Virginia Woolf’s art of Charachterization

Virginia Woolf’s concept of characterization was quite different than that of

popular novelists. In fact many critics of her time were of the view that Woolf fails
to create a memorable portrayal of her characters. However, Woolf delineates
her concept of characterization in her essays “Modern Fiction” and “Mr Bennett
and Mrs Brown”. She was not inclined to create characters as was done by Wells,
Bennett and Galsworthy who were "never interested in character in itself; or in
the book itself. They were interested in something outside." For her, 'each person
is a multiplicity of characters and identities'. And her portrayal of characters is but
a ceaseless process of becoming, that is, the personality 'in its flowing through
time'. In the process, the readers are presented with multiple views of her
characters for building up a profile of a particular character's traits and life being.
The psychology was the field of interest for all the Modern writers such as Joyce,
Proust and Henry James. Following the psychological insights by Freud and Jung,
the modern writer, came to view human personality from a new perspective
under the pressure of developments in physical science, psychology, philosophy
and other streams of knowledge. He consciously or unconsciously comes to
debase the 'hero' to the 'antihero' of modern society bringing forth a
reciprocating change in the pattern of fiction. Virginia Woolf stood up as a
spokesperson for these modern writers. Indeed the conventional writers drew
their characters minutely about how they dressed, what they ate, and various
other things. The characters in the modern fiction like that of Virginia Woolf are
differently poised from the angle of inner being. This kind of bold and dramatic
experimentation now comes forward to penetrate into the thick curtain of the
superficial self in order to present the nascent states of consciousness that
permeates one other.