earticle

영어

In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf explores the possibility and limitations of a complete communication of individual consciousness. Such main characters of the two novels as Mrs. Dalloway and Lily Briscoe have a wish that their consciousness can assimilate completely the consciousness of others. While they respectively try to embrace the individual consciousness of Septimus Warren Smith and Mrs. Ramsay, they usually feel frustrated partly because of the divided condition of their self and partly because of the unstable linkage between their sensational experience and their consciousness. Ironically, their wish seem to be finally fulfilled after the death of their doubles, that is, Septimus and Mrs. Ramsay. They receive an impression that the individual consciousness of Septimus and Mrs. Ramsay is revived and then assimilated into their own. At the very moment of the assimilation of consciousness, however, they feel emptiness and isolation in the center of their individual consciousness. Woolf as a modernist writer suggests that the communication of consciousness between individuals is fundamentally imperfect, and that the personality of an individual ultimately remains a mysterious phenomenon which avoids being captured by either our intellectual or sensational perception.