Selected Short Stories

In this wonderful anthology of Virginia Woolf's short stories, we notice that Virginia bases her narrative discourse on a set of themes that are experimental in shaping the structures of character, event and spatial reference; such as the connection of the personality with the symbolic and visual structure of space, the creative ambiguity of the personality with spiritual depth, the connection to deep and old memories, and its connection also to ancient fashion forms in a dynamic temporal and spatial context in which the impressions of the past and the transformations of the structure of the presence correspond as well as the gestures of death and life. Also, we find that the ancient sounds of art and literature correspond are restored intermittently in the consciousness and unconsciousness.

Consequently, the reality of Mrs. Dalloway involves the encounter between the transformation of the place by war and the structure of daily life, and her creative signs that are deeply spiritually connected to ancient fashions, paintings, music, texts by William Shakespeare, and the natural, romantic rhythm of spaces and characters earlier than the moment Mrs. Dalloway walks on London Street. Then we can read Mrs. Dalloway's inner world through her connection to the space of the transformation and the deep layers of this space in its poetics of the signs of the character's feminine memory.

Additionally, with a new poetic sensitivity towards colors, we find Virginia’s narrator reshaping things, elements of nature, inner impression and shadow according to the green harmonic, or the blue musical harmony, and then reveals the new musical narrative of the silent, living, micro or macro elements according to their psychological and spiritual impact through the abstract color.

Also, the Virginia narrator combined the index of individual identity with the creative originality of Mabel, who was in Mrs. Dalloway's fashion room and re-read her individual feminine identity through the aesthetic impact of old fashion and the literary images generated by the creative act of reading.

Moreover, the creative ambiguity of the artistic figure rises in its spiritual and organic connection with the aesthetic visual structure of the place/room in Virginia's story The Lady in The Looking Glass; from the narrator's perspective, the woman has become an aesthetic sign in that personal space, which resembles ancient civilizational symbols, abstract artwork, and allegorical images in literary poems. Then Virginia Woolf points out, in the implications of her narrative discourse, the inner spiritual and literary depth of the character, and also points to the phenomenological overlap between seeing the character in reality and her vision in a possible daydream.

Finally, I think that analyzing Virginia's stories is suitable for International Women's Day in the year 2022 due to revealing the creative sensitivity of some unique female characters.