On Virginia Woolf
& Her
Mrs. Dalloway
Lecturer： 姜 敏
Virginia Woolf’s Life
"Have you any notion how
many books are written
about women in the
course of one year? Have
you any notion how
many are written by
men? Are you aware
that you are, perhaps,
the most discussed
animal in the universe?”
--- Virginia Woolf

Nicole Kidman acting
as Woolf in the Movie
The Hours directed by
Stephen Daldry
Virginia Woolf’s Life




1882–1941, English novelist and essayist; daughter
of Sir Leslie Stephen.
A successful innovator in the form of the novel, she is
considered a significant force in 20th-century fiction.
Educated at home from the resources of her father's
huge library.
1912 , she married Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer
on economics, with whom she set up the Hogarth
Press in 1917. Their home became a gathering place
for a circle of artists, critics, and writers known as the
Bloomsbury group.
Woolf’s Life (continued)

Virginia Woolf suffered mental breakdowns in
1895 and 1915; she drowned herself in 1941
because she feared another breakdown from
which she might not recover. Most of her
posthumously published works were edited by
her husband.
--from The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.
2007. P 52079
Woolf’s Novels
The Voyage Out (1915)
Night and Day (1919)
Jacob's Room (1922)
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
To the Lighthouse
(1927)
The Waves (1931)
traditional in method.
increasingly
innovative
experimental novels
Orlando (1928)
The Years (1937 )
Her biography of
Roger Fry (1940)
=
“The biography is a
careful study of a
friend.”
Some of her short stories from Monday or Tuesday
(1921) appear with others in A Haunted House (1944).
Woolf’s Essays






The Common Reader (1925),
The Second Common Reader (1933),
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
(1942),
The Moment and Other Essays (1948).
A Room of One's Own (1929) feminist tracts
Three Guineas (1938)
from To the Lighthouse
"So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man
and a woman looking at a girl throwing a
ball."


“ A woman must have money and
a room of her own if she is to write fiction”
from A Room of One’s Own
Woolf’s Achievement 1
Stream-of- Consciousness Technique



As a novelist Woolf's primary concern was to
represent the flow of ordinary experience.
Her emphasis was not on plot or characterization but
on a character's consciousness, his thoughts and
feelings, which she brilliantly illuminated by the
stream of consciousness technique.
Woolf and Joyce are the most gifted and innovative
of the stream of consciousness novelists
A Battle against the Traditional
Realist Writers


In 1920s, a well-known “ quarrel ’’with some
of the established British novelists of the time.
To object strongly to “materialists’’
“ because they are concerned not with the
spirit but with the body’’
“ that they write of unimportant things; that
they spend immense skill and immense
industry making the trivial and the transitory
appear the true and the enduring.’’
A “ Manifesto” for Stream-of
-Consciousness type of fiction



“ Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on
an ordinary day.
“ The mind receives a myriad impressions…
From all sides they come, an incessant shower
of innumerable atoms….
“Let’s record the atoms as they fall upon the
wind in the order in which they fall”--- Woolf
(Chen Jia , Vol IV, 451 ).
Characteristics of
the Stream of the Consciousness device
the traditional narrative devices
Reveal the action or plot
through the mental
processes of the character
….through the
commentary of an
omniscient author
Character development is
…through the creation of
achieved through revelation typical characters in typical
of extremely personal and environment
often typical thought
process
The action of the plot
moves back and forth
through present time
to memories of past
events and dreams of
the future.
Dramatic monologue
& free association
… corresponds to real,
chronological time.
Narration, description,
and commentary
Reading Time
Mrs. Dalloway
Main Story of Mrs. Dalloway


The central figure, Clarissa Dalloway, is a wealthy
London hostess. She spends her day in London
preparing for her evening party. She recalls her life
before World War I, before her marriage to Richard
Dalloway, and her friendship with the unconventional
Sally Seton, and her relationship with Peter Walsh.
At her party she never meets the shell-shocked veteran
Septimus Smith (his news is brought to her by his
doctor), one of the first Englishmen to enlist in the war.
Sally returns as Lady Rossetter, Peter Walsh is still
enamored with Mrs. Dalloway, the prime minister
arrives, and Smith commits suicide.
An Excerpt from the Book

‘…And then , thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a
morning—fresh as if issued to children on the beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always
seemed to her, when, with little squeak of the hinges,
which she could hear now, she had burst open the
French windows (落地窗） and plunged at Bourton
（一休假胜地） into the open air. How fresh, how
calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the
early morning… looking at the flowers….until Peter
Walsh said, “musing among the vegetables?”’
Continued

‘…a suspense (but that might be her heart,
affected, they said, by influenza) before Big
Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed…such fools
we are, she thought, crossing Victoria street.’
The Stream-of-Consciousness Technique
Represented in Mrs. Dalloway



A giant web of thoughts of several groups of
people during the course of a single day.
There is little action/plot, but much movement
in time from present to past and back again
through the characters memories. The strike of
the clock indicates the real time and brings her
back to the present real world.
She did not limit herself to one consciousness,
but slipped from mind to mind .
Prose Style

Poetic, heavily symbolic, and filled with
superb visual images.
Characterization


A thoroughly well-depicted picture of the
heroine, not only from all her own actions and
words and thoughts but also from the
description of her relations with her family
members and friends.
Mrs. Dalloway is shown with all her defects
and foibles but there is a sympathy for her
throughout the story. After escorting the Prime
Minister in her party, “with Sally there and
Peter there and Ricard very pleased”, she was
aware that “these triumphs…had a hollowness’’.
Virginal Woolf vs. James Joyce



The spiritual life of the
English upper class; her
own social circle
High condensation and
glimpses of moments of
experience
Her own poetic medium
prose); easy to
understand



The lower middle class
in Dublin; people in all
walks of life
The illusion of a total
picture
characters expressing
themselves in their own
idiom; hard to
understand
Movies


Mrs. Dalloway (1997)
Directed by Marleen Gorris
The Hours (2002)
Golden Globe Awards Winner
Directed by Stephen Daldry
Starring: Nicole Kidman ( Virginia Woolf)
Julianne Moore (Mrs. Brown)
Meryl Streep (Mrs. Dalloway)
(Show 6 minutes of The Hours)
The Hours
Virginia Woolf
Laura Brown


Richard
( a mixture
of the three male
characters in the
novel )


Severely depressed
Richard Dalloway
(Mrs. Dalloway’s husband)
Peter Walsh
( her former lover)
Septimus Smith
( the veteran suffering from a
精神错乱，抑郁
sort of mental derangement).
症
On the Treatment of Depression
Smith’s doctors different opinions of him:
A.
B.
There is “nothing whatever the matter’’
“very seriously ill’’, “ a case of extreme
gravity”, “ a long rest in bed’’
Does a long rest heal them?
Woolf’s Achievement 2
A Feminist



She was very much concerned with the rights
and position of women, especially of
intelligent women and women writers.
She actively took part in the struggle for
woman’s rights of suffrage & rights to work
which is shown in her Three Guineas
She wrote several essays on the subject,
notably in A Room of One’s Own
A Room of One's Own

Woolf imagines that
Shakespeare had a sister: a
sister equal to Shakespeare
in talent, equal in genius,
but whose legacy is
radically different. This
imaginary woman never
writes a word and dies by
her own hand, her genius
unexpressed.


But if only she had found the means to create,
urges Woolf, she would have reached the same
heights as her immortal sibling. ----from Amozon.com
“ A woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write fiction”
A Room of One’s Own



to dissect the world around her & give a voice
to those who have none.
to analyzes the differences between women as
objects of representation and women as
authors of representation
to argue that a change in the forms of literature was
necessary because most literature had been "made
by men out of their own needs for their own
uses." .
Her message is simple:

A woman must have a fixed income
and a room of her own in order to
have the freedom to create.
A Room Of Her Own: A Foundation
For Women Artists & Writers

The Website of this foundation :
www.aroomofherown.org/home.php

Dedicated to furthering the vision of writer
Virginia Woolf, AROHO continues to change
the lives of creative women by rewarding and
showcasing their important voices to their own
community as well as the marketplace.

The Foundation

AROHO is committed to bridging the often fatal gap
between a woman’s economic reality and her artistic
creation.

Since its beginning the Foundation has given
almost $500,000 to creative women American)
through their $50,000 Gift of Freedom awards,
scholarships, retreats, public readings, the AROHO
Book Club, and other customized web-based resource
center.
Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”

40 years later,at the beginning of the new wave
of postwar women’s writing, Dorris Lessing
addressed the subject of the secret room in “To
Room Nineteen” in a collection called A Man
and Two Women.
The Main Story of
“To Room Nineteen”

The wife, Susan, gives up her job to bring up
her four children, finds domestic life and
marriage increasingly meaningless, and begins
to rent a room in a seedy (somewhat disreputable)
hotel. She sits there, day by day, in a wicker
chair, doing nothing. Her husband, reasonably
suspecting that she has a lover, discovers her
secret and is more than willing to condone
forgive her. Her response is to lock herself into
her room and turns on the gas.
Opposing Voices from Men
An Article “ Motherhood Need Not
Spell the End of Literature”
意味着
Byline: SEBASTIAN
SHAKESPEARE
From www.questia.com
.
Some of the best female writers of the 20th
century found it difficult to combine
motherhood and creativity

‘ Doris Lessing abandoned her two infant
children (both under five) after leaving her
first husband. "I had these two children and
just couldn't afford to keep them," she said.
Her two prams were not only enemies of
promise but became emblematic (symbolic ) of
female poverty.’

‘Colette, who never wanted children, hardly
ever saw her daughter whom she left in the
hands of an English nanny. She chillingly,
albeit rather brilliantly, described children as
"those happy unconscious little vampires who
drain the maternal heart". And as for Virginia
Woolf, well, we all know what happened to
her. The author of A Room of One's Own, who
argued that "a woman must have money and a
room of her own if she is to write fiction",
ended up without children and committed
suicide.’
satiric
While some other of the best female writers of
the 20th century managed to combine
motherhood and creativity

‘What about Toni Morrison (1993 Nobel
Prizewinner), who continues to collaborate
with her musician son Slade on children's
books? Motherhood, far from being a
hindrance, can be a spur to creativity. ’
The Author of Harry Porter Books

‘Look at JK Rowling, one of the most
successful writers of the modern (or any) era,
worth [pounds sterling]500 million, who was a
single mother when she embarked on writing
her Harry Potter books. ’
Discussion

Question 1: Can a woman /man become truly
independent and free to have both a happy life
and a successful career?

Question2: What is your understanding of
women’s situation in China?

Question 3: Do you think it is still necessary to
discuss the equality between men and women
nowadays?
Woolf’s Achievement 3
An Insight into Gender

She waged literary war on
gender.
To engage in a war or
campaign
Sexual identity, especially
in relation to society or
culture
See Sex; Sexuality; Gender
The Meaning of Gender

‘The meaning of the word "gender" has
evolved as differentiated from the word "sex"
to express the reality that women's and men's
roles and status are socially constructed and
subject to change.’
–from the statement of the 4th World
Women Conference held in Beijing
Possibility of an Androgynous Mind
Having both female and male
characteristics

In the last chapter of A Room of One’s Own ,
Woolf refers to Coleridge who said that a great
mind is androgynous and states that when this
fusion takes place the mind is fully fertilized
and uses all its faculties. "Perhaps a mind
that is purely masculine cannot create, any
more than a mind that is purely feminine..."
Orlando (1928)


a fantasy novel, traced the career of the
androgynous protagonist from a masculine
identity within the Elizabethan court to a
feminine identity in 1928.
a play of gender
Judith Butler’s Theory:
Gender Performativity(性别表演理论）

Note: This part is for your further study in the
future
Sexual Difference ≠Men and Women
The End of Sexual Difference?


Man and woman are, according to the perspective
of sexual difference, ways in which sexual
difference has assumed content.
Butler even challenges the idea of homosexuality
Critical Thinking Mode
--what we shall learn from Woolf
and Butler

If one calls such terms into question, does that
mean that they cannot be used anymore?... Or
is it simply that the terms do not function in
quite the same way as they once did?
–from Undoing Gender,Judith Butler
Virginia Woolf’s Last Words
( to her husband)

“Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I
feel we can't go through another of those
terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I
begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate.
So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.
You have given me the greatest possible
happiness. You have been in every way all that
anyone could be. I don't think two people
could have been happier till this terrible
disease came.

I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling
your life, that without me you could work. And
you will I know. You see I can't even write this
properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe
all the happiness of my life to you. You have been
entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I
want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody
could have saved me it would have been you.
Everything has gone from me but the certainty of
your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any
longer. ”
Summary of Virginia Woolf




A gifted stream –of- consciousness novelist &
a master of the critical essay
偏头
疼
“She suffered all her life from migraines
&depression, but her work has been a comfort
to uppity women for over half a century”
“Her works enable us as women to see
ourselves in new ways”
She is an innovator and feminist with an
insight into human being.
Taking liberties
References











陈嘉，《英国文学史》，北京：商务出版社，1990
王佩兰，《英国文学史及作品选读，长春：东北师范大学出版社2004
王守仁， 《英国文学选读》，北京：高等教育出版社，2005
Butler， Judith. Undoing Gender. Boca Raton, FL: Routledge 2004.
Jane, Goldman.The Cambridge Introduction To Virginia Woolf
(Cambridge Introductions to Literature)
Article Title: Motherhood Need Not Spell the End of Literature.
Newspaper Title: The Evening Standard. Publication Date: October 16,
2007. Page Number: 13. COPYRIGHT 2007 Solo Syndication Limited;
COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale Group
Encyclopedia Article Title: Woolf, Virginia (Stephen). Encyclopedia Title:
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Publisher: Columbia
University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 2007.
Page52079
http://www.classicreader.com /author.php/aut.40/
www.amazon.com
www.aroomofherown.org/home.php
http:// books.guardian.co.uk