In the following passage from a 1950 essay by Lawrence Edward Bowling on the stream of consciousness technique is, I think, one of the most careful considerations of what’s going on in Dorothy Richardson’s narrative approach: “Miss Richardson’s customary method may be called the stream of consciousness technique only in the sense that she leads us along the bank of the stream and describes for us in her own words what she sees; only occasionally does she bring us to a vantage point from which we can behold the stream itself.” The result is what Bowling calls “sensory impression.”
From Lawrence Edward Bowling, “What is the Stream of Consciousness Technique?” PMLA, Volume LXV, Number 4, June 1950, 333-345.
The twentieth-century novelist most frequently referred to as the typical writer of stream of consciousness fiction—and held by some to have invented this method—is Dorothy Richardson. In the introduction to Pointed Roofs (1919), May Sinclair comments as follows upon Miss Richardson’s technique: “Obviously, she [the author] must not interfere; she must not analyze or comment or explain…. And there are some things she must not be. She must not be the wise, all-knowing author. She must be Miriam Henderson. She must not know or divine anything that Miriam does not know or divine.” Speaking of Miss Richardson’s Honeycomb, Joseph Warren Beach quotes Miss Sinclair’s comment and agrees with it: “It is not as if the author were there to interpret for us. The fundamental assumption of Miss Richardson’s method is that the author should not be there. … The narrative is simply the stream of consciousness of the heroine.’
With these comments, let us compare a few examples of Miss Richardson’s writing. In the following passage, a man with whom Miriam is talking makes a remark which excites her mind into a soliloquy:
“The vagaries of the Fair, dear girl,” he said presently, in a soft blurred tone.
That’s one of his phrases, thought Miriam—that’s old-fashioned politeness; courtliness. Behind it he’s got some sort of mannish thought… “the unaccountability of women”. . . who can understand a woman—she doesn’t even understand herself-—thought he’d given up trying to make out. He’s gone through life and got his own impression; all utterly wrong . . . talking about them with an air of wisdom to young men like Gerald . . . my dear boy, a woman never knows her own mind. How utterly detestable mannishness is; so mighty and strong and comforting when you have been mewed up with women all your life, and then suddenly, in a second, far away, utterly imbecile and aggravating with a superior self-satisfied smile because a woman says one thing one minute and another the next. Men ought to be horsewhipped, all the grown men, all, all, horsewhipped until they apologise on their knees. (Honeycomb, chapter 7)
This is good interior monologue and agrees perfectly with the above quoted remarks. The following excerpt, although it is not monologue, also conforms to Miss Sinclair’s and Professor Beach’s comments. As Miriam goes down a West End street, these are the sights and sounds which impress themselves upon her consciousness.
… grey buildings rising on either side, feeling away into the approaching distance— angles sharp against the sky… softened angles of buildings against other buildings . . . high moulded angles soft as crumb, with deep undershadows . . . creepers fraying from balconies . . . strips of window blossoms across the build- ings, scarlet, yellow, high up; a confusion of lavender and white pouching out along a dipping sill . . . a wash of green creeper up a white painted house front … patches of shadow and bright light…. Sounds of visible near things streaked and scored with broken light as they moved, led off into untraced distant sounds . . . chiming together. (Honeycomb, chapter 6)
This type of writing, to be distinguished from interior monologue, may be designated as sensory impression. In interior monologue, the mind is active; from concrete sensory impressions, it works toward abstract thoughts and ideas. In sensory impression, the mind is more or less passive; it is concerned merely with perceiving concrete sense impressions. In reveries and dreams, the mind seems to be in this same state, and the same technique may be used in presenting these imaginary sensory impressions. To present this area of consciousness, many authors use brief phrases, separated by three elliptical dots, as Miss Richardson does in this passage. (Compare Daniel Prince’s dream in Les Lauriers.) A noun is commonly used to designate an object not in motion, and a participle is attached if movement is indicated. Sensory impression is the writer’s nearest approach to putting pure sensations and images on paper. This is the area of consciousness which Dostoevsky and most other writers either omit or present indirectly in the form of internal analysis. The distinguishing characteristic of certain twentieth-century psychological novelists is that they attempt to present directly and dramatically the whole of the consciousness.
In each of the above two passages, it may be said, without qualification, that the author does “not interfere, … analyze or comment or explain,” and that the passages are “simply the stream of consciousness of the heroine.” The question remains, however: does Miss Richardson employ this same objective, dramatic technique throughout the whole of the novel or in only a few intermittent instances? If it is not correct to say, “The narrative is simply the stream of consciousness of the heroine,” then how does her usual method differ from this technique and what should it be called?
To discover that Miss Richardson does intervene in order to analyze and interpret, we need look no farther than the first paragraph of Honeycomb:
When Miriam got out of the train into the darkness she knew that there were woods all about her. The moist air was rich with the smell of trees—wet bark and branches—moss and lichen, damp dead leaves. She stood on the dark plat- form snuffing the rich air. It was the end of her journey. Anything that might follow would be unreal compared to that moment. Little bulbs of yellow light further up the platform told her where she must turn to find the things she must go to meet. “How lovely the air is here.” The phrase repeated itself again and again, going with her up the platform towards the group of lights. (Honeycomb chapter 1)
Nothing about this paragraph impresses one as being unusual. It is certainly not the stream of consciousness of the heroine. ‘‘How lovely the air is here’’ is the only part of the passage which is an exact copy of any part of the character’s mind, and this fragment is enclosed in quotation marks to indicate that it is different from the remainder of the passage. The sentence beginning “The phrase repeated itself again and again…” cannot by any standard be defended as a direct report of the character’s actual thought; this is an abstract commentary on the part of the author, intervening between us and the character’s mind to give us a summary of the character’s thought. If we were really inside Miriam’s stream of consciousness, we would not find any such summary statement; we would simply hear the phrase repeating itself. The statement that “it is not as if the author were there to interpret for us”’ is not correct, for the author is definitely present in this passage. Instead of introducing us directly into the interior life of the character, the author stands as an interpreter between us and the character’s mind and gives us her interpretation of what the character feels and thinks. This method of writing should be called, not the stream of consciousness technique but internal analysis, since it is the author’s analysis of what is taking place inside the character. Internal analysis and the stream of consciousness technique are fundamentally different: the one summarizes, the other dramatizes; the one is abstract, the other is concrete.
In stating that Dorothy Richardson is not “the wise, all-knowing author,” that she does “not know or divine anything that Miriam does not know or divine,” Miss Sinclair is thinking of the author’s tendency to follow closely the experiences of the heroine and to present things in the order in which they reveal themselves to that character; but Miss Richardson does not always adhere to this practice, as is illustrated by her comment in the following sentence from Honeycomb: “Responding to her companion’s elaborate apologetic petition for permission to smoke it did not occur to Miriam to confess that she herself occasionally smoked.” In this sentence, the author reveals herself as being aware of something which “did not occur to Miriam.” Although Miss Richardson usually identifies herself with her main character—and this is one of this author’s distinguishing characteristics—she does not restrict herself completely to this point of view.
Commenting upon the stream of consciousness technique, Elizabeth Drew defines it as “the method of creating character and interpreting life invented by Dorothy Richardson, that method by which we never pass out of the realm of one person’s immediate experience, and one person’s consciousness is the standard of reference for the whole existence.” As pointed out in the preceding paragraph, this type of statement applies fairly well to Miss Richardson’s method; but it does not correctly describes the stream of consciousness technique. Elsewhere, Miss Drew remarks of Miss Richardson’s method: “she is entirely occupied with the reporting of the impressions made upon her conscious and un- conscious mind by the experiences of life.” This time, Miss Drew quotes a representative passage from Interim to illustrate the method of which she is speaking:
The hushed happiness that had begun in the dining room half an hour ago seized her again suddenly, sending her forward almost on tiptoe. It was securely there; the vista it opened growing in beauty as she walked . . . bearing within her in secret unfathomable abundance the gift of old-English rose and white gracious adorable womanhood….
“The recording of all these phenomena is, says Miss Drew, “a new experiment in literature.” The question is, does the passage quoted from Interim bear out or refute Miss Drew’s remarks? She says the passage is a “reporting of the impressions,” “the recording of all these phenomena.” But is it correct to say of this passage that it is a report or a recording? These terms imply an exact copy. What the author gives us in this passage is not an exact copy, not a direct quotation, but an indirect statement. Miss Richardson’s customary method may be called the stream of consciousness technique only in the sense that she leads us along the bank of the stream and describes for us in her own words what she sees; only occasionally does she bring us to a vantage point from which we can behold the stream itself. In making this distinction, we are not questioning in any way the literary quality of either type of writing but merely insisting that between the technique employed in the last three passages considered from Miss Richardson’s work and that exemplified in the first two passages there is a fundamental difference and that, if confusion is to be avoided, the two methods must not be called by the same name.