In literature, a stream of consciousness is a way of narrating happenings in the flow of thoughts
in the characters' minds. A manner of writing that tries to achieve the natural
flow of a character's elongated thought process, often by combining sensitive impressions, incomplete ideas, unusual syntax, and rough
grammar. Another relevant
term for this device is "interior monologue" where the person thought
processes of a character, connected to their movements, are represented in the
form of a monologue that addresses nature itself.
Stream of consciousness seeks to portray the experience of thinking in all its disorder and distraction. Stream of consciousness is not just an attempt to relay a character's thoughts but to make the reader experience those thoughts the same way the surface is thinking them. It is often written in the first person and is less organized and seldom messier than an internal monologue, which is most often written in the third person and follows an insignificantly more structured flow of thoughts. Stream of consciousness is a style of writing developed by a group of writers at the beginning of the 20th century.
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William James initially
used the phrase in his Principles
of Psychology (1890) to
describe the unbroken flow of thoughts and feelings in the waking mind. May Sinclair was the first person, in 1918,
to use the definition of a stream of consciousness in literature. It has since
been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction. It includes a
character's mental process, in which sense mingles with conscious and
half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, and random connections.
Virginia Wolf and Stream of Consciousness
Virginia Woolf was interested in giving voice to the complicated inner world of feelings and memory and considered the human personality a constant shift of ideas and emotions. The events that traditionally made up a story were no longer relevant for her; the impression they made on the characters who experienced them mattered. In her novels, the omniscient narrator disappeared, and the point of view moved inside the characters' minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas, and instantly impressions presented as a constant flux.
Virginia Woolf, in her essay, Modern Fiction
"Let us record the atom as they fall
upon the mind in the order in which they fall; let us trace the pattern,
however, disconnected and incoherent in appearances, which each sight or
incident scores upon the consciousness." In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf tops in creating a
suggestive effect through this method. This novel contains a great deal of
straight, conventional narration and description.
"Life is not a
series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a
semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to
the end." (Woolf, 1919)
Elements of Stream of Consciousness into the Light House
Virginia Woolf in the novel "To the Lighthouse" employs the stream-of-consciousness technique in certain ways. These ways include using different grammatical and syntactic techniques, associative thought, the employment of repetitive ideas and consciousness, and opinions of the character through indirect interior monologue.
1. The Use of Different Grammatical and Syntactic Structures
The works incorporating
the "Stream of Consciousness" have different grammatical and
Syntactic structures because it use human thoughts as the base for writing
fiction and human thoughts are rather unsymmetrical. In the first part of the
novel "The Window," this technique is quite evident. She uses parenthetical
phrases and sentences to introduce the characters and to give an insight into
these characters.
The first chapter
starts with Mrs. Ramsey promising James to take him to the lighthouse if the
weather is fine. Mr. Ramsey, strolling nearby, shatters James's hope by
declaring that the temperature "won't be fine." This highlights the contradictory personalities of Mr. and
Mrs. Ramsey. This difference in personalities echoes in the mind of little
James, which is later parenthesized in chapter 7, where an omniscient narrator
attributes the "fatal sterility of the male" to Mr. Ramsey and the image of the "fountain and spray of life" to Mrs. Ramsey.
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Read also: Relation of Art and Life in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf |
In the second part of
the novel, "Time Passes," the subordinate sentences are in brackets,
highlighting phenomena such as death and destruction. She uses frames to tell
about the death of Prue and Andrew Ramsey.
In the last part of the
novel, "The Lighthouse," the parentheses also act as a representative
of perspective as depicted in the interaction between Mr. Ramsey and Lily
Briscoe, where the view of the narrator and Lily are differentiated: "They are very exhausting,' he said, looking, with a sickly
look that nauseated her (he was acting, she felt, this great man was
dramatizing himself)."
2. The Use of Repetition
The use of repetitive
thoughts, ideas, and phrases is quite significant in the text, which employs
the stream of consciousness. The stream of consciousness is directly related to
the thought process and is, therefore, continuous and repetitive. This repetition
of thoughts and ideas is quite evident in this novel. Mrs. Ramsey thought the
novel is presented as a cohesive force that binds everything and everyone. She
is given as the "center" and a coherent force binding everything together. In the
novel's first part, her sitting at the window is symbolic.
She is presented as the bidding force that connects the house with the outer
world.
In the second part, "Time Passes," the repetitive imagery of death and darkness is presented,
which took over the Ramsey family within ten years.
Similarly, the last part of the novel
incorporates an idea of harmony and completion depicted through the completion
of the journey of Ramsey's and Lilly Briscoe's paintings.
3. Associative Thought
The associative thought
in the form of subjective experience and the intermingling of objective time
with psychic time are dominant throughout the novel. This associative thought depends upon the senses, memory, and
imagination. In other words,
free association or associative thinking deals with the Freudian method of analysis, which focuses on the analogy
drawn between two different things based on personal experience. In the first
part of the novel, "The Window," Tansley draws a similarity between the picture of
Queen Victoria and Mrs. Ramsey. Similarly,
the first part's narration of the "Fisherman's Wife" is quite
significant. While Mrs. Ramsey was narrating this tale to James, the exterior
occurrences were freely associated with the story itself.
In the second part of
the novel, "Time Passes," in chapter eight, free association is also
used. Mrs. M'cNab, while cleaning the house, thinks about war, the garden, and
the Ramsey family who decided to come to the summer house before.
In the third part of
the novel, "The Lighthouse," another significant example of free association
is in chapter twelve, where Lily, while drawing her paintings, freely thinks
about different people, including Mr. Carmichael, Mr. Tansley, Mrs. Ramsey, Mr.
Ramsey, and the children.
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Read also: Characteristics of Mr. Ramsay and Mrs.
Ramsay in 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf |
4. Direct Interior Monologue
Woolf employs the
technique of the stream of consciousness through direct interior monologue,
which highlights a character's consciousness, unconsciousness, and thought
process. For instance, in the first part of the novel, "The Window,"
during the dinner party, every character's thoughts are described by the
writer with great efficiency. The inner turmoil of Mrs. Ramsey is presented as
follows: "She had a sense of being past everything, through
everything, out of everything…Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy, that was
what she was thinking, this was what she was doing leading out soup – she felt,
more and more strongly, outside that eddy".
The narrator then
shifts focus from Mrs. Ramsey's inner turmoil to Lily Briscoe's thoughts, where
she analyzes Mrs. Ramsey's character, the character of Tansley, and her work: "How old she looks,
how worn she looks, and how remote." She thinks why Mrs. Ramsay pities
William Bankes and realizes, "The life in her, her resolve to live
again, had been stirred by pity." At the dinner party, each character's thoughts are presented
through the direct interior monologue highlighting the inner consciousness of
each character.
Similarly, in the
second part of the novel, the death of members of the Ramsey family is
introduced to the audience through a direct interior monologue where an
omniscient narrator tells the audience about the death of Mrs. Ramsey, who died
suddenly.
In the last part, "The Lighthouse," the audience is introduced to the feelings of completeness
and harmony that took over Lily while drawing the painting through this direct
interior monologue.
Conclusion
In conclusion, one may
say that the novel "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf is a
masterpiece that incorporates the stream of consciousness and the different
elements of this technique to give an insight into the consciousness of each
character. "By blending people's inward feelings and keeping dialogue to a
minimum, Woolf develops her many-dimensioned characters uniquely and memorably" (Rowland, 2011).
Woolf, in her essay
Modern Fiction, points out the components of proper fiction in which the human
consciousness and thought are the most important: "The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the
proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain
and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss."
