Learning Paths » 5B Interacting
Analysis of the extract from The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf
The extract is taken from The Common Reader which is a collection of essays.
In the extract the intelligent reader can single out the personal idea of life and fiction Virginia Woolf is committed to express.
Right from the first lines, Mrs Woolf reports her idea of life and its relationship whit fiction; life is spirit, truth and reality and it can’t be contained in the “ill-fitting vestments” represented by the form of fiction most in vogue during the first decades of 19th century.
The extract develops the reasoning of Mrs Woolf’s opinion about the need of a new fiction form.
Virginia Woolf doesn’t agree with the restrictions imposed by the traditional novels and she describes the causes of her disagreement: in traditional novel the writer seemed to be constrained by a powerful force to elaborate his work following precise and detailed rules.
The first twenties lines reveal the critique to the traditional novel; the critique is made efficient by the use of the clothing metaphor which recurs twice in the extract (line 6 and line 16-17). It is used by the authoress to point out how traditional novel is not fit for fiction anymore: as old clothes appear out of the new fashion styles, traditional novel look as a wrong form for writing about life.
In the second part of the extract the writer displays many ideas of life. In particular she uses two figures expressing her view of life: the first one refers to the enormous quantity of impressions reaching human mind in every single moment of every day of our life which is described as “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms”. The word “atoms” could represent human physical composition but in the contest it is used into it refers to the impressions coming from the external world into human mind. So life is marked by the abstract perceptions related to the human physical level. The second figure expresses the concept that a writer is not a slave of writing rules but he is a free man who can write “what he choose, not what he must”. The figure portrays life “a luminous halo” surrounding us; it is an undefined, changeable and unknown entity and it has to be described by writers just as it appears to them.