In class lately we have been talking a lot about the differences between the writing styles of Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemmingway. Some people might think that, because these two authors are from similar time periods, their styles of writing must be similar. However, it is quite the contrary. Woolf and Hemingway’s styles could not be more different.
Virginia Woolf loves to use lots of description and make the reader be right next to the person they are describing or in the room that that person is in. Her amazing attention to detail is what made Mrs. Dalloway the book that it was. She fills sometimes an entire page with description, from the red velvet curtains to sound that the car makes when it. Another one of Woolf’s traits is the way she likes to get inside peoples’ heads. A majority of the novel is spent in one of the characters heads, usually Clarissa, Richard, or Septimus’s. Sometimes it’s not a lot, but it’s important. For example, when Richard is buying the flowers for Clarissa, the only way we know that they are to tell her he loves her is because we get inside his head and know exactly what he’s thinking.
Ernest Hemingway is very different. His pages are full of four or five word sentences. He has hardly any detail and is not descriptive about almost anything. He also has continuous back and forth dialogue that often causes the reader to get confused about who is talking. I also found that a lot of Hemingway’s comments were very politically incorrect and/or racist whereas, even if Virginia Woolf is implying some of the same things, it is much more subtle. Hemingway, on the other hand, is very blunt.
Another difference is that Woolf seems to write about more feminine topics, like flowers and parties. Hemingway tries to be very macho and his entire novel is filled with people who are very often crude and drink constantly.
Although they come from the same time period, Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway have very different styles of writing, but the way they each write makes their novels all the more fascinating.
2 comments:
One important thing to keep in mind is that Woolf's extensive descriptive passages are never *solely* descriptive (of the sort she makes fun of Edwardian writers like Bennett for indulging in)--the material objects, effects of light, smells, and other details are always registered through a character's consciousness (whether as a trigger for memory, part of a memory, or a powerful "moment" in the present). In other words, her apparently external description always has something to do with the character who is perceiving what's being described--it's "part of the cave."
It is interesting to see how different two writers from the same time period are. I think a lot of it lies in there setting and backgrounds. Woolf was raised in a very Victorian house in England, while Hemingway lived in the Left Bank with progressive, decadent artists. Their surroundings definitely played huge parts on their writing styles.
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