Form and meaning in Dorothy m. Richardson’s pilgrimagea critical reassessment

Resumo

The aphorism "Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered" quoted by José Saramago at the beginning of The Double (2004)may be said to synthesize the aim of this thesis, which is no other than an attempt to clear up the partial, divergent, and often contradictory critical interpretations of Pilgrimage and to show the novels aspiration to organic unity and coherence. The starting hypothesis is that, although Pilgrimage undoubtedly is a modernist novel, it grows out of the English novelistic tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly womens sentimental and gothic fiction, a fact that has not been sufficiently studied by the critics. Our critical reassessment has, therefore, taken into account both the earlier and the modernist traditions with a view to demonstrating how Pilgrimage absorbs and recasts them and incorporates innovative modernist features such as the use of myth as a structuring principle or the open-ended ending. In my approach to the novel, I argued that both the Bildungsroman and the roman fleuve, which are two of the main traditional lines of analysis of Pilgrimage, are historically bound genres and that both of them share basic traits that go back to a common archetype, that of the heros quest. Consequently, I attempted to provide a comprehensive analysis of the form and meaning of the novel with a view to establishing, firstly, the range and depth of the traditional and the modernist elements of the novel at the thematic and formal levels and, secondly, the way in which the novels mythical structure runs parallel to the physical and psychological (or spiritual) maturation of the heroine. The textual analysis (based on the theories of Gérard Genette, Dorrit Cohn and also, to a lesser degree, those of Mieke Bal, Wayne Booth and Saul Gary Morson) focused on such typically modernist narrative techniques of stream-of-consciousness novels as free indirect style, paralepses and psycho-narration, and also the transposition to