Virginia Woolf

Abstract

Woolf’s formation as an experimental writer was founded on early observation of illness, and of bereavement. The Voyage Out uses illness to subvert the marriage plot by colliding it with stories of exploration and adventure, where tropical fever tests the protagonist. Rachel Vinrace’s fever, however, is not a climax of self-realization but a violent interruption that collapses plot and novelistic convention. In Rachel, Woolf uses the fever to create a distorting and disorienting, but also vividly mimetic portrayal of the mind. In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf provides the complementary view to the rich interiority of The Voyage Out, relating the perspective of onlookers who repeatedly see Clarissa as an influenza sufferer; a viewpoint that influences her own experience in turn.