Stream of Consciousness | explanation | Virginia Woolf

This article is over stream of consciousness and also includes information about modern innovation in writing, Virginia Woolf, and her novel, Mrs. Dalloway.

Stream of consciousness

 Stream of consciousness is a technique in literature. It's a style of narration meant to mimic the flow of human thought. We'll talk more in a minute about where the catalyst for this inventive way of writing came from.

 If you think about the way that you think, which is called "metacognition" by the way, the human brain, when it thinks, it doesn't divide things into chapters or into sentences. Often, your thoughts are incomplete or fragmented, or you jump to your sister's rabbit, who one time bit your finger, which reminds you of the dentist, and when you bit the dentist's finger when you were younger.

 Your brain just goes all these different directions...at least, mine does. The human thought process flows, and authors try to mimic the way humans loosely associate when jumping from thought to thought. This is a contrast to traditional narration, where you have a third or first person narrator who is telling what happened, whether it's in an emotional way or it is in an objective way, or whatever. Often you would get a character's perspective on the stage through a soliloquy. 

In a soliloquy, the speaker addresses the audience, or some absent third person, so that we can know what the speaker is thinking even though no one else is on stage. Stream of consciousness, then, is primarily the character addressing the character's self. It's like a soliloquy except the third person is the reader instead of the audience, and the character is not actually saying the words as they would in a play, with a soliloquy.

 We see the inside of the character's mind and it has little structure. It Can jump from place to place, whereas with a soliloquy, you are usually gonna get a logical sequence, with complete sentences, and , beautiful words, lots of literary devices, whereas the human mind doesn't really work like that. Primarily, this technique is used in fiction, instead of drama or poetry, though it is used in poetry to a degree, after, say, 1920 or so.

 Often, this technique of stream of consciousness is also lacking in punctuation or traditional grammatical structure. Sentences can be whole pages long or more, whereas what we see in more traditional works where it follows the traditional structure and pattern of grammar. Now, stream of consciousness is often use inter changeably with the term" interior monologue."

 An interior monologue performs the functions of stream of consciousness in a more organized way. An interior monologue, is going to be more structured. We see the character's thoughts in stream of consciousness, andythey may still be disjointed in an interior monologue or make these associative leaps. However, inner monologue will maintain the syntax, the punctuation, often it will be a more comfortable narration, whereas stream of consciousness might make you stop and think.

 Maybe you have to reread some of the stuff, because you are reading someone else's thoughts, and they are not going to think like you, necessarily. These terms though still are used interchangeably and some consider, like, stream of consciousness as the genre, while interior monologue is the delivery of stream of consciousness, because inherently, stream of consciousness is the interior speech in someone's brain.

 So it is, by definition, an interior monologue. Now, this innovation, these things in writing when the whole scope of writing changes, these things don't happen by accident. These come from talented authors or new authors, or interested authors purposefully seeking to change the craft.

 Woolf and her contemporaries, Virginia Woolf . we are gonna talk more about her in a minute - they wanted their work to reflect life. They wanted authenticity; they wanted to mirror the universal human experience.

 Previously, characters in books have been written for the upper classes, or they had been, made for in tragedy, we talk about how you have to be a noble blood, you know, because you have a long way to fall, whereas with what Woolf was trying to do,what her group was trying to do, is to make it accessible, to make literature relatable to everyone. 

Also, we have to considerthat she is writing in between the World Wars. World War I was unlike anythingEngland or America or anyone had ever seen before. It changed how people live, how they see the world, what they thought was important and valuable and possible, and because literature is fundamentally a reflection of the human experience, literature had to change too, because the human experience changed. While we still maintain the same feelings and understandings that we have as a culture, as a - for thousands of years, the way, the avenue, the vessel had to change because the World War changed things so much. 

Now, Woolf's innovation comes from her experimentation with storytelling. 

For example, Mrs. Dalloway is a woman's whole life kind of explained within the confines of asingle day. It starts out in the morning, ends inthe evening, but this whole time, we're getting images out of Clarissa's brain. There is another story that she wrote that takes place two days that are 10 years apart, and it tells the story kind of in the sameway as Mrs. Dalloway, where in real time we have a very small amount of time, but in brain time we see memories, flashbacks, feelings triggered by events. 

She wrote a book-length essay that discusses a woman's needs in writing fiction, called " A Room of one's own, and she uses stream of consciousness and inner monologue in all of these works that she's trying to be innovative and trying to do something different with fiction. 

Now, Mrs. Dallowayis her most well-known novel, and it's about Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party that she is giving that evening. Clarissa Dalloway is in her mid-fifties, she is in society, well to do, very wealthy, her husband is in Parliament, and throughout this day as she's preparing for the party, she has various memories of flashbacks of her life, choices she regrets or was unable to make, because, if you watch the " Importance of Being Earnest" video that I did it talks about how homosexuality and is literally illegal in the late 1800s in England, and so, although Mrs. Dalloway is taking place in the inter-war years, that's still a taboo.

 I mean, even today, to an extent, um, homosexuality is a taboo depending on where you are, what company you're in. The whole novel takes place within a single day. It also deals with another issue that was confronting the world at this time: post-traumatic stress disorder. After World War I, when men came back fromthe war, a lot of them were really messed up by what they saw, what they did, what they experienced, and Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway is one character who is sufferingfrom post-traumatic stress disorder.

Some things to look for as you read, um, look at Woolf's style. Does Clarissa's stream of thought match the rhythm of your own? When you read Clarissa's thoughts, um, you ever - I think, you know, all of life has this rhythm, which is sort of weird to say, maybe, but Clarissa too has a rhythm in her thoughts. Look at it, read it out loud, feel what she's feeling. Also, the story is told in third person point of view.

 Is Woolf's third person recreation of Clarissa's thought, does it feel authentic, or is it - you feel - does Clarissa feel real, or does she feel manufactured? Does Septimus feel real, or does he feel manufactured? And whether they feel real to you or not, what is it in the style of writing that makes them feel authentic or inauthentic? And also, what moves does Woolf make within the test so you'll see Clarissa as human, as real, as Virginia Woolf saw Clarissa Dalloway ? What was she trying to show us with Clarissa's thoughts? So I hope you enjoyed the article, and I hope you enjoy Mrs. Dalloway. 

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