Virginia Woolf: Twentieth Century Psychology and Modern Fiction

Abstract

The present study attempts to trace parallel developments between early twentieth century psychology and the evolution of modern fiction. I have chosen the work of Virginia Woolf to illustrate the emergence of an emphasis in modern fiction on depicting the contents of consciousness. This focus on sensibility and intersubjectivity goes well beyond the limitations imposed by the realistic novel, with its concern for larger contextual factors such as social structure and historical change. Woolf and other modernists such as Proust, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Faulkner, and Beckett directed their attention to capturing the “stream of consciousness” at the same time that Titchener and the structuralists, Wertheimer and the Gestaltists, and Freud and his followers began to use introspective methods. These movements differed profoundly from Watson's behaviorism because of their embrace of radical subjectivity, but shared with behaviorism a tendency to view behavior in a cultural vacuum. It is my thesis that these tendencies, though not necessarily linked causally, reflect a broad current in modern art and contemporary psychology that has endeavored to view the individual in light of the “immediate data of consciousness” and in terms of “culture-free” universals. I try to provide an explanation for these phenomena by pointing to well-known social changes associated with the breakdown of tradition and the consequent weakening of the person's sense of being situated in a special place or rooted in a familiar tradition.