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Correlation of the past and the present 3. Virginia Woolf took her life in March Her fear that she would no longer be able to live meaningfully, according to her ideals and particular vision of life, forced her to choose death as salvation.
To her, death was not an ending. The spirit above all had to be preserved. Like her character Septimus Warren Smith, under the strain of mental illness, she threw her life away in order to preserve that which was most sacred to her — life and integrity of the soul.
In this vision of life as an eternal process, the concepts of time and space, invented by man, have no meaning, because reality exists outside of them. By passing his temporal life man views all things in relation to himself and his life on the earth. And reality, as viewed by Virginia Woolf, includes the whole expanse of space and time, and every living form brings its historic and prehistoric past into the ever-flowing stream of life.
The present moment is never isolated, because it is filled with very preceding moment, and is constantly in the process of change. Time flows with the stream, having neither beginning nor end. Reality is actually timeless and spaceless, because it contains all space and all time. Believing in the eternal process, Virginia Woolf also demanded a revolution in literary technique and subject matter.
She reconsidered personality, language, plot and structure in a new light. Personality was continuously in the process of taking shape and could not be accomplished by external descriptions.
Language had to convey the emotions and perceptions of different levels of awareness all at the same moment, revealing the unconscious as well as the conscious things. Plot had to be eliminated, since action held no interest. The only thing that mattered was the inner life.
But she gave her own understanding of double-nature of time [3] as proposed by Bergson. Historical time, which is external and linear, was measured in terms of the spatial distance travelled by a pendulum or the hands of a clock. And psychological time, which is internal and subjective, was measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment. Bergson had also given guidance to writers seeking to capture the effects of emotional relativity, because he had suggested that a thought or feeling could be measured in terms of the number of perceptions, memories, and associations attached to it.
For Woolf, the external event is significant in the way, how it triggers and releases the inner life. While an exterior incident or perception may only be a brief flash of chronological time, its impact upon the individual consciousness may have a much greater duration and meaning. Like other modernist writers experimenting with the representation of consciousness, Woolf was interested in capturing the flux of random associations.
In addition, she wanted to emphasise how the half-buried memories and interpretations could mould a person. In Virginia Woolf's handling with time lies a key not only to her mysticism, but also to her literary technique. The life of the mind in which psychological time exists is freely moving, it is untamed, and resistant to conscious will. In spite of this fact, Woolf tried to control what seemed uncontrollable by using time itself - fictional time synonymous with chronological and external time as one of her major devices. Thus, for example, as one of her characters recalls moments from the past and loses himself in thoughts and meditations of that moment, a clock strikes fictional time and brings him back, to the present chronological time.
Her wish to convey consciousness and eliminate action resulted in the narrowing of the fictional action, as the psychological duration of the characters expands. Thus Virginia Woolf replaced the outlines of the traditional well-made novel with the frames of a temporal or spatial nature. Within them the inner life was given full swing, receiving its only direction by its underlying emotional structure.
In this very way Virginia Woolf did the most unusual thing. She transformed the man-made concepts of reality, time and space into her own artistic device in order to express both an inability to escape completely from the tickings of the chronological clock, but at the same time to merge successfully the inner reality and timelessness. Virginia suffered her first mental breakdown. Her half sister Stella took on the running of the household.
Her eldest true sister Vanessa then took over the house. Her father had an extensive library and Virginia was allowed to use its full range and she was determined to become a writer herself one day.
Although Virginia never went to School, Vanessa trained to be a painter and her two full brothers went to Cambridge. Vanessa took the family to a new house at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London.
Chronological List of Works By Virginia Woolf. Updated December 04, Created July 7, All but The Voyage Out and Night and Day are from the. January 25, Adeline Virginia Stephen born at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf (all first-year.
Virginia started writing reviews for The Guardian. She began renting small houses near Lewes in Sussex particularly Asheham House. Eventually she agreed.