Virginia Woolf's Artists. The Influence on her Work of the Aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell

La tesi esamina l'utilizzo di tecniche pittoriche nei romanzi di Virginia Woolf. La teoria estetica del Bloomsbury Group che si dirama in linee antitetiche, nella fattispecia quella di Roger Fry, teorizzatore del postimpressionismo, e quella di Clive Bell, teorizzatore dell'astrattismo, viene da Woolf rielaborata nei termini di una mimesi letteraria che testimonia l'originalità della scrittrice sia in ambito modernista che postmodernista ante litteram. Fondamentali interlocutori di Woolf, i due critici d'arte la ingaggiano infatti in una meditazione teorica sul potere mimetico del codice semiotico verbale che si concluderà in una presa di posizione postimpressionista e antiolistica anticipatoria di quanto il posmodernismo adotterà come suo tratto caratterizzante.

My Ph.D thesis examines the development of the concept of form in the light of the Post-Impressionist aesthetics of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. While it is often assumed that Virginia Woolf works in their wake, their influence has not been examined in detail before. The dissertation draws attention to the polarity of the views on art which Roger Fry and Clive Bell as art critics pursued, and to the consequences these imply. Fry's and Bell's aesthetics are tested against Virginia Woolf's concern for art in general, and in particular against her statements on the artist in her novels and essays. After an introduction in which the general development of aesthetic criticism in the nineteenth century is traced, the critical ideas of Fry, his influence on Woolf, and the theories of Bell are explored in Chapters 2 to 4. Chapters 5 to 7 examine Woolf's use of their aesthetic ideas in the following novels: To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Between the Acts. Fryian concepts such as beauty, design, rhythm, texture, unity and vision are shown to play a crucial role in her fiction, which, if unacknowledged, limits our understanding of her artistic universe. These concepts represent the background on which all her experimental writing, her study of the re-presentation of reality through the medium of the novel, is based. Woolf's concern for form is thus shown to be a development from the rejection of the mimetic conventions towards abstraction. The extremity of this solution, however, proved its limitation. The predicament in which Bernard, the artist of The Waves, is entrapped directed Woolf away from Bell's decontextualized universe towards the equipoised vision of reality championed by Roger Fry in his work on Cézanne; this constituted the basis for her new concept of beauty, not as truth but as "pied beauty".