Abstrakt
While reading and studying Woolf's fiction, the reader is often given the simplified information that the author's novels and short fiction consist mainly of accounts of mental states and manifestations of consciousness. This claim is supported by Woolf herself in her essay "Modern Fiction" in which she urges writers to "convey the varying, unknown and uncircumscribed spirit with as little of the alien and external as possible".
However, if the reader takes Woolf's statement literally, he or she notices that Woolf's fiction is quite contradictorily full of accounts of the physical and material. For instance, Woolf establishes strong physical objects such as houses, a lighthouse, clocks, or describes quite minutely the physical external reality but at the same time provides the character's mental response to these physical entities.
The aim of the presentation is to explain the relation between the mental and the physical in Woolf's fiction in terms of her conception of experience of reality and theories of consciousness that may be associated with the conscious experience of reality represented in her works. As the author does not deny the existence of physical objects in her fiction and places the physical and mental on the equal level, she may be associated with Bertrand Russell's neutral monism that treats reality as neither mental nor physical.
It is to be analyzed in the presentation that the mental, in other words the perceiving subject, often merges with the perceived physical object and the distinction between the mental and the physical is no longer relevant in Woolf's fiction. Moreover, Woolf's representation of consciousness may be also related to panpsychism, more radical theory of consciousness than neutral monism, that attributes mental states also to non-living entities such as physical objects.
Consequently, some physical objects in Woolf's fiction stand for human bodies, for example the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse.