Abstract
Previous chapters have focused upon the way in which, in her ‘dramatic’ novels, Woolf is careful to create the illusion of authorial absence from her narrative. In The Voyage Out and Night and Day, that is, she embodies her own world-view in the lives of her fictional characters, and she exploits repetition as a means of unifying her material and of drawing attention indirectly to her own opinions and experience. In writing The Years, Woolf once again tackled the problem of how best to introduce theoretical ideas into a work of fiction, building upon the experiments which she had made in her earlier novels.1 The present chapter will suggest that the ‘argument’ of The Years is more persuasive than that of Night and Day because Woolf sustains a uniform tone throughout this novel. In the published work, she transforms the uneven and over-schematic ‘essay-novel’ The Pargiters into the fluent ‘realist’ narrative which is The Years.2
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Notes
Indeed, given that she was writing — as both Marilyn Butler and Margaret Kirkham point out — in the context of the social conservatism which followed upon the French Revolution, and at a time when, largely through the posthumous reputation of Mary Wollstonecraft, feminism and Jacobinism were closely connected in the public mind, it would have been most impolitic of her to do so, even had she so desired (see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) passim; and Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, pp. 53ff.).
See The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947).
James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare, 1922) pp. 84–111. Despite Woolf’s hostility to Joyce’s writing, this was a scene which she found particularly impressive (see ‘Modern Fiction’, in CE, ii, p. 107).
See Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 27.
See R. A. Waldron, Sense and Sense Development (London: André Deutsch, 1967) p. 50.
Forster was mistaken, then, when he remarked in his Rede lecture (1941) that in The Years, as in Night and Day, Woolf ‘deserts poetry, and again she fails’ (E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942) p. 14).
Hillis Miller notes the superimposition in each passage of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond of all the other similar passages, and comments: This occurs through the repetition in each of the same motifs. As each of these passages follows the last, they gradually accumulate into a resonating line of similar configurations, each echoing all the others and drawing its meaning from that echoing … The meaning of this echoing is its affirmation that Henry’s life hangs together. His life has meaning because the same elements recur in it and give it a total design justifying the drawing of a line connecting each part to all the others. (Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition, p. 89) For an article which argues that the repetition in The Years fails to unify the novel see Victoria Middleton’s ‘The Years: “A Deliberate Failure”’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, vol. lxxx (1976–7) pp. 158–71.
The Stephen girls felt the same kind of pressure during the months when their father was dying of cancer (see Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984) p. 125).
The idea is, of course, central to ‘Modern Fiction’ (CE, ii, p. 106), but also finds expression in a manuscript fragment in which Woolf remarks: The biographer cannot e[x]tract the atom. He gives us the husk. Therefore as things are, the best method would be to separate the two kinds of truth. Let the biographer print fully, completely, accurately, the known facts without comment; Then let him write the life as fiction. (MHP, MH/B5) Compare Brecht’s argument that: ‘the continuity of the ego is a myth. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew’ (‘Conversation with Bert Brecht’, in Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964) p. 15).
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© 1989 Jane Wheare
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Wheare, J. (1989). The Years. In: Virginia Woolf: Dramatic Novelist. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19684-5_4
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