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  3. "I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolfs provocative statement abou

"I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolfs provocative statement abou

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问题     "I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolfs provocative statement about her intentions in writing Mrs. Dalloway has regularly been ignored by the critics, since it highlights an aspect of her literary interests very different from the traditional picture of the "poetic" novelist concerned with examining states of dream and vision and with following the intricate pathways of individual consciousness. But Virginia Woolf was a realistic as well as a poetic novelist, a satirist and social critic as well as a visionary: literary critics’ casual dismissal of Woolf s social vision will not withstand thorough examination.
    In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the questions of how individuals are shaped (or deformed) by their social environments, how historical forces impinge on people’s lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to determine people’s fates. Most of her novels are rooted in a realistically represented social setting and in a precise historical time.
    Woolfs focus on society has not been generally recognized because of her intense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers in her novels are usually satiric or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is fundamentally sympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform their society and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest, unaware of how their political ideas serve their own psychological needs. (Her Writer’s Diary notes: "the only honest people are the artists" whereas "these social reformers and philanthropists" harbor discreditable desires under the disguise of loving their kind...) Woolf had an abhorrence of what she called "preaching" in fiction, too, and criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence (among others) for working by this method.
    Woolfs own social criticism is expressed in the language of observation rather than in direct commentary, since for her, fiction is a contemplative, not an active art. She describes phenomena and provides materials for a judgment about society and social issues: it is the reader’s work to put the observations together and understand the coherent point of view behind them. As a moralist, Woolf, works by indirection, subtly undermining officially accepted mores, mocking, suggesting, calling into question, rather than asserting, advocating, bearing witness: hers is the satirist’s art.
    Woolf s literary models were acute social observers like Chekhov and Chaucer. As she put it in The Common Reader, "It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or no stone set upon another because of anything Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbing morality at every pore." Like Chaucer, Woolf chose to understand as well as to judge, to know her society root and branch — a decision crucial in order to produce art rather than polemic.
The most probable reason Woolf realistically described the social setting in the majority of her novels was that she______.
选项 A、was aware that contemporary literary critics considered the novel to be the most realistic of literary genres
B、was interested in the effect of a person’s social milieu on his or her character and actions
C、needed to be as attentive to detail as possible in her novels in order to support the arguments
D、wanted to show that a painstaking fidelity in the representation of reality did not hamper the artist
答案B
解析 细节题。原文第二段第一句指出：伍尔夫在小说中深入考虑的问题是：个人是怎样由社会环境造就的或改变的(how individuals are shaped(or deformed)by their social environments)；历史的力量是怎样冲击人们的生活的(how historical forces impinge on people’s lives)；阶级、财富、性别是怎样决定人的命运的(how class，wealth and gender help to determine people’s fates)。由此可以推论，伍尔夫在她大部分小说中现实主义地描述社会环境最可能的原因是因为她关注社会环境对人物及其行为的影响(was that she was interested in the effect of a person’s social milieu on his or her character and actions)。因此B是正确答案。
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