Moments of Being: Beauty in Virginia Woolf's Works

This thesis seeks to explore how Virginia Woolf depicts beauty in the literary scenes, characters, and language in her fictional works. In The Voyage Out (1915), Woolf writes, “When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath” (12). In this passage, Woolf is defining one aspect of beauty. Beauty can disguise and is transient. This thesis explores beauty as a meditation on time, loss, and recovery of the past in memory and in vision (grounded in creative memory). All of these meditations are dependent on characters’ moments of being, or their awareness of being human. My findings are based on discussions of To the Lighthouse (1927), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and Between the Acts (1941).

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Montana

Year

2010

Author dc:creator

• Meusel, Kyndra Elizabeth

• beauty
• loss
• memory
• time
• Virginia Woolf

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/674

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.umt.edu:etd-1693