(In)visible dimensions of identity in Virginia Woolf

This study of three novels by Virginia Woolf---Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves---examines the various narrative techniques Woolf employs to construct her concept of character in the modernist novel, and also considers her related assumptions about the multiple dimensions of identity. As Woolf questions whether life and reality are "very solid or very shifting," she generates a series of framing devices---such as mirrors, portraits, dinner parties, and narratives---that acknowledge a solid, visible, and structured reality within the frame amidst a shifting, invisible, and unstructured reality outside it. Woolf's attention to the operation of the frame as simultaneously facing inward and outward enables her to umbrella this contradistinction of elements in her expression of identity. This analysis of Woolf's orchestration of multiple framed perspectives and images evidences her visionary contributions to studies in narrative and human character.