Virginia Woolf – Stream of Consciousness
Woolf was dissatisfied with the third person narration because it did not allow the reader to understand the character’s experience better. The author instead chose to adopt the stream of consciousness in that it felt more truthful than the traditional narrative styles. The fact that this narrative is considered difficult to read is the reason why Woolf chooses it in that it presents a rich and different experience from that which one gets by reading a conventional prose (Dahl, 1967, p. 443). Adopting the stream of consciousness helps to show the character’s thoughts while replicating their thinking process, an aspect that enables the reader to enter and understand the character’s world vividly (Girodo, von Randow, de Moura, & Cristófaro,n.d). Woolf refashions third-person narrative to enable the reader to understand Mabel’s feelings, insecurities, and past events with relation to her encounters at the party. This modification to the stream of consciousness presents a rather truthful experience of the protagonist in a manner that would be difficult to understand without introducing any modifications to the stream of consciousness narrative.
The short story, The New Dress has employed the concept of stream of consciousness where the feelings and thoughts of Mabel Waring are core to the narrative. The writer has employed an indirect interior monologue to present the thoughts through an unknown, third party narrator, who reveals Mabel’s daydreams, past, and feelings of her encounters. Through this concept, we are able to learn about the disconnection that Mabel experiences at the party as she experiences suspicions when she takes off her cloak for the first time (Woolf, 2015, p. 2). From this concept, we are also able to learn where Mabel is, the setting at the party, and the disconnection caused by the dress she was wearing. Although Mabel is the protagonist, she does not think positively about herself and the party. Her self-perception cannot be trusted since her thoughts are consumed with insecurities and self-hatred. Through the narrative of the stream of consciousness, Woolf has exposed the social and psychological issues that Mabel is dealing with including low self-esteem, fashion consciousness, and internal conflicts that breed self-hatred and an array of insecurities.
References
Dahl, L. (1967). The attributive sentence structure in the stream-of-consciousness-technique: With special reference to the interior monologue used by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Eugene O’Neill. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 68(4), 440-454. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43342368
Girodo, A. L. R. S. M., von Randow, C. M., de Moura, J. G., & Cristófaro, N. C. Exposing a mind: The use of stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s “The New Dress”. Academic Writing, 69.
Woolf, V. (2015). New Dress. Max Bollinger.