Shaping the story through the narrative use of locations & contextualizing the novel in the evolution of modernist writing style
In 1919, Virginia Woolf published an essay titled “Modern Fiction” in which she critiques the longstanding tradition of realist writing, arguing that novels written in this tradition fail to capture life as humans experience it. She calls for abandoning the conventions of realist writing, which, she argues, is usually more plot driven and “symmetrically arranged” (Woolf 2152), and instead suggests that novels should “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall [and] trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance” (Woolf 2152). In other words, “Modern Fiction” provides Woolf’s definition and understanding of what were to become characteristic features associated not only with her writing, but with Modernism in general: stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse. Taking a comparative approach, this project examines the changes in Woolf’s style of writing across her oeuvre, with a particular focus on her first three novels: The Voyage Out (1913), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob’s Room (1922).
Since these two terms play a part in our project, it is useful to first briefly explain them. Free indirect discourse is a narratological device which enables authors to mediate characters’ speech in a way which makes it difficult to distinguish between the voice of the narrator and the character. In that sense, “the narrator disappears” (Klarer 30). Closely related to this device, is modernist dialogism which Hammond et al. define as the “tendency of modernist writers to include mutually differentially and often ideologically opposed voices in their works” (Hammond 52), which raises the question of which character is speaking or thinking certain thoughts. Since free indirect discourse, unlike direct discourse, is commonly not enclosed within quotation marks, determining who speaks or thinks can be particularly difficult (Abbott 237). Another frequently employed technique in modernist writing is the stream of consciousness. This device is used to convey the subconscious thought patterns of literary characters (Klarer 192).
Upon completing Jacob’s Room in 1922, Woolf remarked that with it she “found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in [her] own voice” (qtd. in Raitt 29). That Jacob’s Room represents a turning point in Woolf’s writing, and a transition towards high modernism, seems to have been largely accepted by scholars (Goldman 49; Raitt 29). In light of recent studies discussed below which have used methods in digital humanities to detect narrative techniques characteristic of modernism, such as free indirect discourse, in Woolf’s writing, this project examines the changes in Woolf’s style across her oeuvre, with a particular focus on her first three novels: The Voyage Out (1913), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob’s Room (1922). While the project offers a global perspective on changes taking places in Woolf’s oeuvre, particular attention is paid to first three novels since we are particularly interested in whether, using the methods we have studied during Digital Detectives, we could detect a stylistic change in Jacob’s Room in comparison to The Voyage Out and Night and Day. Detecting such a change would confirm Woolf’s, as well as scholars’ claim that with her third novel she has really found her voice. Additionally, the project looks more closely at the internal structure of these three novels by examining the progression of storytelling with regard to sentiments. Since The Voyage Out and Jacob’s Room are, at their core, stories about a journey, this project also looks at the geographical progression of the stories.