Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

Impressionist painting was one of the phenomena standing for the overall social changes throughout the European countries in the late nineteenth century. It influenced other fields of art bringing about new movements. Succeeding the idea of realism impressionist painters realized the importance of o...

Impressionist painting was one of the phenomena standing for the overall social changes throughout the European countries in the late nineteenth century. It influenced other fields of art bringing about new movements. Succeeding the idea of realism impressionist painters realized the importance of observing the real world. At the same time they emphasized the subjective element, that is, the individual impression, refusing tradition and conventional forms. It means that though impressionist painting seemed to be engaged in the individual sense of the outer world it sought the inward reality. Virginia Woolf(1882-1941) shared this impressionist recognition about reality. Therefore in this study I try to illuminate Woolf's identity as a writer in terms of impressionist aesthetics examining characteristics of literary impressionism through the texts of To the Lighthouse(1927) and Mrs. Dalloway(1925). Both impressionist painters and writers shared the opinion that though impression begins in outer world experience, its reality can be subjective. Impressionist writers paid their attention to tracing human mind which perceived the impression. Woolf used the technique of the 'stream of consciousness' to keep track of human mind. The attention to human mind resulted in the change of the traditional concept of time, characters and plot. Woolf suggests in her texts that realities can be relative and subjective, which can be said to be influenced by impressionist painters' fluid recognition about reality that objects could be seen different according to the condition of air and distance. Besides she thought that the very moment of balance among different realities was the moment of ultimate beauty effecting intense impression which artists had sought and tried artistic arrangements of impressive moments in her texts. As impressionist painters took up shifting perspective and tried abstraction to express the essence hidden behind appearances, Woolf used the narrative technique of multiple point of view. Woolf's narrators were also impersonal, not showing themselves into texts, which was the big difference from traditional omniscient narrators. With this kind of narrative technique Woolf could get the effect of distance and balanced perspective in presenting different realities and succeed in representing the essence of realities by the use of abstract images. According to this study Woolf related the problem of balance among different realities to that of the essence of human life. This can be compared with the aesthetics of Paul Ce'zanne who sought the beauty of balance to express the essence of objects. Woolf's characters that often made the gesture of concentration like pursing their lips or frowning their eyes show their effort to keep balance among different realities and not to be absorbed into self-consciousness. Woolf suggests that it is the reality of human life that each independent individual exists together keeping the subtle balance one another. Woolf seems to have been able to obtain both "a strong structural basis and an appearance of fluid translucence" by using images, not symbols, as a means of representing the essence. This enables readers to approach the text from various angles. In this study we can see that Woolf's writing is none other than her lifetime attitude that she was against any kind of fixed identification.