Ann-Kathleen Kraetzig

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,7, Bielefeld University, language: English, abstract: "Catch me if you can" was the invitation Virginia Woolf tried to meet in various waysduring her career as a writer. This invitation had been uttered by a character in Woolf sessay Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown1, where she expresses her intention to catch realitywithin her novels. The discussion of representation of reality has a long tradition. Before Virginia Woolf began to think about the concept of reality, the Edwardians triedto transfer reality to their novels by presenting detailed descriptions of the outer world. When the modern writers emerged, they turned their backs on the traditional novel andadopted the current interest in psychology into their works by concentrating on theindividual mind. In this context, Virginia Woolf s thoughts and theories are veryinteresting as she criticised both, the Edwardians as well as some modern writers. Thatis, she was neither convinced by the technique of the Edwardians, nor by the way hercontemporaries approached the psychological representation of reality. She feltdisappointed by the former mainly because of their detailed description of the outerworld which she regarded as superfluous, and blamed the latter for their monological,unrestricted representation of the mind. Although Woolf supported the modern traditionto concentrate on the mind rather than on plot, she had an aesthetical claim which wasincompatible with the erratic stream of consciousness technique. Additionally, shequestioned the objectivity of a monological representation and searched for new ways tocatch and represent reality. The problem was thus, how to convert her intentions intoher writing.