Transcript Virginia Woolf and the Modernist Mind: 1

Virginia Woolf and the Modernist
Mind
Dr. Susan Solomon
5/21/2014
Virginia Woolf in popular culture
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Selected Works:
• Jacob’s Room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse
(1927)
• “A Room of One’s Own”
(1929)
• The Waves (1931)
“Three Guineas” (1938)
1882-1941
1895: X-rays discovered; cinematograph
and wireless telegraph invented;
1899-1902: Boer War (75,000 deaths)
1903: first airplane flight by Wright
Brothers
1905: Einstein’s Special Theory of
Relativity
1914: Irish Home Rule Bill passed;
1914-1918: Over 16 million deaths in
WW1
1918: Women over 30 earn vote in
England
1921-2: Irish Free State founded and
proclaimed
1923: BBC radio first broadcast
1927: first Transatlantic flight by
Lindbergh
1927: first talkie films
1929: NY stock exchange collapse –
world depression
1930: USA television
1933: Hitler elected chancellor;
Spanish Civil War 1936-39 (500,000
deaths)
1936: BBC television
1938: Germany begins expansion into
Austria
1941: Pearl Harbor, Germany invades
Soviet Union (over 60 million
deaths)
Fleischer Studies: The Einstein Theory of
Relativity, 1923
also from Fleischer Brothers
Sir Leslie Stephen
• 1832-1904
• Alpinist, Cambridgeeducated
• Editor, Dictionary of
National Biography (18821890)
• Model of Mr. Ramsay in To
the Lighthouse: philosopher
who studies “subject object
and the nature of reality” or
“think of a kitchen table
when you’re not there”
•
Woolf on Leslie Stephen
• “[. . .]the disparity, so obvious in his books, between the
critical and the imaginative power. Give him a thought to
analyse, the thought say of Mill or Bentham or Hobbes, and
he is (so Maynard told me) a model of acuteness, clarity,
and impartiality. Give him a character to explain, and he is
(to me) so crude, so elementary, so conventional that a
child with a box of chalks could make a more subtle
portrait” (Sketch of the Past 146)
Bloomsbury
Notable Members Included
John Maynard Keynes,
Lytton Strachey,
George E. Moore,
Bertrand Russell,
E.M. Forster,
Clive Bell,
Roger Fry,
Leonard Woolf,
Virginia Stephen/Woolf,
Vanessa Stephen/Bell
Omega Workshop Textile by
Vanessa Bell
Hogarth Press
• Founded by Leonard
and Virginia Woolf in
1917
• “A Mark on the Wall”
was, together with
Leonard’s “Three Jews,”
the first publication.
On Mrs. Dalloway
• “the real ‘I’ is the ever-flowing stream known
only to ourselves, and it is with this ‘I’ that
Mrs. Woolf deals. … In the course of three
hundred pages which record this day nothing
happens except that the reader is brought into
intimate contact with a group of people and
made to participate in their consciousness”
(Joseph Wood Crutch, “The Stream of
Consciousness” The Nation CXX, 3126, June 3,
1925, 631-21).
in The Waves (1931)
• “Now I will wrap my agony inside my pockethandkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball.
I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons.
I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit
next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish
and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I
will examine it and take it between my fingers.
They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for
eggs through the brambles and my hair will be
matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink
water from ditches and die there.”
Counterexample: A Scandal in
Bohemia
• “The lamps had been lit, but the blinds had not been
drawn, so that I could see Holmes as he lay upon the
couch. I do not know whether he was seized with
compunction at that moment for the part he was
playing, but I know that I never felt more heartily
ashamed of myself in my life than when I saw the the
beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring, or
the grace and kindliness with which she waited upon
the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest
treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part
which he had intrusted to me” (10-11).
Example: James Joyce: Ulysses, Ep.8
Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.
Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.
His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses.
He swerved to the right.
Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I?
Too heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.
Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted
his eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed.
Not following me?
Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.
The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold
statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.
A rewriting
As Mr Bloom came to Kildare street he was thinking to
himself that he must stop at the library before he proceeds
with the rest of his business for the day.
From the opposite direction a tall figure in a straw hat was
walking with the sunlight on his back. Bloom thought he
recognized him. When he looked down to see the man’s
tan shoes and turnedup trousers he was certain that the
man was Blazes Boylan, his wife’s lover, the last man he
wanted to run into.
His heart quopped softly as he thought to himself that he
must turn to the right. “Museum. Goddesses”-- he thought
confusedly to himself and he swerved to the right.
Review from 101: Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”
101 Review: Allegory of the Cave
• Chained prisoners who cannot move their heads watch
the shadows of things passing by a fire behind them.
• They accept the shadows as reality, because it is the only
reality they know
• The cave represents our body, senses
• Shadows represent the phenomenal world surrounding
us
• The world outside of the cave represents the Platonic
Real, truth, the unknowable noumena
Fireside meditations
stream of consciousness, n. (OED)
• Psychol. An individual’s thoughts and
conscious reaction to external events
experienced subjectively as a continuous flow.
Also loosely, an uncontrolled train of thought
or association
• Literary Criticism. A method of narration
which depicts events through this flow in the
mind of a character; an instance of this
Stream of Consciousness
• What psychology must study “is the fact that
in each of us, when awake (and often when
asleep), some kind of consciousness is always
going on. There is a stream, a succession of
states, or waves, or fields, (or of whatever you
wish to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of
desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly
pass and repass, and that constitute our inner
life. (William James Talks to Teachers on
Psychology 1899 qtd in “Stream” 170).
What was new in Richardson’s Interim
according to May Sinclair?
In this series there is no drama, no situation,
no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life
going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s
stream of consciousness going on and on […]
In identifying herself with this life, which is
Miriam’s stream of consciousness, Miss
Richardson produces her effect of being the
first, of getting closer to reality than any of our
novelists who are trying so desperately to get
close. (Little Review April, 1918)
Standard Features of Stream of
Consciousness
Stream of consciousness narratives generally
have no defined setting, no dramatic action,
and no authoritative narrator who intervenes,
comments, and controls the story.
Instead all of this content is presented
“indirectly” (or should we say directly?) in the
consciousness of a character.
There is therefore also no clear difference
between what objectively takes place in
reality and what is subjectively perceived.
On Mrs. Dalloway
• “the real ‘I’ is the ever-flowing stream known
only to ourselves, and it is with this ‘I’ that
Mrs. Woolf deals. … In the course of three
hundred pages which record this day nothing
happens except that the reader is brought into
intimate contact with a group of people and
made to participate in their consciousness”
(Joseph Wood Crutch, “The Stream of
Consciousness” The Nation CXX, 3126, June 3,
1925, 631-21).
in The Waves (1931)
• “Now I will wrap my agony inside my pockethandkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball.
I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons.
I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit
next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish
and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I
will examine it and take it between my fingers.
They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for
eggs through the brambles and my hair will be
matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink
water from ditches and die there.”
Counterexample: A Scandal in Bohemia
• “The lamps had been lit, but the blinds had not been
drawn, so that I could see Holmes as he lay upon the
couch. I do not know whether he was seized with
compunction at that moment for the part he was
playing, but I know that I never felt more heartily
ashamed of myself in my life than when I saw the the
beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring, or
the grace and kindliness with which she waited upon
the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest
treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part
which he had intrusted to me” (10-11).
Example: James Joyce: Ulysses, Ep.8
Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.
Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.
His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses.
He swerved to the right.
Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I?
Too heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.
Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted
his eyes. Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed.
Not following me?
Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.
The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold
statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.
A rewriting
As Mr Bloom came to Kildare street he was thinking to
himself that he must stop at the library before he proceeds
with the rest of his business for the day.
From the opposite direction a tall figure in a straw hat was
walking with the sunlight on his back. Bloom thought he
recognized him. When he looked down to see the man’s
tan shoes and turnedup trousers he was certain that the
man was Blazes Boylan, his wife’s lover, the last man he
wanted to run into.
His heart quopped softly as he thought to himself that he
must turn to the right. “Museum. Goddesses”-- he thought
confusedly to himself and he swerved to the right.
Review from 101: Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”
101 Review: Allegory of the Cave
• Chained prisoners who cannot move their heads watch
the shadows of things passing by a fire behind them.
• They accept the shadows as reality, because it is the only
reality they know
• The cave represents our body, senses
• Shadows represent the phenomenal world surrounding
us
• The world outside of the cave represents the Platonic
Real, truth, the unknowable noumena
Fireside meditations
the Real tablecloth
• “The rule for tablecloths at that particular
period was that they should be made of
tapestry with little yellow compartments
marked upon them, such as you may see in
photographs of the carpets in the corridors of
the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different
kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking,
and yet how wonderful it was to discover that
these real things, Sunday luncheons …. and
tableclothes were not entirely real” (CP 269).
• “but these generalisations are very worthless.
The military sound of the word is enough: which,
as a child, one thought the thing itself, the
standard thing, the real thing, from which one
could not depart save at the risk of nameless
damnation” (“The Mark”)
• “But I can see clearly how the case stands: my
mind loves to wander, and cannot yet suffer itself
to be retained within the just limits of truth”
(Descartes 55)
Inverted upheavals
• “It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy
thoughts, this tree. […] Everything’s moving,
falling, slipping, vanishing. . . . There is a vast
upheaval of matter” (“The Mark” CP 27)
• “[…] since I have procured for myself an
assured leisure in a peaceable retirement, I
shall at last seriously and freely address myself
to the general upheaval of all of my former
opinions” (Meditations CP 12-13)
Mystery Solved
•
•
•
•
“Someone is standing over me and saying:
“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”
“Yes?”
“Though its no good buying newspapers. . . .
Nothing ever happens. Curse this war. God
damn this war! . . . All the same I don’t see
why we should have a snail on our wall.” (CP
271-272)
“The mind receives a myriad
impressions – trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved with
the sharpness of steel. From all
sides they come, an incessant
shower of innumerable atoms.
[…] Let us record the atoms as
they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall, let us
trace the pattern … which each
sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness” (Woolf, “Modern
Fiction”).