Stream of consciousness

‘Stream of Consciousness’ is a technique, deployed by modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, which is supposed to authentically document the mental process or to capture the ‘atmosphere of mind’. This technique is used to explore the inner reality or the psychic being of characters. Virginia Woolf makes use of this technique in her novel Mrs. Dalloway. For Woolf “life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of the consciousness to the end.” As a novelist she wanted to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind…trace a pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon that consciousness.” Woolf’s writing of Mrs. Dalloway is a form which breaks away from contemporary form which she reviled for not doing justice to life and character. What she seems to be arguing for is a representation of the life of the mind, in all its vagaries, idiosyncrasies and indeterminacies, in all its complexity and in its fullness. She emphasized the need to move away from the public to the private, the social to the introspective, the political to the individual. (The political and the public that do come into her writing are only through individual psyches). Woolf’s true subject in the text is consciousness, awareness, action and reaction, what we remember and say and keep hidden, the distance between the interior and the exterior, how very differently we appear to ourselves and to others. What she wants is what E.M. Foster said to her in praise for Jacob’s Room, ‘to get further into the soul’. Woolf celebrated the representation of “inner life” and attempted to capture in lucid prose, the unrestricted flow of thought; and so she deemed the non-...

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...and scrutinizing in the text, the inner thoughts of the consciousness do not hold sway over the actions of the characters, the consciousness never intervenes with the external actions. Moreover, in spite of the multiple focalization (i.e. the insight into the minds of other characters, their fears, insecurities, anxieties, and exhilaration) Woolf never privileges any particular perspective or impression over the other; for example – Clarissa and Miss Kilman could become critics of one another which does not seem to happen. Thus we can see that working of the consciousness, rather than what consciousness can change or drive one to do, is the concern of the text. Through the stream of consciousness Woolf gives the readers multiple perspectives without making definite statements, escaping commitment to any class or section, without building up any kind of hierarchies.