Abstract
This thesis focuses on the window and the visual in Virginia Woolf's first three novels The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). It examines how the window enables Woolf to experiment with modes of literary representation by drawing analogies with the visual arts. In proposing this argument, I aim to establish the relation between the way Woolf uses the window in these early works and in her later modernist style. Chapter One provides the background for this study. It introduces Woolf's relationship to the visual arts - painting, photography and the cinema, in particular. It also addresses key historical accounts of the window as a figurative device in literature and the arts, as well as in Woolf's literary criticism. Chapters Two and Three analyze the window in The Voyage Out and Night and Day as a metaphorical boundary between the real and imagined worlds of the protagonists. By exploring the visual possibilities of the window as a way to represent the protagonists' inner life, Woolf points to the limitations of the novels' conventional form, which conforms to Victorian realist traditions. Chapter Four treats the window as an analogue to Woolf's experimental form in Jacob's Room. Throughout the novel, Woolf represents the protagonist mostly through the narrator's external observation and other characters' impressions of him. In this respect, the window provides a model for the modes of seeing through which Woolf constructs the protagonist from the outside, and thus posits the same opposition between internal and external realities as in the earlier two novels. By tracing the window's role in these early works, I argue the window - as an important connection between the literary texts and modes of visual art - charts the shift in Woolf's engagement with realism. As such, it also marks her transition from Victorian to Modernist literary conventions.