Mrs. WoolfとMrs. Brown

Mrs. Woolf and Mrs. Brown

Ito Tamotsu

広島大学総合科学部紀要. V, 言語文化研究

Bulletin of the Faculty of Integrated Arts and Science, Hiroshima University. V, Studies in Language and Culture

When Virginia Woolf first conceived Jacob's Room, she intended that three short stories, "The Mark on the Wall," "Kew Gardens," and "An Unwritten Novel," should 'take hands and dance in unity.' Jacob's Room is quite different from her two novels preceding it, and the difference is mainly caused by its narrative style. Unlike omniscient narrators in traditional novels, the narrators in the three short stories have limitations in their power: the narrators in "The Mark on the Wall" and "An Unwritten Novel" can think freely about the things before their eyes but they may not see the truth until the end of the stories; the narrator in "Kew Gardens" sees and hears the people who pass the flower bed, but does not connect their actions or speech. Jacob's Room has these two kinds of narrators made into one, and the narrator makes the story go on, using sometimes present tense (besprechend. Tempus) and sometimes past tense (erzählend. Tempus). But she does not know the truth of the whole story. So we must suppose that the implied author, or simply the writer of the novel behind the narrator sees the whole truth.

Jacob's Room is an experiment in a narrative voice, so we must wait for the next novel, Mrs. Dalloway, or "The Shooting Party" written much later, to have a 'real' character whom Woolf wishes to capture and whom she names Mrs. Brown in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown". Jacob's Room has prepared a room for her Mrs. Brown.

English and American literature [ 930 ]

jpn

広島大学総合科学部

[ISSN] 0385-1494

[NCID] AN00077749