The Connection of Virginia Woolf’s Prose to Chaos Theory

The prose by Virginia Woolf is outstanding with the wide amount of senses and their deepness that one can see in her literary works. One can see no wondering in the fact that the literature works with such wide and deep sense can include evidence for different theories. Thus, there is evidence for the theories of Nietzsche, Emerson, and Chaos Theory in the prose by Virginia Woolf.

The most interesting in this context can be a relation of Woolf’s prose and Chaos Theory, as far as this theory is related to mathematics. According to Oestreicher, Chaos Theory has a philosophical proposition that “every event is physically determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. ” In the context of Woolf’s prose, the events from theory’s proposition can be understood not only as some physical processes but also as events from human life. Woolf’s novels such as Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway can be considered in the context of their relations to Chaos Theory. It has to be mentioned that the specifics of these two of Woolf’s novels is that they represent stories of human lives with many details. That allows one to observe the lives of the characters and see on their examples those chains of prior occurrences that lead to one or other events in their stories. The fact that Woolf describes the different people from the same areas of society allows to compare their lives and see which prior occurrences lead to which events and why different characters have different or the same events in their stories. This way one can see the evidence that Woolf’s novels provide for Chaos Theory.

Observing the relation of “A Room of One’s Own” and Emerson’s theory one can see that not only Woolf’s novels can provide evidence for scientific theories. One can see that Emerson pay much attention to nature in his theory. He admires nature and writes about its importance as the phenomenon that allows people to know themselves. Emerson describes his impression from being in nature in the following way - “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. ” At the same time, one can see that Woolf’s character, or maybe herself, starts her story from the point when she was in nature and trying to catch the idea. Woolf describes the landscape around her in the following way “The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been, ” and than add that “There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought, ” implying herself or her character behind that “one”. This way one can see that “A Room of One’s Own” provides evidence for being in nature as a way of knowing oneself. One can also pay attention to the character of Mrs. Jarvis from Jacob's Room. This character has an experience of walking walks on the moor and having feelings similar to one Emerson described in his essay. This way one can see evidence for Emerson’s theory in Woolf’s prose. One more theory, evidence for which one can find in Woolf’s literature works is Nietzsche’s theory. Thus, in his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Nietzsche pays much attention to the truth and the fact that it can not be reached. Nietzsche writes about knowledge that “pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character. ” One can see that similar ideas about knowledge and inability to find the truth are reflected in Woolf’s prose. Thus, in Jacob's Room Woolf remarked in the context of perception the main character that “Nobody sees anyone as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole — they see all sorts of things — they see themselves…” This way, one can see the evidence of Nietzsche’s ideas about perception and knowledge.

In A Room of One’s Own Woolf asked herself - or her character asked herself - about the nature of truth “Yes indeed, which was truth and which was illusion, I asked myself, ” and after that she develops that think on the example of the landscape around her - “the willows and the river and the gardens that run down to the river, vague now with the mist stealing over them, but gold and red in the sunlight — which was the truth, which was the illusion about them?” This way, one can see evidence for Nietzsche’s theory in Woolf’s prose. This way, one can see that being complex and having deep scenes, the prose by Virginia Woolf contains the evidence for the theories by Nietzsche, Emerson, and Chaos Theory. This is relevant not only for her novels but also for works of small genres.