Stream of Consciousness

Few terms are more associated with the innovations of modernist fiction—and Virginia Woolf’s novels in particular—than ‘stream of consciousness’, yet the contours of the term often remain vague. This chapter argues that Woolf makes distinctive contributions to the genre that have been underrecognized both because of its gendered association with formlessness, and because stream of consciousness is often simply conflated with interior monologue, which she mostly did not use. Instead, Woolf’s contributions include her use of free indirect discourse to overcome the egotism of the first person, experiments with rendering collective streams of consciousness in Between the Acts, and finally, her use of analogies to evoke the feeling of thinking, which also illuminates unappreciated links to William James, the psychologist who coined the term together, Woolf’s strategies refute the charge of intense individualism that is often levied at stream-of-consciousness writing.