vswpaper's Diaryland Diary

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Thesis statement

Here's the crude thesis. It establishes the map of the paper, which was very important to do when I scratched it out--I had to feel sure I really had a series of ideas that came to something. In the actual draft I'm working on, it's smoother, and hopefully gets the idea across to someone else; the point of the version below was to make it clear to myself. Some of the detail has been moved into the body of the paper so the actual thesis paragraph is intended to be bare-bones concept. The last sentence has been reworked to be the last sentence of the paper, along with a quote I had set aside but noticed again a day or so ago. And I so hope the actual thesis is better to read.

"In her career, Virginia Woolf recognizably turns a corner after her second novel, Night and Day. Beginning with short pieces published by her own press, the Hogarth Press, she is working out a way to present character�her central goal as a writer. In her longer works, the patch stretches from Jacob�s Room through The Waves, at which point her longer works took a different direction. As she is working out the representation of character, one of the things she does is extend her range of male characters through a curious development of sympathy. She brings an additional perspective to them as she explores the idea of androgyny, and incorporates �feminine� aspects into her depiction of one male character in particular. This development reaches full flower in the character of Bernard in The Waves. She endows him with susceptibilities, actions, and views previously occurring only in her women (or when they occur in in two of her men, they appear as weaknesses rather than as profundity of character). Her perspective moves from exterior�extrapolating Jacob from his room, from the contours of his life�to personal�most extremely her depiction of her father in To the Lighthouse�to interior, when she puts something of herself into Bernard."

6:10 p.m. - 2007-01-25

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