William Wordsworth's 'Double Awareness' of Memory in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway = William Wordsworth'un 'Hatıranın Çift Yönlü Algılaması' Kavramının Virgina Woolf'un Mrs Dalloway Adlı Romanındaki Kullanımı

• Main Author: Ali GÜNEŞ
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dogus University 2003-06-01
• Series: Doğuş Üniversitesi Dergisi
• Subjects: Romanticism; Narration; Modernism; Subjectivity; Identity; Romantizm; Anlatım; Öznellik; Kimlik
• Online Access: http://journal.dogus.edu.tr/index.php/duj/article/view/174

This article deals with Romanticism in modernist British writer Virginia Woolf's novel, Mrs Dalloway. Although her works are experimental and new, they are part of a wider and developing perspective in the historical process of literary tradition, so that they cannot be viewed as completely breaking away from literary tradition, but rather as a reworking and redevelopment in its evolution. In her reworking of the traditional novel, this paper may suggest that Woolf made it "new" by returning to the Romantics, particularly to Wordsworth. By this claim, this paper does not mean that Woolf copied Wordsworth exactly, but was profoundly and pervasively influenced by his aesthetic views, especially in relation to her understanding of life as "consciousness". By returning to the Romantics, Woolf develops her sense of "reality" as both fragmented and whole, and of the "self" as fragmented but desiring and imagining unity. Hence she not only strove to construct a poetical or lyrical novel to express that contradictory view but also used her fiction to explore the mystery of the subjective consciousness as the dominant modernist view. In order to express her perception of modernist identity, Woolf used memory as a device in Mrs Dalloway and thus developed a new way of narration as well as a new view of human identity. By means of this new method, she left the objective narration of the traditional novel, and thus meaning or the view of identity in Woolf's late fiction is not static but undecided, unfinished and mysterious.