The waves between the acts: the perception of music in the works of Virginia Woolf.

What did Woolf seek to achieve from her musical way of writing? Where we would only have been able to guess in the past, modern science has revealed links between music and the brain that will now help us to understand how Woolf attempts to unify – both characters and reader – in the shared experience of music. This essay is a simultaneous study on how music affects the brain, and why Woolf’s works affect us: it will investigate the works of Virginia Woolf and the bearing music and sound have on her writing, and answer the questions of why and how Woolf strove to the condition of music in her literature. The topic of music and the way it affects both mind and emotion will be broached from a neurological perspective; this, in turn, will help us better understand Woolf’s writing and what she sought to achieve in the musical arrangement of her words: how rhyme, meter and other poetic devices play a part in her desire to move people and make them look inward. We will also see, in a close analysis of how Woolf’s characters react to music and sound, what Woolf wanted to achieve by making her text musical.Bachelor of Art