11th British Literature

Stream of Consciousness in "The Looking Glass"

In psychological terms, “stream of consciousness” is a metaphor for our ever-changing, ever-moving human thought processes.

“Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.” (William James, , 1890)

The first stream of consciousness novel in English was by British writer Dorothy Richardson. This novel, Pointed Roofs, published in 1915, was part of a long semi-autobiographical series, and one of its reviewers, May Sinclair, used the term “stream of consciousness” to describe Richardson’s writing in 1918.

“She has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes.” (Virginia Woolf, in a review of Richardson’s book Revolving Lights, 1923)

Stream of consciousness writing can be characterized by:

Interior Monologue of a principle character, “overheard” by the reader
Abrupt shifts in topic mid-sentence or mid-paragraph, following thought association rather than chronology
“One must refuse to be put off any longer with sayings and doings such as the moment brought forth - with dinners and visits and polite conversations. One must put oneself in her shoes. If one took the phrase literally, it was easy to see the shoes in which she stood, down in the lower garden, at this moment. They were very narrow and long and fashionable - they were made of the softest and most flexible leather. Like everything she wore, they were exquisite.” (“Lady in the Looking Glass”)

Sensory details like sights, smells, and sounds, recording the narrator’s perceptions of the world as they occur.
Sentences of varying lengths, often very long and often violating standard grammar rules
“The quiet old country room with its rugs and stone chimney pieces, its sunken book-cases and red and gold lacquer cabinets, was full of such nocturnal creatures. They came pirouetting across the floor, stepping delicately with high-lifted feet and spread tails and pecking allusive beaks as if they had been cranes or flocks of elegant flamingoes whose pink was faded, or peacocks whose trains were veined with silver.” (“Lady in the Looking Glass”)

In art, we might compare stream of consciousness writing to Impressionism, another style that tries to evoke the way the viewer sees reality rather than one objective view of reality.
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. … Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. (Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 1919)



Stream of consciousness, especially as deployed by Virginia Woolf, is sometimes thought of as a writing style particularly suited to capturing women's experiences and state of mind:
“…the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon—one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go…” (Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall”)

How does Virginia Woolf use both the writing style and the content of this story to challenge our assumptions about a singular, objective view of reality?


How do you describe the narrator of this story? What is the narrator’s attitude toward Isabella Tyson?
What material objects does the narrator use to imagine Isabella’s life? What personality or psychological traits do these objects represent in Isabella?
What is the significance of each part of the title of this story? What does the title imply about the story’s purpose? About Isabella as a character?
What is the connection between the last paragraph (below) of the story and the rest? Is there one true view of Isabella Tyson?