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English-Romanian
IIIrd year
The narrative perspective changes during the novel to determine from which
characters point of view the story seems to be narrated at each point. Most of the novel is
concerned with Pauls relationship with women, especially his mother, Miriam, and
Clara.
Joseph Franks Spatial Form in Modern Literature, a theory dealing with narrative
problem in modern fiction, explains reduction of temporality for the sake of spatiality.
There is a distinction between story and plot. The term defamiliarization means that the
writer modifies the readers habitual perception by drawing attention to artifice of the
text. This technique of defamiliarization forces the reader to see meaning not as
authorial, stable, spread in diachronic temporal order but as generative one, moving back
and forth using a synchronic and simultaneous perception. An important part of the
narrative turns an inner attention to the psychic region of characters ignoring the sense of
temporality. This is also known with the term of flashback, technique used by Virginia
Woolf too, enabling her to tell the whole story of Mrs. Dalloway where the past and
present merge in the characters consciousness.
Talking about the style of the narrative, one may see that both novels use a
combination between realistic description and poetic images. On the one hand, realism is
a style describing in a true-to-life manner the everyday events and on the other hand, the
poetic narrative lifts life out of its normality, making it seem supernatural or symbolic of
universal themes outside ordinary daily experience. The poetry appears mostly in the
description of nature and implies the readers emotion, the novels would not be
understood properly without.
In my opinion, the expressionism of the language is used more frequent and it is
more important in Virginia Woolfs novel than D.H. Laurences, because her whole novel
is a poem itself, full of artistic images, elaborate and rhythmical language, words
comparison or metaphors and similes. Laurence himself confessed in a letter dated
October 1910 that his writing is a novel not a florid prose poem, or a decorated idyll
running to seed in realism. A characteristic of D.H. Laurences style is the combination
between realism, impressionism, symbolism and expressionism, each of them being
supply for the atmosphere, the significance and the vision.
As a conclusion, there are some common aspects in Virginia Woolfs and D.H.
Laurences novels, giving them the features of modernism, such as the combination
between realistic description and poetic images, the technique called flashbacks, that
makes the temporality insignificant and the stress on the consciousness importance. Both
of them make use of symbols and metaphorical images that increase the expressivity of
the novel. But there are also aspects that differentiate the two writers such as the fact that
V. Woolf uses the free-indirect style, while D.H. Laurence doesnt; as well as the fact
that the last one knows how to make from an apparently realistic (Late Victorian) novel
written from the point of view of an omniscient IIIrd person narrator a modernist one.
Bibliography:
1. Burlui, Irina, Lectures in 20th Century British Literature, Publishing Al. I. Cuza - University Iasi, Faculty of
Philology
2. Doody, Margaret Anne, George Elliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1980
3. Genette, Grard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin 1980
4. Frank, Joseph. Spatial Form in Modern Literature in The Widening Gyre, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1963
5. Baron, Helen, Disseminated Consciousness in Sons and Lovers, in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 48, No. 4, October
1998