PALADE EDITH
English-Romanian
IIIrd year
Experiments in Modernist Fiction
Narrative techniques - Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf vs. Sons
and Lovers, by D.H. Laurence
Starting with the early days of twentieth century, the English writers felt that they
had to break the traditional ways of creating literature in order to come with something
innovative, as a reaction against the Victorian culture and aesthetic. In this essay I will try
to emphasize the common and distinctive aspects of the narrative techniques used in their
novels by two modern writers, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Laurence.
Virginia Woolf uses an ambiguous type of narrative perspective , this is why her
novels are difficult to read for most of the people. In Mrs. Dalloway, we cannot speak
about an omniscient third person narrator, as in her traditional novels, but about a type of
narrative one used with by VirginiaWoolf successfully, called Free Indirect Style. It is a
combination between direct and indirect speech, which exposes and develops the
characters. The objective voice preserved throughout the narrator merges with the
subjective voice revealed by the character.
By the use of this technique, Virginia Woolf would enter her characters’ minds
and souls, without using the dialogue too much, as she was convinced that neither the
dialogue nor the narrator would allow her to present the most complex human
relationship and the changings of the human consciousness that occur in only seconds.
There are two aspects of the free indirect style: free indirect speech and free indirect
thought. Through the last one, everything that a character interferes with, feels or thinks
about is reported from the depths of the characters’ own consciousness. This is why it is
used especially when the character is alone, as a self-reflection. When the narrative shifts
to the subjective point of view of an individual character, the reader discovers both the
way in which a character sees the words and actions of other characters and the way a
character creates opinions and decides upon action.
The Free Indirect Style depends heavily on the reader’s involvement. Margaret
Anne Doody says, in her essay George Elliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel , that
“The technique turns upon a discrepancy between a character’s thoughts and authorial
respeaking of them. The effect depends upon the reader’s noticing a gap, a distance …
(therefore, Free Indirect Style) is inherently ironic, setting out limitations in a wider
perspective. But the irony is not dismissive and detached, nor can we regard ourselves
has prejudging the characters whose thoughts infuse the narrative. Our judgment emerges
slowly under the quiet guidance of the author, and can be completely formed only when
we understand the character’s point of view. The author makes us see the world as the
character sees it, and we must comprehend his view before rejecting or modifying it.”
In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Gérard Genette, defined the role of
the narrator: “The narrator is present as source, guarantor, and organizer of the narrative,
as analyst and commentator, as stylist … and particularly … as producer of metaphor”.
Another technique used by Virginia Woolf to create the narrative perspective is
the Stream of Consciousness, a style of writing started in the early twentieth century. It
reflects the flow of characters’ thoughts and feelings, so it represents a subjective point of
view. It gives readers the impression that they are inside the character’ s mind. The
stream of consciousness is pretty difficult to follow, since it is the interior monologue of
the character, usually characterized by leaps in syntax and punctuation, tracing a
character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. The readers experience the daily
life of the characters, as Virginia Woolf describes the trivial, ordinary life of her
characters, still with the stream of consciousness style. It merges the past with the present
by naturally developing flashbacks within the character’s consciousness.
In comparison with V. Woolf, D.H. Laurence was also interested in the
consciousness of his characters when he wrote his novel Sons and Lovers, but with with a
difference; through an illustration of the emotional properties of the consciousness, not
the mental ones, as in Mrs. Dalloway. The inner torments of the individual determine his
dilemmas, which constitute the main theme of the novel. It centers on the emotional
development of the main character (Paul Morel), since childhood to young maturity
(buildungsroman), the disintegration of the individual trapped in the modern civilization.
There is a struggle between passion and intellect, plus the love for the mother, which
makes decisions very hard to make.
The critic Helen Baron claims that Lawrence embeds his own understanding
about human consciousness not only in Paul's character but also in the very style of the
writing. In her essay, Disseminated Consciousness in Sons and Lovers, Baron writes that
Lawrence tests readers' assumptions that the will can control what the body feels and the
mind thinks, claiming Lawrence represents consciousness as something that cannot be
contained. Baron wrote that "Lawrence's exploration of consciousness is so strongly
embedded in the narrative tissue that the very words themselves are treated as cells with
permeable boundaries."
Sons and Lovers is told from the point of view of an omniscient third person
narrator, as it can access the thoughts of the characters and moves back and forth in time
while telling the story (as in the traditional novel). Although Laurence tries to be
objective, sometimes he is subjective, mostly when adding editorial comments (modern
feature). This gives the novel a type of belonging to Late Victorianism – Early
Modernism.
Being highly autobiographical, one may identify the narrator of the novel with
Lawrence, who seems to be looking back in time and trying to come in terms with his
own youthful problems and feelings, through the character of Paul Morel. The narrator is
sometimes subjective as he sympathizes with Paul, but at other times he blames him. The
other characters are to be judged in a similar way. I think the narrator is simply thinking
about how people naturally change their perspective according to the circumstances.
Other times, the narrator allows the characters to speak for themselves in passages of
dialogue. This narrative technique makes the reader feel closer to them, as the narrator
doesn't guide the view of their motivations.
The narrator intrudes, saying, "Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body
along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred
over." Lawrence alternates between showing and telling in the novel. When he shows, he
simply describes the characters' action and lets them speak for themselves. When he tells,
he summarizes scenes and sometimes comments upon them. The narrator's presence is
most obvious in the latter instance.
The narrative perspective changes during the novel to determine from which
character’s point of view the story seems to be narrated at each point. Most of the novel is
concerned with Paul’s relationship with women, especially his mother, Miriam, and
Clara.
Joseph Frank’s Spatial Form in Modern Literature, a theory dealing with narrative
problem in modern fiction, explains reduction of temporality for the sake of spatiality.
There is a distinction between story and plot. The term “defamiliarization’’ means that
the writer modifies the reader’s habitual perception by drawing attention to “artifice” of
the text. This technique of “defamiliarization” forces the reader to see meaning not as
authorial, stable, spread in diachronic temporal order but as generative one, moving back
and forth using a synchronic and simultaneous perception. An important part of the
narrative turns an inner attention to the psychic region of characters ignoring the sense of
temporality. This is also known with the term of “flashback”, technique used by Virginia
Woolf too, enabling her to tell the whole story of Mrs. Dalloway where the past and
present merge in the characters’ consciousness.
Talking about the style of the narrative, one may see that both novels use a
combination between realistic description and poetic images. On the one hand, realism is
a style describing in a true-to-life manner the everyday events and on the other hand, the
poetic narrative lifts life out of its normality, making it seem supernatural or symbolic of
universal themes outside ordinary daily experience. The poetry appears mostly in the
description of nature and implies the reader’s emotion, the novels would not be
understood properly without.
In my opinion, the expressionism of the language is used more frequent and it is
more important in Virginia Woolf’s novel than D.H. Laurence’s, because her whole
novel is a poem itself, full of artistic images, elaborate and rhythmical language, words
comparison or metaphors and similes. Laurence himself confessed in a letter dated
October 1910 that his writing is “a novel – not a florid prose poem, or a decorated idyll
running to seed in realism”. A characteristic of D.H. Laurence’s style is the combination
between realism, impressionism, symbolism and expressionism, each of them being
supply for the atmosphere, the significance and the vision.
As a conclusion, there are some common aspects in Virginia Woolf’s and D.H.
Laurence’s novels, giving them the features of modernism, such as the combination
between realistic description and poetic images, the technique called “flashbacks”, that
makes the temporality insignificant and the stress on the consciousness importance. Both
of them make use of symbols and metaphorical images that increase the expressivity of
the novel. But there are also aspects that differentiate the two writers such as the fact that
V. Woolf uses the “free-indirect” style, while D.H. Laurence doesn’t; as well as the fact
that the last one knows how to make from an apparently realistic (Late Victorian) novel –
written from the point of view of an omniscient IIIrd person narrator – a modernist one.
Bibliography:
1. Burlui, Irina, Lectures in 20th Century British Literature, Publishing “Al. I. Cuza” - University Iasi, Faculty of
Philology
2. Doody, Margaret Anne, “George Elliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1980
3. Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin 1980
4. Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” in The Widening Gyre, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1963
5. Baron, Helen, “Disseminated Consciousness in Sons and Lovers”, in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 4, October
1998