Criticism on Important of being Ernest

Criticism Concerning the Title:

The satire starts with the title of the Drama. The title of Oscar Wilde's most successful
play “The Importance of Being Earnest” features a salient pun in the form of the word "earnest", which means "honest" and "truthful" and the name "Ernest" which is the name of the alter ego that main character Jack Worthing uses to slide away from responsibilities and do as he pleases.
The reality is, however, that nobody in the play seems to be very earnest.


Dualism:

In The Importance of Being Earnest, there are two principal male characters, Jack and
Algy, who have invented aliases that enable them to lead a double life. The dualistic
theme is not only displayed in the characters use of double identities but in the language of the play and the play as a whole.John Worthing, called Jack, is the protagonist of the play. Jack has a country estate in Hertfordshire where he is the Justice of Peace. He is a serious, responsible guardian to his adoptive father’s granddaughter Cecily and he stands for all the Victorian values of morality: duty, honor and respectability; “When one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects. It’s one’s duty to do so” (Wilde 301).Wilde used the concepts of double identity as well as a dualistic theme in the play, revealed in the language and in the lying, in order to exploit the hypocrisy of the society, i.e. the ruling class, and in doing so he deconstructed Englishness. There is a
deconstruction of gender roles, the church, the family, the education and the legal
system in the play and these are exposed through the characters and their lying.
Wilde depicts a society 16 with manners and morals used as a façade, a society where people try to conceal their secret lives with the use of language itself as a mask.



Wilde’s Main Criticism in the Play Is with the Institution of Marriage:



The Importance of being Earnest by Oscar Wilde uses satire to ridicule the cultural
norms of marriage love and mind-set which were very rigid during the Victorian Age.
Because it uses satire to ridicule these institutions, it shows the deviance from the social order by making ridiculous the ideas of standards, morals and manners. By trying to correct the flaws of the characters in this play, this piece also serves as a great form of criticism."The play really owes something to the restoration comic tradition."Again, Wilde is satirizing the institution of marriage, as it is not based on love, but on more vain superficial criteria. Although in this case there is exaggeration used to satirize the vanity of the aristocrats, Wilde still brings across the point that both Gwendolen and Cecily may have refused to marry the 'men of their dreams' if their names weren't 'Ernest.'Furthermore, Algernon’s negative views on marriage in the opening scene, where he refers to it as 'demoralizing' seem to suddenly change when he meets Cecily.Gwendolen and Cecily both appear as ladies when they first meet, calling each other sisters, "My first impressions of people are never wrong." Yet when they believe that they're engaged to the same "Ernest”, there is immediate coldness between them. Gwendolen satirically says to Cecily, "I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different." (Wilde, 559) .This is called 'dissembling' as the characters aren't literally wearing masks, but metaphorically they are all pretending to be someone they aren't. There is the division between truth and identity and it shows that sometimes certain laws in society force people to lead double lives.Lady Bracknell is the driving force behind the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest.
She represents women of the Victorian upper class society and believes that those
of high class should be the ones in power. She has very little opinion of those with no
title, or money and views the upper class society as being a 'closed club'. In other words, most people don't deserve to be in it unless they were born into it. She appears
as a guardian of society in that she forcefully dictates who should marry who in the play. In the first scene, Gwendolen is unable to defend herself from wanting to marry Jack when he proposes to her. Lady Bracknell firmly steps in saying, "Pardon me, you are not engaged to anyone. When you do become engaged to someone, I, or your father, will inform you." Lady Bracknell is portrayed as a forceful character who leaves no room for opposition. Even though Gwendolen wants to oppose her, she hasn't the strength to do so. Wilde uses Lady Bracknell to show a typical aristocrat who bends no
rules of the upper class society. One example where he shows how values are inverted and emphasis is placed on more trivial matters is the scene where Lady Bracknell meets with Jack to discuss Gwendolen. In this scene we see that instead of asking Jack
if he loves Gwendolen (which would seem to be the most important question); Lady
Bracknell focuses on the materialistic side of it. She questions Jack about his money,
land, house and the area in which he lives. She makes it clear that it's important for
Jack to have a house in the town because Gwendolen cannot live in a country house. It is also seen here that Lady Bracknell treats the trivial things seriously, even though she's supposed to be an upholder of the values of society. However, little attention is paid to moral values. Instead, Lady Bracknell is displeased with the side of which Jack's town house is located- the unfashionable side. She thinks that
everyone's interest will be similar to hers and subtly tells him, "The unfashionable side. I thought there was something. However that could easily be altered." The entire way in which Lady Bracknell meets with Jack as though she is of a superior being than him. She takes down his answers to her questions in a notepad, as though it's an interview rather than a personal meeting with her daughter's love. The setting of the meeting reflects how Lady Bracknell views marriage. It's more like interviewing someone for the job of being Gwendolen's husband rather than getting to know the man her daughter is
interested in. Upon the shock that Jack was found and he doesn't know who his real
parents are, Lady Bracknell immediately dismisses him, especially when she finds out that he was found in a handbag. The farce continues when she tells Jack,
“I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as
soon as possible, and make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of
either sex, before the season is quite over.”
This is an extremely impossible request of Lady Bracknell, as it is obvious that Jack has no knowledge about his real parents. Although he knows that he desperately wants to marry Gwendolen, he doesn't hide his amazement upon Lady Bracknell's request, "Well I don't see how I could possibly manage to do that. I can produce the hand-bag at any moment." This simply highlights how trivial the important things are to Lady Bracknell and how important the trivial things are to her. This is a major point Oscar Wilde focuses on, in this comedy of manners, values are totally reversed.Another example of Lady Bracknell's ignorance of the non-aristocrats is seen where she is ready to turn a blind eye to Cecily, when she hears that Algernon is engaged to her.

She immediately judges Cecily based on the fact that Jack is her guardian. However,
her views instantly change when Jack tells her that Cecily has a hundred and thirty
thousand pounds in funds, "A hundred and thirty thousand pounds! Miss.Cardew
seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her." Once again
emphasis is placed on a person's wealth rather than their personality, sincerity, or
compassion for the other. Marriage is viewed as an economic factor, whereby people marry for wealth or to conserve wealth in their families, especially Lady Bracknell who represents the guardian of an upper class society. She is however a hypocrite and uses social morals to her convenience. For example, she refuses to let Jack marry Gwendolen because of his social background, yet she tries to justify a broke Algernon marrying the wealthy Cecily. Her social hypocrisy is highlighted when she also confesses that she was not rich when she married her husband. "Never speak
disrespectfully of society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that.
When I married to Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind." She furthermore thinks that her status gives her the right to approve of the marriage between Cecily and Algernon without asking Jack what he thinks. Eventually, both sides come to an
agreement and Jack's name turns out to really be Ernest and he's really Lady
Bracknell's nephew. Wilde gives the typical happy ending where everyone lives happily ever after and the stern mask that Lady Bracknell wears slowly turns into a smile.

Work Citation


1].     Ahmed, M. (n.d.). " Criticism in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest ". Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/34774153/_Criticism_in_Oscar_Wildes_The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest_

Thanking activity on " Thomas Hardy's Jude the obscure"

1]  Hardy and Marriage .
This period reflected Christian values such as moral responsibility and proper sexual behaviour.There were double standards regarding sex. The Victorian view of sexuality was based on two types of women, the Madonna and the whore (Morgan xii), where one is fit for sex and the other for life.Any sexual relationship outside wedlock was forbidden and women had to remain pure for their future husbands-to-be because,their reputation was dependent on their sexual status and virginity.Many women entered matrimony at a young age either to ascend the social class system or to seek financial security in a wealthy husband. Generally, the Victorian concept of marriage was a means of financial union between families or a “financial transaction”  In Jude the Obscure, women are not more secure or protected in marriage than outside of wedlock. Both Sue and Arabella are representatives of the growing intellectual and sexual freedom, which several reformers like Mill tried to advance through literature of that time. Their modern views on love and ironical statements about traditional marriage are symbolic of their rejection of the cruelty of this institution against women in particular.

2]       Hardy’s View on Divorce and
                             Cohabitation
Jude the Obscure shows Hardy’s distinct view of the social institutions, particularly regarding “cohabiting/Free union” and divorce. Due to the strictness of the English divorce law,which recognized only adultery as grounds for divorce (Frost 16, 96), many couples cohabited or parted to seek happiness outside of wedlock because they could not end their union legally and thus lived apart (Frost 7, 40, 72). The only way to obtain a divorce other than by ecclesiastical annulment was through a private Act of Parliament, a process that was complex and expensive for the poor classes , Eventually, people were desperate and searched for alternative ways to join their lovers and leave unhappy marriages, such as cohabiting. In general, the term “cohabiting” is as old as marriage itself but was becoming more common as large numbers of people were joining this “liberated” group. The definition means couples living “as husband and wife” and having a sexual relation. Cohabitees presented themselves as married to society and shared domestic duties, the same last name and reared children  The notion of “cohabiting” also problematized the values of “family”, “marriage” and the state’s role in these institutions (Frost 1). This free union threatened and undermined the whole concept of marriage because it provided an alternative solution for couples to be together, replaced the “sacred” institution of marriage and weakened the state’s authority over people (Frost 1, 3, 9). This union (cohabiting) challenged the Victorian marital expectations .When Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure in 1895, British marriage laws had recently been liberalized and there was a continuous debate about women’s rights to divorce for reasons other than adultery. In his novel, Hardy brings the notion of cohabiting into the social discussion. He draws his characters into disastrous unions to show the failure of this institution in adopting new ideologies and progressing change into the lives
of unhappy couples. Hardy tried to address the complexity of marriage and divorce in Jude the Obscure in order to reflect the difficulties in the legal laws.

3] Hardy and the New Woman
They are representatives of the model of the “New Woman”. The term “The New Woman” was “a generalized phrase describing an economically independent woman who stood socially, politically, and educationally equal among men. It was a topic of much concern and debate in both England and the United States in the late nineteenth century.Her “newness” is clear in the way she views the social institutions. After entering marriage, Sue shows her disappointment in the institution of marriage that deprives women of their sovereignty. She expresses her disappointment in the social institution of marriage, which attracts people to marry. She says: “how hopelessly vulgar an institution legal marriage is – a sort of a trap to catch a man- I can’t to think of it”
 Sue cannot bear to think of is her legal state to be bounded to her man and not having an individual entity. In this, Sue becomes the spokeswoman against the suppression of the institution of marriage. In the preface to his novel, Hardy realized the new prospects of the decade’s “new sensation” . Sue Bridehead “the woman of the feminist movement-the slight, pale ‘bachelor’ girl-the intellectualised, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing”.If Sue is equal to men in education, Arabella is equal to men in her “certain maleness that allows the reader to see the way in which she breaks social expectations” (Young4). She does the work that men do. She slaughters an animal and works in a bar. Arabella’s ironical view of marriage and traditions is characteristic of the New Woman. She does not consider traditions like marriage seriously (Young 5). Marriage matters only for the financial security it provides.

4] The Case Against Marriage
         4.1. Hardy’s cynicism about marriage and his advocacy of the Free Union (Jude and Sue)
There were no options such as not to marry because society regarded marriage the only means for women to survive through reliance on men.Moreover, marriage acknowledged no legal rights for women in contrast to men and only emphasized women’s devotional wifehood. As soon as a woman entered matrimony, she lost her property and entity to her husband. Hardy reminds his readers of women’s insecurity in marriage and the complexity of their situation in this institution. After entering marriage with Phillotson, Sue expresses her disappointment in the institution of marriage. An institution that suppressed, subordinated and enslaved women to men. She expresses her distaste at performing the marital rituals and tells Jude: “How should I like to go in and see what the spot is like where I am so soon to kneel and do it”Sue has to kneel to this institution, which betrayed her and her race. The once independent, active, free-thinking Sue who
 not afraid to mix with men, is uncomfortable in her new position in marriage. Later, while planning for her wedding ceremony with Phillotson, Sue is confronted with the unequal terms in the marriage ceremony. The marital terms deprive women of their individual rights as human beings equal to men and they put them under the suppression and control of men. In fact, the Victorian marriage had one obvious feature in common with slavery; in marriage, as in slavery the bounded party was required to take the master’s name upon bondage, making the wife a slave of her society, husband and conventions. (Morgan 120). This is evident when Sue is obliged to take Phillotson’s name. Sue feels that she is not the same liberated person she was before her marriage with Phillotson. When Sue meets Jude after her marriage with Phillotson, Jude realizesher loss of identity. After marriage she became “labelled ‘Phillotson’” (162). In taking up Phillotson’s name, Sue becomes enslaved to her husband, conventions and society. She loses her entity to her husband and becomes his personal possession When Sue obtains divorce, she refuses to enter matrimony because she fears that marriage kills love as she questions the meaning of marriage. Sue feels afraid of  traditional marriage and the oppression it imposes on women. She would rather continue living in sin than remarry. She tells Jude that she dreads that, Her distinctive views of the social institutions such as marriage and divorce reflect the growing intellect and awareness of women’s role in social and private lives at the end of the nineteenth century. Sue has modern ideas about the ideal relationship between two people.Her divorce gives her the individuality and independence she enjoyed before her marriage. She says: “Are we￾you and I – just as free now as if we had never married at all?” (225). Later, Sue tells Jude that the next generations will pursue their path and will refuse the traditional and cruel terms of this institution and couples will live as they like However, being unmarried and living in sin is only part of the problem because children born to these cohabiting couples were illegitimate and had no legal rights. Little Father Time is aware of the economic and social burden children have on their parents. He feels the shame and society’s rejection of illegitimate births when his family is denied a lodging in Christminister. In an attempt to stop the suffering of his parents, he kills himself with the other children. It is not only parents who suffer the cruel terms of social institutions. This cruelty extends to their children and damages them. Little Father Time is a symbolic character who draws the reader’s attention that the law and the cruel terms of the institution of marriage have mistreated children as much as women Sue argues that the mutual harmony between them is lost after the death of their children. Sue says: “O my comrade, our perfect union-our two-in-oneness is now stained with blood!” (300). Sue, once independent and fearless, breaks down, but not due to her weakness, but she falls under the weight of her calamity and tragedy.Sue feels guilty and responsible for the death of her children and considers her tragedy as a kind of punishment for her illegal relationship with Jude.Marriage is only a means to control the lives of people. Though Jude and Sue are victims of the cruel terms of marital laws, marriage was much more unfair to Sue than Jude. Hardy chooses this tragic end to show the cruelty of the social institution of marriage against any declaration of love and sexuality outside of wedlock.

4.2]  Legal Union (Sue & Phillotson / Jude & Arabella)
            Sue & Phillotson
She thinks that she is going to be happy in her new role in marriage, but when she discovers the cruel terms and marital obligations she becomes reluctant to perform her duties. Her view of Phillotson changes after her marriage. He is not only old enough to be her father, but he is also sexually repulsive to her and a traditional man in his view of life and matrimony. It seems that Phillotson is the problem because his age and intellect does not match with Sue’s. This contradiction brings their downfall. Jude realizes that Sue is uncapable of playing the role of the virtuous wife with a man she dislikes physically and emotionally. He tells her For Phillotson, the wife is morally obliged to perform her sexual duties towards him in marriage because he has the right to exercise his conjugal rights over her. He does not realize the sexual incompatibility in his marriage with Sue. For Sue, sexuality is not the ultimate goal of marriage, while for Phillotson it is the ultimate reason for marriage. For Phillotson, marriage is all about sexual obligation. He is blind to the fact that this obligation harms Sue. He says: “What then was the meaning of marrying at all?” (192). He reminds Sue that it is a serious crime if she denies him his sexual right and he says: “But you are committing  a sin in not liking me.” (193). However, Sue realizes that there is no legal way to free herself from this obligation. She pledges to Phillotson to let her go. He is totally conscious of the consequences of his action that would dissatisfy his society. Because of his sympathy with Sue, Phillotson loses his job at the school where he was teaching, his money and his social standing.

Jude & Arabella
However, Arabella acts the way she has to because she is a powerless person. She is aware that a woman cannot survive on her own because she needs a husband to take that responsibility Arabella is Hardy’s critique against the traditions of the institution of marriage and the wedding ceremonies. Hardy is ironical in the way he describes the exchange of the marital oath between Jude and Arabella. Both promise to continue their lives on the basis of a temporary sexual attraction. Hardy questions the validity and trustworthiness of marital vows, which are based on temporary affections and not mutual love and understanding. During their wedding On the other hand, Arabella, who is unmarried and pregnant, cannot survive society’s ruthless conviction. She becomes also a victim of her time because she has no other option. Even Jude is aware that his marriage and Arabella’s is a“mistake” (50). He protests against the legal terms that destroy the life of men and women. He says to Arabella that marriage is like “to be caught in a gin which would cripple him, if not her  also, for the rest of a life time” (50) Though Sue and Arabella contradict each other in their conception of marriage, both are victims of the same rigid marital laws. While Arabella cares for marriage only for the social and financial advantages it provides, Sue enters matrimony and discovers the difficult situation of women in marriage. Both women feel the suppression of this institution on women and the weak legal state of women in marriage. Sue becomes reluctant to perform her sexual obligations. She loses her carrier of becoming a teacher, her children are killed due to the weight of society’s convictions on illegitimate children. She returns to her first husband to punish herself and converts her conventions and changes her mind. Arabella, on the other hand, survives, but not due to her respect for marriage but because she knows how things are done in society and she succeeds in finding a husband after the death of the previous.

PROBLEM PLAY

The problem play is a form of drama that emerged during the 19th century as part of the wider movement of realism in the arts, especially following the innovations of Henrik Ibsen. It deals with contentious social issues through debates between the characters on stage, who typically represent conflicting points of view within a realistic social context. Critic Chris Baldick writes that the genre emerged "from the ferment of the 1890s... for the most part inspired by the example of Ibsen's realistic stage representations of serious familial and social conflicts." He summarises it as follows:

Rejecting the frivolity of intricately plotted romantic intrigues in the nineteenth-century French tradition of the 'well-made play', it favoured instead the form of the 'problem play', which would bring to life some contemporary controversy of public importance—women's rights, unemployment, penal reform, class privilege—in a vivid but responsibly accurate presentation.

The critic F. S. Boas adapted the term to characterise certain plays by William Shakespeare that he considered to have characteristics similar to Ibsen's 19th-century problem plays. As a result, the term is also used more broadly and retrospectively to describe any tragicomic dramas that do not fit easily into the classical generic distinction between comedy and tragedy.


Earlier play

While plays in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, mystery plays, and Elizabethan plays are clearly classified as tragedy, comedy, and satyr plays, there are some plays that exhibit the characteristics of problem plays, such as Alcestis.

Shakespeare's play.

F. S. Boas used the term to refer to a group of Shakespeare's play, which seem to contain both comic and tragic elements. For Boas the 'problem' plays were Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida. He wrote that "throughout these plays we move along dim untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome".Later critics have used the term for other plays, including Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice.


19th-century drama

While social debates in drama were nothing new, the problem play of the 19th century was distinguished by its intent to confront the spectator with the dilemmas experienced by the characters. The earliest forms of the problem play are to be found in the work of French writers such as Alexandre Dumas, fils, who dealt with the subject of prostitution in The Lady of the Camellias (1852). Other French playwrights followed suit with dramas about a range of social issues, sometimes approaching the subject in a moralistic, sometimes in a sentimental manner. Critic Thomas H. Dickinson, writing in 1927, argued that these early problem plays were hampered by the dramatic conventions of the day, "No play written in the problem form was significant beyond the value of the idea that was its underlying motive for existence. No problem play had achieved absolute beauty, or a living contribution to truth."

The most important exponent of the problem play, however, was the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen, whose work combined penetrating characterisation with emphasis on topical social issues, usually concentrated on the moral dilemmas of a central character. In a series of plays Ibsen addressed a range of problems, most notably the restriction of women's lives in A Doll's House (1879), sexually-transmitted disease in Ghosts (1882) and provincial greed in An Enemy of the People (1882). Ibsen's dramas proved immensely influential, spawning variants of the problem play in works by George Bernard Shaw and other later dramatists.

20th century


The genre was especially influential in the early 20th century. In Britain plays such as Houghton's Hindle Wakes (1912), developed the genre to shift the nature of the 'problem'. This "resolutely realistic problem play set in domestic interiors of the mill town Hindle" starts with the 'problem' of an apparently seduced woman, but ends with the woman herself rejected her status as a victim of seduction "the 'problem' is not, after all, the redemption of a betrayed maiden's tarnished honour, but the readiness of her respectable elders to determine a young woman's future for her without regard to her rights—including here her right to erotic holiday enjoyment."

In America the problem play was associated with the emergence of debates over civil rights issues. Racial issues were tackled in plays such as Angelina Weld Grimké's, Rachel.It was a tool of the socialist theatre in the 1920s and 30s, and overlapped with forms of documentary theatre in works such as Carl Crede's Paragraph 218 (1930), which concerns the issue of abortion, and which was directed by Erwin Piscator

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STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Definition of Stream of Consciousness

When used as a term in literature, stream of consciousness is a narrative form in which the author writes in a way that mimics or parallels a character’s internal thoughts. Sometimes this device is also called “internal monologue,” and often the style incorporates the natural chaos of thoughts and feelings that occur in any of our minds at any given time. Just as happens in real life, stream-of-consciousness narratives often lack associative leaps and are characterized by an absence of regular punctuation.

The term “stream of consciousness” first came about in 1890 when the philosopher and psychologist William James used it in his book, The Principles of Psychology. He used it to describe the natural flow of thoughts that, even while the different parts are not necessarily connected, the brain does not distinguish one thought as strictly independent from the next. May Sinclair was the first person, in 1918, to adapt the definition of stream of consciousness to literature.

Difference Between Stream of Consciousness and Free Writing

The activity of free writing is a technique to remove inhibitions from creativity. Free writing encourages a writer to get words down on paper without editing or worrying about the product, knowing that most of it will not necessarily be all that interesting. Stream of consciousness, on the other hand, is writing that has been polished and has a purpose, even while giving the impression that it is somewhat “random.” Authors who use the technique of stream of consciousness do so with intentions to guide the character from one place to the next internally and not just let the character’s thoughts go haywire.

Common Examples of Stream of Consciousness

All of us experience the sensation of stream of consciousness on a daily basis when we are alone with our thoughts. For example, imagine the following situations:

• “Let’s see, what else do I need to buy? I’ve got chips, chocolate…oh, and I need to get that awful prune juice for Harold. I can’t believe he actually thinks this cleanse thing is gonna work. And to think he wanted me to do it with him. As if I need to lose weight. Hmm, I wonder how late the gym is open tonight.”
• “I’ve got to get this spreadsheet done by the meeting. I hope Miller likes it better than last time. I can’t believe he liked Joe’s work better. What a brown-noser. And he’s wearing the stupidest suit today. Oh shoot, I’ve got a mustard stain on my sleeve.”

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Significance of Stream of Consciousness in Literature

Stream of consciousness is a device that gained popularity in twentieth-century literature. There are some examples of stream of consciousness before this time, such as in the 1757 novel Tristam Shandy or Edgar Allen Poe’s precursor style in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and other works. In general, however, it’s considered a modern style.

Stream of consciousness can be found in literature from different cultures and languages. Stream of consciousness examples can be found in the works of French writer Marcel Proust, Indian writer Salman Rushdie, Irish writer James Joyce, Italian writer Italo Svevo, Mexican writer Roberto Bolaño and contemporary American novelist Dave Eggers. Authors use stream of consciousness to more closely follow a character’s interior life. Stream of consciousness gives a very direct view into the subtle and sometimes rapid shifts in the way a character thinks while going about his or her day. This provides a very intimate relationship between the reader and the character.

Examples of Stream of Consciousness in Literature

Example #1

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

(“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot)

This is one of the early examples of stream of consciousness writing from the twentieth century (it was published in 1915). T.S. Eliot explores his narrator’s inner life throughout the poem, moving from one thought to the next quickly. The above excerpt shows several different thoughts within the space of just a few lines. However, the use of stream of consciousness in this poem belies a real depth of feeling, as the narrator seems to want to make himself understood throughout the poem and struggles with that connection.

Example #2

I could hear Queenie’s feet and the bright shapes went smooth and steady on both sides, the shadows of them flowing across Queenie’s back. They went on like the bright tops of wheels. Then those on one side stopped at the tall white post where the soldier was. But on the other side they went on smooth and steady, but a little slower.

(The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner)

One of the characters in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury is Benjy, a cognitively disabled man. His section of the novel is written in a stream of consciousness style, documenting Benjy’s sensory experiences of the world without the advantage of being able to really understand them. In this excerpt, Benjy describes moving in a carriage and Faulkner imagines the details that stream though Benjy’s mind as he has this experience.

Example #3

For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life.

(Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf)

In the above example of stream of consciousness from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the character of Clarissa is walking to a flower shop. She is noticing beauty around her and feeling happy to be alive. In her happiness she thinks of how a homeless person might be able to see the same things and feel the same happiness. Woolf uses stream of consciousness here as a bit of foreshadowing; Clarissa’s husband will later see a homeless woman on the street and have a different impression than Clarissa does here. By introducing the reader to Clarissa’s thoughts here on this matter, the reader later is able to understand more of the significance of her husband’s different views.

Example #4

Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

(Ulysses by James Joyce)

The above excerpt is the famous conclusion to James Joyce’s monumental work of stream of consciousness, Ulysses. In it, the character Molly is seemingly reflecting on accepting a marriage proposal from Bloom, her husband. The lack of punctuation or stops and starts is characteristic both of Joyce’s writing style and stream of consciousness in general. The repetition of the word “yes” is the connective tissue between all of Molly’s disparate thoughts.

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Test Your Knowledge of Stream of Consciousness

1. Choose the correct stream of consciousness definition from the following statements:
A. A linear flow of thoughts with obvious associations between one idea and the next.
B. A narrative device which mimics the chaos of natural thoughts patterns that often lacks obvious connections.
C. A form of writing with clear rhythm, pattern, and rhyme scheme.

Answer to Question #1	Show

2. How are free writing and stream of consciousness different?
A. They are synonyms—there are no differences.
B. Free writing is polished writing that reflects an author’s best work while stream of consciousness is random words strung together.
C. Stream of consciousness is a highly stylized form even though it appears random, while free writing is an author’s first draft of writing that doesn’t attempt to be polished.

Answer to Question #2	Show

3. Having read the above example of Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness style, which of the following quotes would you guess also comes from Mrs. Dalloway?
A. 

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . .

B.

There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.

C. 

Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut.

Answer to Question #3	Show

Work cited :-

1)  https://youtu.be/qYAUkfv3kwM

2) http://www.literarydevices.com/stream-of-consciousness/