Virginia Woolf: The Novel as a Work of Art - An analysis of To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts

Abstract

When one thinks about Virginia Woolf, one immediately thinks about Modernism. She was indeed a pioneer of English Modernism and she was among its most active and famous members. Nonetheless much has been debated about her engagement not only with literature, but also with pictorial art. Other than novels and short stories, Virginia was also a prolific critic and essayist. Indeed, through her non-fictional writing she explored her concerns about the arts. Before analysing the interart influence in the life and works of Virginia Woolf, knowledge of how the relationship between the arts developed throughout the centuries must be acquired. Starting from antiquity, the debate upon the relationship between the various arts is examined. The verbal and visual arts have competed in history both to acquire the characteristic from of the other crafts and to gain the supremacy above the arts. It is only in the modern Age that the connections between the verbal and visual have become close, thanks to the role of intellectuals and artists. Woolf definitely took part in the whole cultural debate of the early 20th century, and she often examined how various arts differed and complemented each other. Throughout her life Virginia analysed the relationship between the visual and the written, starting within her family environment. Virginia was constantly surrounded by critics, writers, artists and philosophers, therefore she could confront and discuss her ideas with them. Very influential to her were the relationships with artistic personalities, such as the art critic Roger Fry, painters like Duncan Grant and Walter Sickert, but also her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Woolf had mixed feelings as for her conception of interart relationship: she sometimes despised visual artists, whereas she admired them at other times. Notwithstanding this troubled relationship with painting, her written works display a great painterly ability on behalf of Woolf. Virginia’s ability of using words allowed her to produce an enormous quantity of visual impressions; she experimented with visuality, and was especially influenced by the Impressionist artistic movement. This dissertation will present Virginia Woolf not as a writer but as a visual artist and a – literary - ‘painter’. As a matter of fact, this study attempts at analysing the influence of the Impressionist visual arts and artists in Virginia Woolf’s writing, focusing on the painterly elements in her novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and Between the Acts (1941). Afterwards, the function of such written visuality will be explored. As a matter of fact, Virginia Woolf, being a writer, differentiated herself from visual artists, insofar as she was interested not only in the external appearances, but in the inner workings of the mind as well. Visual devices are, therefore, also a way of exploring the moods and sensations of the characters in the novels. All in all, one could say that Virginia Woolf found in the visual arts a vocabulary and images apt to her theories and aesthetics of the world.