UC Davis

This paper will explore the connection in Woolf’s writing between her conception of narrative as a function of human perception of time, and her use of the archetypal modernist epiphany as an organizing structure around which her stories accreted. In doing so this paper will examine a division in Woolf scholarship between two different conceptions of the modernist epiphany, as either mystical or materialist phenomena. Four different characters will be examined: Orlando, Clarissa Dalloway (both from their eponymous novels), and James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe from To the Lighthouse. In doing so this paper will reveal the means by which the two understandings of epiphany can be seen not as mutually exclusive interpretations but as complementary modes of the same phenomena.