had been considered essential for an accurate representation of life.

In her essay

on Modern Fiction, Virginia Woolf explains V7hat she is trying to accomplish in Jacob's Room:
. . . if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he
could write what he chose, not V7hat he must, if he could
base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention,
there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love
interest or catastrophe in the accepted style. . . .2

15

16
On April l6, 1920, Virginia V/oolf started work on Jacob's Room
with much enthusiasm for the new technique,3 but it proved far more
difficult to write than it was to conceive.

After only a month of com-

posing, she became more and more convinced that she would not succeed
in making Jacob's Room an innovation in the field of literature.

By

the end of September, she began to feel that "What I'm doing is probably being done better by Mr. Joyce."^

Only after she had completed

the novel did she realize any satisfaction.

Jacob's Room tells the story of Jacob Flanders from early
childhood to his death at the age of twenty-seven during World War I.
The segments of Jacob's life that the novel covers include his childhood spent near the sea, student days at Cambridge, independence in
rooms in London, love affairs, visits to France and Greece, and, finally,
his death in the war, an event which is only indirectly mentioned.
are no plot and no real episodes.

There

There is no attempt, either, to re-

tain the chronological order of events; the events form a series of

rapid, only slightly related impressions.

By abandoning traditional

plot structure, Virginia Woolf could create new experiences in the area
of time development.

Jacob's Room is divided into fourteen sections,

each of which ends VTith a change of time or place.

Each section is

further divided by changes V7hich occur when characters or points of

view change.

The point of view shifts frequently from one character

to another and then back to the author, who comments intermittently

throughout the novel.

17
If his new work is to be of any value, a writer cannot abandon
one form without creating another to take its place.

Virginia Woolf

based her concept of time on the way it exists in the mind; she felt
that her new form must be consistent with the manner in which the mind
relates and structures new and stored materials.

Since structure in

the mind is based on a sense of return to earlier impressions, Virginia

Woolf chose a sense of personal recurrence to form the pattern upon
which her novels are constructed.

In her early novels, including

Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf presents a mind through which the objects
of the past and present move.

At first these images are unrelated;

then a few are repeated, and, out of this procedure a pattern emerges :
"Let us record the atoms as they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance which each sight or
incident scores upon the consciousness."^
While he is attending chapel at Cambridge, Jacob looks at the
glass windows and thinks of a lantern, V7hich reminds him of one he had
used to catch moths at night; he is, in this way, brought back in time
to other incidents of his childhood,

A pattern is beginning to be

formed; memories at the back of Jacob's mind have shaped what he is

in the present.

As a child he had found a sheep's jaw on the beach;

despite his mother's objections, while he slept that night, "The

sheep's jaw with big yellow teeth in it lay at his feet."^
when

Again,

he is an undergraduate, the sheep's jaw image returns VTith much

the same meaning as it had for the young child:

"It must come as a

18

shock about the age of twentythe world of the elderlythrom up in

such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and
Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep's jaw with the yellow
teeth in it."7
The novel, taken as a whole, is based upon the sense of return
which is intended to establish a pattern,

Jacob's Room ends vrith the

clearing of his rooms for reoccupation by another; the pattern is preparing to repeat itself.

Bonamy, a friend of Jacob, stares out the

window at the chaotic life scene, and, in desperation, or, perhaps, in

recognition, cries, "JacobI

Jacob!"

This phrasing recalls to the reader

the opening scene of the novel when Archer seeks his brother among the
rocks, shouting "JacobI

Jacob!"

As in The VJaves and To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf chose

^^ Jacob's Room to place her characters near the sea during the formative period of their lives.

The sea beats virtually forever, and it

will outlast the lives of those set against it. The sea gives man a
proper perspective on his life, but it also serves Virginia V/oolf as
representative of the way in which time flows. Time in Jacob's Room
jumps forward and backward as waves on the sea do; and, yet, the particles of water within the wave are stationary, the same cycle repeating itself over and over again.

It is this kind of pattern that Virginia

Woolf tries to capture in her first time-novel.

The characters in Jacob's Room form another segment of the
novel's pattern.

Continuity and fluidity are emphasized vdthin the

19
experiences of the characters.

Each character is a part of all the

others with whom he has come in contact.

In order to convey this con-

cept, Virginia Woolf utilizes a multiple presentation of times, people,

and objects fused together : "But if you look at them steadily . , ,
multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life."^
The author of Jacob's Room moves linearly in space at the same time
that she is moving forward in time.

At the beginning of the novel, dif-

ferent points of space at the sarae moment are revealed.

Mrs. Flanders

is finishing her letter as Steele is hurrying to finish his portrait of

her before she moves.

At the same time, also, Archer is calling to

Jacob, and Jacob is busily exploring the beach.

The folloviing portion

of Chapter I is an example of both multiplicty and simultaneity by the

author as she VTinds in and out of the mind of Mrs. Flanders:
Such were Betty Flanders' letters to Captain Barfootmanypaged, tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles
from Cornv7all: Captain Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook
is dead. Tears made all the dahlias in her garden undulate
in red waves and flashed the glass house in her eyes, and
spangled the kitchen VTith bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis,
the rector's wife, think at church, while the humn-tune played
and Mrs, Flanders bent low over her little boys' heads, that
marriage is a fortress and id.dow^s stray solitary in the open
fields, picking up stones, gleaning a few golden strav:s,
lonely, unprotected, poor creatures, Mrs. Flanders had been
a widow for these tv70 years.9
The presence of Virginia W^oolf is very apparent in these quoted
lines, even though it \m.s her intention eventually to remove the narrator from the scene so that the reader could experience events exactly as did the characters.

But in her first experimental novel, Mrs.

V;oolf frequently intrudes, explaining to the reader her difficulties

20

and enlisting his sympathy:

not find it?"''^

"One word is sufficient.

But if one can-

Although Virginia Woolf is never far from her charac-

ters, the reader learns most of what he knows about Jacob from the point
of view of observers,

Jacob is never directly described and seldom re-

veals himself to the reader by his own thoughts or actions.

Virginia

Woolf is trying to show that each character is a projection of the

others who see him, and, consequently, most of the reader's impressions
about Jacob are derived from other people's thoughts. Tirae is a constant
flux and the people within time also flow into one another making their
impressions and having impressions made upon them before drifting to
another confrontation.

The reader's first clear picture of Jacob comes

from the older lady who shares his railvjay carriage on the way to
Cambridge :
Taking note of his socks (loose), of tie (shabby), she once
more reached his face. She dwelt upon his mouth. The lips
were shut. The eyes bent doT>m, since he was reading. All
was firm, yet youthful, indifferent, unconsciousas for
knocking one dovin! No, no, no! She looked out of the x-Tindow, smiling slightly now, and then came back again, for he
didn't notice her. Grave, unconscious . . . now he looked
up, past her . . . he seemed so out of place, somehow, alone
with an elderly lady . . . then he fixed his eyeswhich were
blueon the landscape. . . . Nobody sees anyone as he is, let
alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in
a railway carriage. They see a wholethey see all sorts of
thingsthey see themselves. . . . H
Jacob's Room is the first of Virginia V7oolf s novels to reflect
the new Bergson concept of time, the great disparity between clock time
and reality.

The rigid divisions of clock or spatial time interrupt

and disturb the flux of life:

21

The clock struck the quarter.

The frail waves of sound broke araong the stiff gorse
and the hawthorn twigs as the church clock divided time
into quarters.
Motionless and broad-backed the moors received the
statement "It is fifteen minutes past the hour," but made
no ansv7er unless a bramble stirred, . , .
At midnight when no one speaks or gallops, and the
thorn tree is perfectly still, it would be foolish to vex
the moor VTith questionswhat? and why?
The church clock, however, strikes tvjelve,12
Structurally, striking clocks in Jacob's Room are used both as a transitional device which indicates a change of character and as the main unifying factor throughout the novel,
A certain form for the novel had been established by the great
writers of the nineteenth century.

It was up to the twentieth century

authors, including Joyce, Proust, and V/oolf, to free the novel from such
an arbitrary standard.

Jacob's R_oorii was one of a group of books by

these authors intended to break VTith past tradition; as Virginia Woolf

notes, "Jacob was a necessary step for me, in working free."13

Although

Jacob's Room was the first of her novels to reject the old method of
characterization and tirae treatment, her new technique had not been used
with the ease and assurance that v7ould characterize succeeding novels.
Nevertheless, Virginia Woolf w^as proud of Jacob's Room and felt that at
last she was putting her o\\^ philosophy into words.

Upon the completion

of the novel, she remarks in her diary, "There's no doubt in my mind

that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my
Hl^

own voice." '^

CHAPTER IV

ORUNDO AND THE V/AVES

Two of Virginia Woolfs middle novels, Orlando and The Waves,

are considered here together because the emphasis of each of the books
is on continuity of both time and individual existence in contrast to
the metered segments of chronological time as measured by an inflexible clock.

For Virginia Woolf, the past and present flow together and

are as one.

A character may change by contact with the past as well as

by contact with the present.

Orlando, for example, symbolizes the con-

tinuous imposing of the past onto the present.

The psychologist Carl Jung was a possible influence on Virginia
Woolfs concept of continuity in individuals.

Jung's theory of the col-

lective unconscious is a concrete psychological support for Woolfs

thoughts about cohesion between individuals living in the present and
those of the historical past,

Jung theorized that pre-existent forras

lie dormant in the mind of each man.

These archetypes are of a collec-

tive , universal, and impersonal nature, identical in all individuals,

but remaining below the conscious level unless awakened by a specific
stimulus,''

Thus, the unity among individuals from the past to the pres-

ent is supported psychologically; in the environment in which she lived,

it is clear that Virginia Woolf would have been aware of such new ideas
in psychology.
22

23
Orlando was, for Virginia Woolf, an enjoyable interlude of
fantasy before she was to undertake the more serious "mystical" book
entitled The Waves.

Orlando, however, is not without significance,

particularly in connection with The Waves.

Living through approximately

350 years of the past, Orlando is a literal symbol of the continuity of

each individual.

The idea for such a novel came to Virginia Woolf after

she read Knole and the Sackvilles. a family history of a good friend,
Victoria Sackville-Vfest, By creating one person, Orlando, who was to
have lived through the Elizabethan, Restoration, and Victorian Ages,
Virginia Woolf illustrates continuity in a concrete manner. The book
follows Orlando from a young man during the Elizabethan Age to a woman
in October,,1928, the "present time."

Episodic in method, Orlando em-

phasizes a series of highlights which combine to shox'j the individual

creating and being created by history, and, thus, carrying forward the
past into the present.

The family house and the oak tree to which

Orlando periodically returns are symbols of unity, backgrounds against

which Virginia Woolf shows the passage of time. The tree is frequently
portrayed in folklore as persisting through passing generations of
people; at times, the family homestead was even built around a large
tree.^ This arrangement was apparently true of Orlando's family house.
The idea of the continuity innate in history appealed to Virginia
Woolf; history seemed a likely vehicle for explaining the relation of
the individual and the present moment to the stream of time.
This relationship is more fully developed in The Waves, in which
Virginia Woolf attempts to convey "the idea of some continuous stream."

2k
Six characters flow along the stream, traveling from their childhood
to middle age.

Different periods and events in their lives form the

crests of waves, like "moments" in contrast to the flux of time.

In

addition, each wave represents the pattern of each character's existence,

from an initial period of growth and expectation to the pinnacle of the
wave, or fulfilliaent, and, finally, to disillusionment and decline.
Important episodes in the lives of the six include being together as
children, separation to various schools and colleges, reunion in a London restaurant after college days, divergent paths in later life, and
the final reunion at Hampton Court in middle age.

Parallel to these

stages of life is the course of the sun on its daily journey across the
sky.

Descriptive narration of the passage of time as measured by the

sun periodically intrudes literally upon the book just as clock, or

chronological, time intrudes upon the six characters.

In her diary,

Virginia Woolf explains her reason for setting "people against time and
the sea."

The noise of the breaking waves represents the one ageless

voice beating out time against the shore, a voice which remains persistent despite such individuals as Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny,
and Louis.
For Virginia V/oolf, time is conceived of as a succession of
individual moments : both The V/aves and Orlando attempt to explore and
express these moments, as in this observation by Rhoda:
. . . I perceived from your coats and umbrellas, even at a
distance, how you stand embedded in a substance made of repeated moments run together,3

25
Time possesses no before and after; the present is not the end toward
which the past has moved, but only one of a series of moments which must
be viewed as part of the ever-changing flux of time.

Whereas the sea

symbolizes the continuous nature of time in The VJaves, Virginia V/oolf

uses an immensely long tunnel to represent duration of time in Orlando,
Chronological time as antithesis to time in the mind is a major
theme of Orlando and is of significance in The Waves.

Orlando lives

more than three hundred years, yet is only thirty-six years old at the
close of the novel.

This discrepancy expresses Woolf s idea about the

two different ages of man as determined by time on the clock and by

time in the mind.

The age of a person as determined by time in the

mind is directly proportional to his imaginative faculty.

The unimagina-

tive "live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them

on the tombstone," V7hile imaginative people "are hundreds of years old
though they call themselves thirty-six,"^
Elasticity of the duration of time in the mind as opposed to
the rigidity of mathematically measured chronological time frequently
occupies Virginia V/oolf s thoughts in Orlando;
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables
bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works
with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once
it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be
stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on
the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the
timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between tirae on the clock and time in the mind is less
known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.3

26
Often the sound of a chiming clock breaks violently into
Orlando's mental processes, striking "vTith an av7ful and ominous voice,
a voice full of horror and alarm."

Clock time in The Waves also

thrusts itself upon the characters, dravdng them from the contemplation of unity with the past to a consideration of the present moment as
stagnant and rootless :
Yes, but suddenly one hears a clock tick, V/e who had been
immersed in this world became aware of another. It is painful. It was Neville who changed our time. He who had been
thinking \^7ith the unlimited time of the mind, which stretches
in a flash from Shakespeare to ourselves, poked the fire and
began to live by that other clock which marks the approach
of a particular person. The wide and dignified sv7eep of his
mind contracted. He became on the alert. . . . I noted how
he touched a cushion. From the myriads of mankind and all
time past, he had chosen one person one moment in particular.7
The chief constituent of time in the mind must be memory, that
agent which breaks down mathematical time and makes it fluid.

Only in

memory is the self conceived of as continuous and flox^7ing, Through

memory the individual can travel back in time while physically existing in the present, thus uniting past and present.

In Orlando, the

historic past is recreated in the present through the frequent use of

memory, while in The Waves, characters such as Bernard and Louis recall
historical events and past times which are inwardly meaningful to them,
Virginia Woolf has a deep sense of the nearness of past times and the
debt owed them by the present human race.

Orlando herself emerges in

1928 as the modem writer whose sensibilities have been developed through
direct contact V7ith the historical past.
Continuity, then, exists not only \vdthin the life of the individual, but also within the history of the human r^ce.

Ideas and feelings

27

laid down in the past continue to live in the human mind of the present,
Bergson offers a concrete explanation of this layering by visualizing
the universe as an indefinite canvas upon which images can be drawn
indefinitely.

All the endless piled-up canvasses give us all the suc-

cessive images that make up the entire history of the universe,^ Virginia Woolf views Orlando's own Bergsonian canvas of impressions as
collective on a lump of glass.
And so, the thought of love would be all ambered over vTith snow
and winter; with log and the bark of stags; with old King James
slobbering. . . , Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge
it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other
matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom
of the sea, is grovTn about viith bones and dragonflies, and corns
and the tresses of drowned women.9
The multiplicity of Orlando as first man, then woman, living in different eras and with different appearances, is yet contradicted by the underlying unity of a single mind which is the recipient of a single heritage throughout its three hundred and fifty years.

Thus, Orlando can

symbolize the racial and collective unconscious as described by Jung.

Just as Orlando actually experiences the historical past, the
six characters of The Waves are. periodically drawn back in time, to become something more than their present selves. They become one with
earlier humanity; individual unity with the past remains unbroken.

Not

unlike Orlando, Bernard and Louis experience a multiple personality;

For Bernard, as for Orlando, a tree represents stability:
The tree alone resisted our eternal flux. For I changed and
changed; was Hamlet, was Shelley, was the hero, whose name I
now forget of a novel by Dostoevsky; V7as for a whole term,
incredibly. Napoleon.10

28

During a train trip, Louis realizes that he is a direct descendant in time of the Egyptians in the era of the Pharoahs.

He recognizes

that he has lived a thousand years already and sees himself as having
been an Arab prince, a poet in the time of Queen Elizabeth, a Duke at
the court of Louis the Fourteenth, and as having listened to songs on
the banks of the Nile.

Louis has been a participant and observer of

the whole panorama of history.

My roots go dowm through veins of lead and silver, through
damp marshy places that exhale odours to a knot made of oak
roots bound together in the centre. Sealed and blind, with
each stopping my ears, I have yet heard rumors of wars; and
the nightingale; have felt the hurrying of many troops of
men flocking hither and thither like flocks of birds migrating seeking the summer; I have seen women carrying red
pitchers to the banks of the Nile.H
For Bernard, regressing into an earlier tirae is an experience
to be sought actively.

He rejoices in expanding back into his origins:

I wish to go under; to visit the profound depths . . . to hear

vague, ancestral sounds of boughs creaking, of mammoths, . . .
I am not, at this moment, myself,12
He sees the present mom.ent in perspective to the future as well as to
the past.
We are creators. We too have made something that will join
the innumerable congregations of past tirae. . . . We . . .
stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force
can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road.'3
Virginia Woolf had set out to annihilate the lines between
mathematical units of time and to convey time as a continuous stream,
an unbroken unity.

Orlando is an obvious success at achieving and ex-

pressing continuity of time and individual existence.

Its genre of

29
fantasy allowed Virginia Woolf to step outside of reality and create
her o m world to express only time in the mind.

The V/aves proved a far

more difficult task because she wanted to express both chronological

time and time in the mind within the same book and to convey unity
within time and among individuals.

A clue to the convergence of this

shifting, six-fold stream of consciousness toward unity is found in

Orlando :
If there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there
notHeaven help usall having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?1^
The possibility that the "characters" in The V/aves are but six
sides of one individual is suggested by Bernard in his final soliloquy:
>/hat I call 'my life,' it is not one life that I look back
upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I amJinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis;
or how to distinguish my life from theirs.15
This suggested unity of individuals within the present dimension
is another facet of the continuity of individual existence other than
the historical continuity of a single person.

V/hether the author por-

trays continuity of time as one long strand of three hundred and sixty
years, as in Orlando, or as six shorter strands of sixty years each, as
in The V/aves, the result is the same; time is measured not by minutes
and years, but by intense moments, the crests of individual experience.

CHAPTER V

THE YEARS

Virginia V/oolf mentions several times in her diary that she

particularly enjoys writing about people at parties. The Years opens
vri-th a stuffy Victorian tea party given in 1880 and closes with a
noisy, chaotic party given in the early 1930's.

The Years covers the

gradual decay of the somev7hat hypocritical, but stable, Victorian culture and the world's entrance into an age of confusion which yet offers the possibility of a more meaningful future. The characters in
the novel who are aware of the coming disorder seek something which is
solid and permanent in the world of continual flux.

The Years serves

to express Virginia V/oolf s oxm ambiguous feelings toward the coming

age.

As usual, she was eager to begin v7ork on her newest project:

And I have entirely remodelled my "Essay." It's to be an

Essay-Novel, called The Pargiters and it's to take in everything, sex, education, life, etc. : and come, VTith the most
powerful and agile leaps, like a chamois, across precipices
from 1880 to here and now. . . . Everything is running of
its ovrti accord into the stream, as with Orlando, V/hat has
happened of course is that after abstaining from the novel
of fact all these yearssince 1919 . . . I find myself
infinitely delighting in facts for a change, and in possession of quantities beyond counting : though I feel now and
then the tug to vision, but resist it.1
The Years took more than five years to complete, was published
six years after The Waves, and was next to the last of Virginia V/oolf s

30

31
novels.

The narrative follows an upper middle-class London family from

1880 to "the present day," some time in the early 1930's.

As the years

march steadily on, the generations grow old, one after another. Structurally, the book is divided into two parts; two-thirds of the novel
concentrates upon the years from 1880 to 1917, while the final third
is devoted to the present day.

The Years is closer to conventional

novel form than any of Virginia Woolf s other works; in it she attempts
to combine forras to make something that is both new and traditional,
Daiches says that, by the time she wrote The Years. Virginia Woolf
had achieved such control over her words that she did not need to depend on unique patterns and symbolic structure; she felt free at last
to use simple, chronological sequence.2 The large scale upon which
The Years is written requires an element of narration that is not necessary in a more restricted novel. There is, again, no plot in the traditional sense of a beginning, middle, and end.
A different year forras the title for each of the book's eleven
sections, but there is no consistent order or rhythm of years: 1880,
1891, 1907, I9O8, 1910, 1911, 1913, 191^. 1917, I9I8, and "the present
day."

Each section begins with a description of the weather during a

particular season, and the seasons do form a recognizable pattern, A

sense of return and renewal is heightened by life alternating with
death:

spring is followed by autumn; summer, by a cruel March; spring,

by a searing August; January, by spring; and winter, by summer.

Further

extending the pattern of the seasons, each year, except the last, ends

32
with either a physical or a spiritual death.

For example, 1880 ends

with Mrs. Pargiter's funeral; I89I, with leaves falling and autumn coming; and 1907, with lights going out.
Eleanor, who speaks for Virginia V/oolf more than does any other
character, recognizes a pattern within her life that is apart from repetition within the seasons :
And suddenly it seemed to Eleanor that it had all happened
before, . . . Does everything then come over again a little
differently? she thought. If so, is there a pattern; a theme,
recurring, like music; half remembered, half foreseen? , . .
a gigantic pattern, momentarily perceptible? The thought
gave her extreme pleasure; that there was a pattern.3
A sense of circles is a unifying technique in The Years comparable to the process of unification in many other Woolf novels.
and time are portrayed as ever-widening circles.

Life

During the spring of

191^, Martin visits a park in which the rooks fly around and around the
tree tops, the omnibuses swirl and circle the near-by church, and Martin
tosses "his bread round him in a circle," soon becoming "haloed by a
circle of fluttering wings."^

The circle image is used most frequently

with reference to a clock striking and the sound vibrating outward:

"What are we all doing?" said Eleanor. "We're sitting in the
drawing room. It's not very late." As she spoke a faint sound
boomed through the room. When the wind was in the right direction they could hear St. Paul's. The soft circles spread out
in the air: one, IXTO, three, fourEleanor counted eight, nine,
ten. She vjas surprised that the strokes stopped so soon.5
Whereas the majority of Virginia Woolfs novels trace the development of one or many individual characters. The Years is her first book to
trace the transition and development of a society.

Public together with

33
personal values are important to Virginia Woolf in The Years, as well
as in her last book. Between the Acts.

The individual is forced to sub-

mit to the society in which he lives, and that society is far from ideal.
I ^ Years stresses the wrong done to the individual by society, and, for
the first time in a novel, Woolf admits the existence of the sordid and
the painful as part of the present moment.

Many of her earlier novels,

such as The V/aves. consider a severely limited world, rather than the
broad all-inclusive world of The Years.
Iii Years is not so different from The Waves as it might appear, however.
dle or old age.

Both novels follow a group of people from youth to midThese human beings are brought together by life, and

their personalities are fused so that they form a continuous unity.

Maggie in The Years expresses the same intuition as Bernard does in
The Waves ; "Am I that, or am I this?

Are we one, or are we separate?"^

Each person is a separate being; yet his life overflows in space and
time to become part of an enduring unity.

A shared childhood gathers

and fuses the major characters in both The Waves and The Years and is
followed by a series of confrontations during which the individual natures of the characters are brought out. The final chapter of both
novels is a general summing up and a final revelation of the characters
and their relationships to one another.

The flow of time is illustrated

by the people traveling within the years; they are the result of people
who came before them, and they help shape the next generation.

Rose

expresses this feeling of continuity with members of an earlier generation :

3^
They talked, she thought, as if Abercorn Terrace were a scene
in a play. They talked as if they were speaking of people
who were real, but not real in the way in which she felt herself to be real. It puzzled her; it made her feel that she
was two different people at the same time; that she was living at two different times at the same moment,7
. A character becomes aware of this sense of oneness in a "moment"
of perception during which he feels a union with all experience.

Early

moments in The Years are responsible for creating memories that the
character can return to when present life has become meaningless.

Each

moment in Virginia Woolfs novels is accompanied by a natural occurrence, such as the falling of leaves or the whitening of the sky in
both The V/aves and The Years.

The character experiencing the moment of

perception gains insight into himself and his relationships with others.
In her later novels, Virginia Woolf captures the final mystic sensation,
a fusion between the mind of the character and the flow of his recurring
experiences.

According to the mystic, there are two kinds of experience:

ordinary sense experience, such as impressions, emotions, and ideas; and

mystical experience which involves a sense of eternity, oneness, and
unity.

The sense of unity "was originally felt to be with God, but Vir-

ginia V/oolf was so disillusioned by organized religion that she humanistically substituted a union with all mankind for the traditional
unity VTith a Supreme Being.

According to statements by Meyerhoff, mys-

ticism involves a denial of time by distinguishing between an external

o

order of reality and the temporal order of nature and experience.^

Virginia Woolf embraces the tenets of mysticism by creating these moments,
which are in time and governed by time, and, yet, contain within themselves

35
the whole of eternity.

When Kitty of The Years senses the coming of

such a moment, she recognizes its true relationship vdth tirae : "She
was happy, completely.

Tirae had ceased."9

Virginia Woolf presents life as a sequence of these moments,

selected for their impact on the individual character.

"Life is not

a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged," she writes in her essay

on Modern Fiction, "but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end,"10
Eleanor looks back over her life in the last chapter of The Years and
worries because she cannot discover its real substance, the "gig lamps"
which one expects to find forming the framework of a complete life.
Life for Eleanor is actually a series of present moments :
Millions of things came back to her. Atoms dance apart and
mass themselves. But how did they compose what people call
a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little
coins she was holding. Perhaps there's "I" at the middle
of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw
herself sitting at her table drawing on the blotting paper,
digging little holes from which spokes radiated. Out and
out they went; thing followed thing; scene obliterated
scene.11
The Years is the first book by Virginia Woolf that minimizes
the importance of the past; in fact, real emphasis in this novel is on
the future with all its potential for rectifying the past.

Eleanor, the

key figure, has grown old, but rather than dwell on past events and
people, she puts her hope for a vital future in the young people whose
task it is to shape tomorrow's world.

The Years acts as a release from

the burden of the dead past, which is not portrayed as a chronological

36
series of events, but only as it is picked up and considered in a character's mind.

The reaction to an event is more important than the

event itself; the past is brought forward by the present and becomes
part of the present in the character's mind, as when Rose's "past seemed
to be rising above her present."12
Eleanor does not respect the past enough to emulate it. Her
father. Colonel Pargiter, had dominated his children, while Eleanor
recognizes the right of the young to be free of arbitrary rules. With
her dismissal of the old family servant, Crosby, along with her sale of
the Pargiter house, Eleanor leaves behind the old culture and tradition
with few regrets:
gether wrong.

"It was a dreadful moment; unhappy; muddled; alto-

Crosby was so miserable; she was so glad."13 V/hereas

Eleanor has lived in the past and recognizes it for vjhat it was, her
young niece, Peggy, mistakenly thinks of the past as "so interesting;
so safe ; so unrealthat past of the eighties; and to her, so beautiful
in its unreality."'
All of the major characters in The Years share an intense preoccupation with the immediate moment.

Eleanor does not V7ant to go back

to the past; she desires to expand the present.

"She felt that she

wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it

fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it
shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding."1^
In Jacob's Room the author feels obligated to explain her nev;
techniques, whereas in The Years, Virginia Woolf assumes the reader vdll

37
understand her vision that the present moment is no longer an end in
itself, but also a means to the future.

It is the future, not the past,

that Eleanor recognizes as important; she is conscious of a possible

triumph in the future.

However, disaster hangs over The Years; both

Hitler and Mussolini are threatening.

V/hen North returns after having

spent several years in Africa, he is appalled by the impact of the

changes which have occurred during his absence.

It is difficult for

Virginia V/oolf to persist in an enthusiasm for the future, but she does
see hope in the younger generation.

During the party in "the present

day." the children of the caretaker, the future workers, are asked to
talk; yet, Peggy erroneously suggests that "The younger generation don't
mean to speak."1^

The children are asked to sing, and they respond with

unintelligible lyrics :
Etho passo tanno hai
Fai donk to tu do,
Mai to, kai to, lai to see
Toh dom to tuh d o
That was what it sounded like. Not a word was recognizable.
The distorted sounds rose and sank as if they followed a
tune, , . , The grown-up people did not know whether to
laugh or to cry. Their voices were so harsh; the accent was
so hideous.17
The distorted sounds of the new generation are meaningless and frightening to most of the older generation.

Only Eleanor recognizes something

other than the superficial effect of the song:

"But it was . . . " Eleanor began. She stopped. What was it?
As they stood there they had looked so dignified; yet they had
made this hideous noise. The contrast between their faces and
their voices was astonishing; it was impossible to find one
word for the whole. "Beautiful?" she said, with a note of interrogation, turning to Maggie. "Extraordinary," said Maggie.
^^
But Eleanor was not sure that they were thinking of the same thing.

38
The intrusion of clock time in The Years is kept at a minimum
because Virginia Woolf is not fighting traditional form as she had
done in previous novels.

The striking of clocks is generally used as

a unifying device, rather than as a mechanism set against man.

But

clock time does intrude upon and frighten those outside of man's timeoriented world :
Then there was a ripple in the air. The great clock, all the
clocks of the city, seemed to be gathering their forces together; they seemed to be whirring a preliminary warning.
Then the stroke struck, "One" blared out. All the sparrows
fluttered up into the air; even the pigeons were frightened. . . . 1 9
Despite the ominous overtones of The Years, including war and
chaos, the novel is essentially optimistic.

Virginia Woolf feels that

human nature is in the process of improving; the world is moving toward

a time when evil \d.ll be overcome and good \d.ll triumph.

At the con-

clusion of ^he Years, Eleanor sees in the newly married couple a beginning and a continuation of the pattern toward goodness. The sense of
flow never ceases; for the first chapter of The Years picks up the flow,
and the reader has a sense of continued flow at the end.

None of Vir-

ginia Woolf s novels ends with a real concluding statement, but with a
sense of continuation.

As she states in the following discussion of

endings.
Where the tune is familiar and the end emphaticlovers united,
villains discomfited, intrigues exposedas it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune
is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the
information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we
need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us
hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.20

39
At the end of The Years, the movement from the past to the
future continues.

Eleanor's final words,'"And now?" are indicative

of her v7elcoming attitude toward the future; in the final episode of

the book, she has dismissed the party as belonging to the past and
holds out her hands to embrace what is to come:
"Aren't they lovely?" said Delia, holding out the flowers.
Eleanor started.
"The roses? Yes . . . " she said. But she V7as watching
the cab. A young man had got out; he paid the driver. Then
a girl in a tweed traveling suit followed him. He fitted his
latch-key to the door. "There," Eleanor murmured, as he
opened the door and they stood for a moment on the threshold.
"There!" she repeated as the door shut with a little thud
behind them.
Then she turned round into the room. "And now?" she said,
looking at Morris who was drinking the last drops of a glass
of wine. "And nox^r?" she asked, holding out her hands to hitn.
The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an
air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace.21
Although the world of The Years is one of ugliness, complexity
and war, the last four words of the novel are the antitheses of these
characteristics; Virginia Woolf feels that disaster is coming upon her
world-, but hopes, with as much conviction as she can realistically
manage, to see a brighter future.

CHAPTER VI'

CONCLUSION

Throughout all her novels, Virginia V/oolf pursued and attempted

to express reality as she perceived it.

In particular, she was inter-

ested in experimenting with new methods of dealing m.th

through which all experience flows.

the time medium

Conventional handling of time was

too inflexible to be satisfactory to a writer who thought time in a

novel should approximate the way time affects and is affected by human
lives.

Beginning \n.th

Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf attempted to struc-

ture her novels outside of clock time.

Jacob's Room was only a partial

success at modifying conventional novel form; for, not until The Years
appeared, was Virginia Woolf able to express her concept of time adequately within a traditional novel.

Orlando and The V/aves are com-

pletely unconventional types and are, perhaps, her most successful

efforts.

All four novels owe their uniqueness to an unorthodox con-

cept of time by an author who has come closer than any other to expressing time as it actually is experienced by man.

ko

NOTES
Chapter I
^J. B, Priestly, Man and Time (New York: Doubleday and Company,
Inc., 196^), p. 61,
2williara Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. by Edward Bliss
Reed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), p. 58.
3 A . A. Mendilow, Time and the Novel (New York: Humanities
Press, 1965), p. k>
Mf/illiara Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. by
Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1939) p. 578.

3lbid., p. 587.
^Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth^ Poetry, 1787-181^ (New Haven:
Yale University Press, I965), p. 211.
7Mendilow, 2 i ^ P* ^*
Wilbur Urban, The Intelligible World (London: G. Allen and
Unwin, 1929).
^Virginia V/oolf, "Modern Fiction," in Modern British Fiction,
ed, by Mark Schorer (New York: Oxford University Press, I96I), p. 3.
"'^Margaret Church, Time and Reality (North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, I963), p. 100.
11 David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vail-Ballow Press,
Inc., 1963), p. 5^.
"'^Priestly, Man, p. 115.
Chapter II
IChurch, Time, p, 101,
2priestly, Man, pp. 12^-125.

ill

42
3lbid., p. 125.
Parcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random
House, 1932), p. 195.
^Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow (Nev7 York: Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1958), p. 125.
^Woolf, Modern, p. 7.
7lbid., p. 7.
%arjorie Grene, Martin Heidegger (New York: Hillary House,
1957), p. 28.
9jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans by Hazel E.
Barnes (New York : Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 329.
lOQrene, Heidegger, p. 37.
Chapter III
1 Virginia Woolf, A VsViter's Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 195^)
2Woolf, Modem, p. 6.
3woolf, Diary, p. 2k.
^Ibid., p. 27.
. 5woolf, Modern, p. 7.
^Virginia Woolf. Jacob's Room (London: The Hogarth Press,
1954), P. 12.
7woolf, Jacob'_s Room, p. 3k*
%bid.. p, 82.
9lbid., pp. 5-6.
lOibid., p. 69.
11Ibid., pp. 28-29.
^^Ibid,, p. 132.

43
''3woolf, Diary, p . 51^^Ibid,, p , 47.
Chapter IV
^0. G. Jung, The Archetypes anj the Collective Unconscious
(New York: Bollingen Foundation, I n c . , 1959), p. 43.
2Alexander H, Krappe, The Science of Folklore (New York:
W, W. Norton and Company, I n c . , 1964), p . 233.
^Virginia V/oolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1931), p . 222.
V i r g i n i a Woolf, Orlando (New York:
of World L i t e r a t u r e , I n c . , I96O), p . 64.

The New American Library

5 i b i d . , p , 64.
^ I b i d . , p . 38,
7Woolf, V/aves, p. 273.
%enri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965), p. 59.
^Woolf, Orlando. p, 65*
lOwoolf, The Waves, p, 249.
^hbid.. p, 195.
12lbid,, pp. 114-115.
13lbid., p. 146.
I^Woolf, Orlando, p. 201.
13woolf, The Waves, p. 276.
Chapter V
^Woolf, Diary, pp. 183-184.
^Daiches, V/oolf, p. 113*

piiiin,ji|.fl^r

44
^Virginia Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1937). p. 369.
^Ibid,, p, 227.
^Ibid., p. 41.
6woolf, Diary, p. 140.
7woolf, Years. p. I67,
%ans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles :
The University of California Press, 1955), pp. 6O-6I.
^Woolf, Years, p, 278,
^^oolf. Modern, p. 6.
^^Woolf, Years, p. 367,
l^lbid.. p. 166.
13lbid., p, 217.
^^Ibid.. p, 333.
13lbid,, p, 323.
I^Ibid,. p, 429.
^7lbid.. pp. 429-431.
^%bid., pp. 430-431.
^^Ibid., p. 227.
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1925), p. 247.
^^Woolf, Years, pp. 434-435.

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