Representation of characters in the opening to virginia woolfs novel...

The text introduces the reader to a number of characters Mrs Haines, Mr Oliver, his daughter in law Isa and Rupert Haines himself. It is through the representation or rather the authorial manipulation of these first two characters that we are drawn into to the dynamic between the latter: Isa and Mr Haines. It is important to note that it is not the characters themselves that are represented as the important theme of the text but the relationships between them. The purpose of the passage is not concerned with giving a set of details about each character, though of course some limited description is given, but in revealing a dynamic tension between them and to leave the reader to wonder what has happened or indeed will occur in terms of the interaction between them. It is a literary device, what is not said, that draws our attention. The lack of explicit descriptive text regarding the characters themselves draws our attention elsewhere, away from the individual characters as distinct ent...