ABSTRACT
Moving between the texts of Woolf's novels and those of her life-history, the part of Francoise Defromont's book looks at moments which evoke the beginnings of an identity fragmented even in its formation as potentially whole. This chapter refers to the passage in Moments of Being when the image Virginia is looking at in the mirror is doubled into a monstrous animal. Her writing reposes, if that is the word, on the principle of the broken mirror, for the novels are constructed like collages made from 'bits and pieces'. If Woolf's technique consists in using light, it also rests on a fragmentation of the approach which grasps each character in the multiplicity of their aspects because, so this writer thought, it is difficult to know others other than as beings who are fragmented and discontinuous.
