Critics have regarded Flush as a minor work and have dismissed it as such. This disregard is closely related with two misunderstood motives for writing Flush, which are : originally, Virginia Woo If intended Flush as a "joke" for "distraction" after The Waves, her most experimental work ; in addition, she aimed to write a biography of the Brownings under the name of their dog, Flush. This article attempts to reconsider what motivated her to write Flush. The affairs of the Brownings were well known, especially thanks to the popular drama The Barrens of Wimpole Street (1930). Though Virginia Woolf went to the theatre, she was disappointed with the play. She decided, therefore, to make "it hit harder" by bringing out Flush as a hero, instead of the Brownings. However, Virginia Woolf seems little interested in any biographical data on Flush. She calls Flush a "joke" because she coaxes her readers to laugh though they expect to read a biography of a dog. She sincerely questions what a biography should be, or how to describe a life, which is her obsessive concern. Her belief that Flush can embody her creative vision is the most convincing motive for writing Flush. Although Flush always remains silent while observing what is going on around him, he once betrays his ambition to write just as the poet. Flush is one of Woolf's familiar artist figures who try to bring forth words from silence, or express what is not yet expressed. Therefore, Flush is not an exceptional minor work, but one definite example of Woolf's writings.

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Men with power in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, including psychiatrists, shared the bias that those who deviate from norms should be eliminated from society so as to prevent the human race from degenerating. In the context of such medical and eugenical discourse, Virginia Woolf was designated as "the congenital degenerate" to be exterminated because she was "a new woman", genius and neurotic. We will trace the way she fought against this label that was attached to herself. Apparently Virginia Woolf was consistent in her attitude toward medical and eugenical discourse. She made a continual attack on the falsehoods of "pseudo-science" and the hypocrisy of professionals, especially in her feminist essays. Besides she knew their political unconsciousness well enough to disclose them when she characterized two wicked doctors - Dr Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw - in her fiction Mrs Dalloway. For all these conscious rejection and criticism, however, in the cracks unconsciously revealed in her texts we can find another Virginia who accepts the doctors' discourse, which is revealed often enough in her discriminating words to others, sometimes in the perception of herself as an incompetent neurathenia. Above all, the very action to commit suicide illustrates her ultimate acceptance of medical discourse. It was ironically Virginia herself who put an end to the degenerate. What made her suffer all through her life is, as it were, "mental illness as metaphor" rather than her illness itself.

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Orlando is a fantastic novel, which the author herself called "a writer's holiday", and the most fantastic is Orlando's immense life span and the sex-change in the middle of the work. Because of this metaphorical construction, this novel has been mostly argued in the light of feminism, associated with A Room of One's Own and with Between the Acts as a re-reading of the English history dominated by men. "Orlando offers a wealth of revelations", as Jean Guiguet pointed out, and this novel reveals not only feminism but many other Woolfian concerns. For instance, the metamorphosis from man to woman of Orlando in Constantinople, where "East" and "West" meet, evokes to us the synthesis of the oppositions, and her cultural shock from the barbarian life of the gipsies there and her longing for pen and ink also evokes to us the classical binomial contrasts of country/city, nature/civilization. Orlando repeatedly comes and goes between nature and civilization, longing for the other side when he is not there. Nostalgia for the lost is a perpetual motif of a pastoral. In this sense, Orlando is a pastoral in which modernist Woolf longs for the wholeness of fragmentation, dialectic synthesis of oppositions. The most persuasive scene is in the last stage. She recovers herself from the fragmental experience of identity by motoring fast out of London, at the sight of the green of the country. And her "Oak Tree" gets a prize and is warmly welcomed by the society. It symbolizes reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, since the oak tree is a symbol of Zeus and civilized society a metaphor of Prometheus. Orlando, which unites "granite" of biographical facts with "rainbow" of fantasy, is a pastoral dedicated to Vita Sackville-West whom Woolf adores. The writer who is on holiday is very serious and productive.

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In her novel Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf challenged the literature of her day with new methods and techniques. How successful was she? Critics are divided in two groups. Some see her series of Impressionistic/Post-Impressionistic scenes as a fresh innovation ; others regard them as fuzzy, disunified fragments. Such critics as Robert Kiely and David Bowling compare Jacob to the apple in Cezanne's pictures of still-life, since they follow Roger Fry's theory of aesthetics. This idea needs modification because Woolf emphasizes the absence of Jacob, while Cezanne creates a new aesthetic value in depicting the existence of the apple. We must realize the novel's title ; it is not Jacob himself, but his room. Actually it seems that van Gogh's art is much closer to Woolf's intention. He paints ordinary things of everyday life, such as shoes, chairs and a bedroom. What he depicts emphasizes the absence of the possessor of these objects. Even though both artists, van Gogh from the Netherlands and Cezanne from Provence, are classified as Post-Impressionists, they try contrary approaches to their subject matter. In Jacob's Room also, there are elements referring to both north and south Europe. Owing to this, we become aware of an underlying two-part structure in the novel. In whatever fuzzy Impressionistic way he may be described, it is effective to make Jacob appear to be an everyman figure. All the more for his absence, he remains in our mind against the background of historical monuments and landscapes, which, losing their dignity, have been transformed into familiar objects.

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