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Virginia Woolf
LIFE
ne
She belongs
belong to the second group of modern novelists
She was born in London in a Victorian family
She grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere
When she was 13 she lost her mother and started to rebel against her father, criticizing
the idea of women as angels of fireplace (she had a nervous breakdown)
She started her literary career after the death of his father in 1904 joining the
Bloomsbury Group, which included the avant gardes of the 20th century (they wanted
to create something new). They were writers, artists and thinkers that rejected artistic
conventions and bourgeois sexual codes by re-defining the artistic themes of the
century: unconventional sexual practices, anti-war feelings and fragmentation of
Modernism and Postmodernism
Her most important works are: "The Voyage Out" (1915), a kind of modern mythical
voyage on a cruise, "Mrs Dalloway" (1925), a modern novel about interconnection
between human consciousness. "To The Lighthouse" (1927), a modern novel
following the examples of Proust and Joyce, "Orlando" (1928), a biography of Vita
Sackville West, a novelist with whom she had an intense relationship, and "A Room
of One's View" (1929), which had a great impact on feminist movement between 60s
and 70s (she explored the issues connected with women writing and the inseparable
link between economic and artistic independence)
by by the terrors of WWII and the fear of losing her mind, she
Sadly, haunted Es
committed suicide in 1941 drowning herself in Ouse River (when she commits suicide,
she writes a letter tellig her husband the importance of love)
NOVELIST
MODERNIST
>
Virginia was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and
memory and saw the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and
emotions
What was important with the events of her stories was the impression they left on the
characters who experienced them
In her novels the omniscient narrator disappeared, and the point of view shifted inside
the different characters' minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas as well as
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momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux
The author expresses life as a halo (alone) which surrounds us in our lives. During an
ordinary life, a person receives a myriad of impressions (also called moments of vision)
that create this halo through which consciousness develops
Characters are not mythical like in Joyce, they are ordinary people living their life.
Thus living life brings people to understand the reality behind appearances
[erika_j]
m
In
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Woolf it's impossible to find epiphanies because her characters live moments of
being that, in the end, give character awareness of everything
In addition she uses the so-called tunnelling technique, that is the character's
recollection of his past. This creates a background to every single character
In Woolf's novels there is an intense use of: stream of consciousness (using a logical
and grammatical organisation), 3rd person narrator and use of past tenses (tunnelling
technique)
MRS DALLOWAY
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It is an example of modern novel
In this novel, Woolf tries to explain the connection between human beings
Plot
It took place on a single Wednesday in June 1923
Clarissa, the protagonist, at the flower shop meets Septimus and Lucrezia Warren (his
wife)
He is a WWI veteran and suffers from a mental disorder that forces him to go to a
specialist called William Bradshaw (he is also Clarissa's doctor)
at home Clarissa meets Peter (her lover at school). Meanwhile Septimus, after
Back &
the interview with Bradshaw, commits suicide and the ambulance with the body passes
nerve
under Peter's hotel
At the end of the novel a party takes place at Clarissa's home and this represents the
climax of the novel because all characters meet there
Clarissa knows about Septimus' death thanks to Bradshaw
This final episode creates a strong connection between Clarissa and Septimus (Clarissa
realises the idea of death through Septimus suicide)
Setting
The novel takes place on a single ordinary day in June
The novel follows the protagonist through a very small area of London, from the
morning to the evening of the day on which she gives a large formal party
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The novelist shows the characters' deep humanity behind their social mask
Thanks to the tunnelling technique, Woolf allows the reader to experience the
characters' recollection of their past and their personal history
The final party unifies all the people
Clarissa thinks about during the day
Characters
The characters are common people that live common lives (ordinary things) and,
thanks to them, she tries to explain the reality beyond appearances
[erika_j]
m
The range of characters is
is simply
entertaining.
small. They belong to the upper-middle class and their role
Clarissa is a London society lady of 51 , married to the conservative Richard Dalloway.
She is emotionally split in two because of the influence of her possessive father, the
frustration of a genuine love and the need to refuse Peter Walsh. She is characterised
by opposite feelings since she wants freedom but she is bound to her class
consciousness. Her life is a general attempt to overcome weakness by trying to become
a perfect human being but also by imposing restrictions on her spontaneous feelings
Septimus Warren Smith 1s a veteran and a poet. He is an extremely sensitive man
because of some evenments of his life and of the experience of war. He has many
psychological problems
There is no connection between Clarissa and Septimus but they are very similar: their
response to experience is always given in physical terms and they both look for
protection and stability in their partners
Septimus can be considered as Clarissa's double but he can't understand external
reality (so he commit suicide because of his psychic paralysis) while Clarissa is clever
and aware of reality and understands the meaning of death only at the end of the novel
through the connection with Septimus (she is prepared to go on)
There is a strong connection between Virginia Woolf and her characters. They are two
of her alter egos and the two main characters represents 2 aspects of her personality
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Themes and motifs
The work is an big analysis of human personality through emotions and impressions
The novel deals with the way people react to new situations and provides an insight
into some of the most significant changes in the social life of the time
Woolf Woolf makes use of some cinematic devices, such as close-ups and flashbacks
She also adopts motif the striking of Big Ben and of clocks in general - which acts
both as a structural connection and as a symbol of the awareness of death. The insistent
chiming (rintocco) of clocks reminds the reader of the temporal grid (rete) which
organises the narrative, of the passing of time in life and of its flowing into death
Life expresses itself in moments of vision which are at the same time objective (the
clocks, the streets, the cars, the flowers) and yet subjectively creative, since they are
recreated every moment by active consciousness
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The impressions and the sensations we have during the day develop our consciousness
Style
She used the 'stream-of-consciousness' technique but, differently from Joyce's
characters, who show their thoughts directly through interior monologue, sometimes
in an incoherent and syntactically unorthodox way, Virginia never lets her characters'
thoughts flow without control, and she maintains logical and grammatical organisation
(we can understand what the character thinks)
Her technique is based on the fusion of streams of thought into a third-person, past
tense narrative (internal point of view and shifting narrator)
[erika_j]
She gives the impression of simultaneous connections between
world
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the inner and the outer
Similar to Joyce's *epiphanies' are Woolf's 'moments of being', rare occasions of
insight during the characters' daily life when they can see reality behind appearances
Woolf's use of words was almost poetic, allusive and emotional
Fluidity is the quality of the language which allows her to express the most intimate
feelings
She uses the tunnelling technique (intense use of past tenses- REFERENCE TO
SVEVO'S TEMPO MISTO)
[erika_j]