Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Readers’ responses to experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway

Abstract

Woolf’s work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. These investigated the way in which different perspectives coexist and alternate in her writing, suggesting that the use of such techniques often results in ambiguous perspective shifts. However, there is hardly any empirical evidence as to whether readers experience difficulty while reading her narratives as a result of these narrative techniques. This article examines empirically readers’ responses to extracts from Woolf’s two major novels – To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway – to provide evidence to whether Woolf’s techniques for the presentation of characters’ voices, thoughts and perspectives represent a challenge for readers. To achieve this, a mixed-methods approach that combines a stylistic analysis with a detailed questionnaire has been employed. Selected extracts that were hypothesised to be complex due to the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue were modified by substituting these with less ambiguous modes of consciousness presentation, such as direct speech or direct thought. Readers’ responses to the modified and unmodified versions of the same extracts were compared: results show that the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue increases the number of perspectives identified by readers, suggesting that this technique increases the texts’ difficulty, laying a more solid ground for future investigations.

What triggers perceptions of racism in Heart of Darkness? A reader-response analysis

“…Readers’ response to racism can also be studied using a naturalistic approach, as Benwell (2009) and Proctor and Benwell (2015) show, but our interest in responses to pre-specified aspects of the text makes an experimental design – with its higher degree of control over the retrieval process – better suited to our aims. Similar experimental approaches have been shown to be successful in illuminating readers’ responses to specific linguistic and stylistic features, as demonstrated in the reader-response analysis of features such as iconicity (Auracher et al, 2011), metaphor (Gibbs and Blackwell, 2012), foregrounding (Emmott et al, 2006; Zyngier et al, 2007), narrative point of view (Cui, 2017; Sotirova, 2006), and speech and thought presentation (Grisot et al, 2020), to name just a few.…”

“…There is growing empirical evidence in stylistics (e.g. Bell et al, 2019;Fernandez-Quintanilla, 2020;Grisot et al, 2020;Bell et al, 2021) of the relationship between language and reader response. Specific linguistic features can have a concrete effect on how readers engage with and respond to a text.…”