Transcript Diapositiva 1

Virginia Woolf
Early life
• born in London 1882
• Father: Leslie Stephen. Historian, critic,
author, mountaineer (from 1st marriage
Laura)
• Mother: Julia Duckworth. A model for preRaphaelite painters (from 1° marriage:
George, Stella, Gerald)
• together, four children: Vanessa, Thoby,
Virginia, Adrian
• very stimulating environment, huge library
• girls: educated at home (classics, English
literature)
• boys: formally educated, went to university
• summers until 1895: St. Ives, Cornwall
(To the Lighthouse)
• 1895: mother’s sudden death (V. was 13)
first nervous breakdown
however studied Greek Latin German
History at the Ladies’ Department of
king’s College, london
• 1904: father’s death. New crisis
• sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a
house at 46 Gordon Square in
Bloomsbury.
• Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey,
Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon SydneyTurner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf,
John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry:
nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers
and artists known as the Bloomsbury
Group
Bloomsbury Group
'one's prime objects in life are love, the
creation and enjoyment of aesthetic
experience and the pursuit of knowledge‘
(G.E. Moore)
against social rituals, bourgeois habits,
conventions of Victorian life, its
consideration of the public sphere
in favour of a more informal, private-oriented
focus upon personal relationships and
individual pleasure
• 1910 Dreadnought hoax (Virginia
participated disguised as a male
Abyssinian royal)
• 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell; couple's
interest in avant garde art → influence on
Woolf's development as an author
• 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf
(recurring breakdowns and depression,
maybe originated from sexual abuse by
half-brothers George and Gerald
Duckworth)
• 1917 founded the Hogarth Press together
• 1922 met writer Vita Sackville-West,
started a relationship with her
• 1928 Orlando the protagonist passes from
one century to the other, also changing
sex
• remained friends until Virginia’s death in
1941
• began writing for The Times Literary
Supplement
• highly experimental novels; a «lyrical»
novelist
•
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1915 The Voyage Out
1922 Jacob’s Room
1925 Mrs Dalloway
1927 To the Lighthouse
• 1928 Orlando
• 1931 The Waves
• 1941 Between the Acts
after completing her last book she fell into a
bad fit of depression and committed suicide
by drowning herself (28.March, 1941)
Dearest,
I feel certain that 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 'til 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. I don't think
two people could have been happier than we
have been. V
Essay Modern Fiction
The proper stuff of fiction does not
exist; everything is the proper stuff
of fiction, every feeling, every
thought; every quality of brain
and spirit is drawn upon; no
perception comes amiss
beyond the limits of
traditional fiction
interested in the area of
psychology
in her works
NOT facts events social relations
BUT feelings thoughts memories
qualities of the brain, of the
spirit
interest focussed on the person
like an instrument capable of
receiving and transmitting
perceptions emotions thoughts
Examine for a moment an ordinary
mind on an ordinary day. The mind
receives a myriad impressions –
trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
engraved with the sharpness of
steel. (…)
The mind: object of impressions of
different quality and intensity
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged; life is a luminous halo, a
semitransparent envelope surrounding us
from the beginning of consciousness to the
end.
no logical or chronological organization of the
data of life, no symmetrical arrangement
indicating there’s a clear pattern below the
surface
“a halo”: man is not in a position to observe life
from the outside, but is immersed in it
role of the novelist: to render life with
as little mixture of the alien and the
external as possible, to render the
experience of life as faithfully as she
can
“the alien, the external” = the
conventions of fiction (setting plot
characters)
a representation of life
complicated by the simultaneous
presence of past and present in
the mind
+ the juxtaposition of different
perspectives from which reality
can be perceived
TIME
handled in two ways:
• Contrast external – subjective
time
(underlined by the reference to
actions or events treated as
counterpoints to the flow of
thoughts of the characters)
• present time constantly put in relation
with the past through the mechanism
of memory
a recollection, sometimes started by an
insignificant event, becomes a way to
understand the present more fully;
interaction of past and present (they
change each other)
1st passage
the beginning of the book
•“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy
the flowers herself”
•third-person, external narrator, who
very soon will share the characters’
different points of view
Clarissa’s (Scrope Purvis’s, Hugh
Whitbread’s)
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. …
And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway,
what a morning – fresh as if issued to
children on a beach
“poetic” quality of the language
the narrator, however implicit and
unobtrusive, makes her presence felt by
recording the characters’ thoughts «in
order» and often providing images rendering
the characters’ perceptions and states of
mind
sometimes managing to create intense
poetry
• Clarissa goes out in the morning to buy
flowers; in her house there are
preparations (later the reader will come to
know that there’s going to be a party in
the evening)
• the fresh air reminds her of her youth at
Bourton
• remembers a conversation with Peter
Walsh (India, letters…)
• wonders how strange it is that people
remember apparently insignificant things
• she goes on walking in London towards
the flower shop; passes an acquaintance,
Scrope Purvis, from whose point of view
we get a glimpse of her
• meditates on the beauty of Westminster
and describes the atmosphere created by
Big Ben (list of all the aspects of London
life that she likes, among which that
moment of June)
• underlines it’s the middle of June, the war
is over; it’s the season of horse races and
cricket
• thinks briefly about her daughter
Elizabeth
(she seems tempted to buy her a
brooch but decides not to buy it)
• thinks about the party she’s
going to have in the evening
• enters Green Park, is aware of
the silence, the slow movements
of the animals
• meets her friend Hugh Whitbread
• they talk about his wife’s health
problems
• while they speak she feels selfconscious, not as elegant as he is
• thinks about the fact that neither
Richard (her husband) nor Peter
Walsh like him
• typical elements of Woolf’s style:
indirect interior monologue
external third-person narrator adopting
the perspective of several characters
shifting point of view
role of memory («tunnelling process»)
contrast objective-subjective time
poetic quality of the language (similes,
metaphors)
2nd passage
“A pistol shot…”
• just before arriving at the flower shop
Clarissa is following her thoughts
• fights the feeling of annoyance given to
her by the thought of her daughter’s
teacher
• opens the doors of the flower shop and
is overwhelmed by the beauty, perfume,
colours of the flowers
• point of view constantly shifting
from Clarissa’s perspective to
Miss Pym’s (the shop assistant)
• she is smelling, choosing the
flowers for her party when a loud
noise, like an explosion, attracts
the attention of the two women
and of all the people in the street
• the external narrator «takes control» of the
narration and describes the effect of the
event on Mrs Dalloway, the shop
assistant, the crowd (rumours described
as a cloud, mockery of people’s tendency
to be affected by the «wing of mystery»)
• the funny remark of a plumber is heard by
a man in the crowd, Septimus Warren
Smith
• he is described from the outside
• then the point of view shifts into
Septimus’s mind
• signs of a view of reality deviating
from what is considered «normal»
(logic?)
• he tends to interpret all negative
events as his own fault, is focused on
himself
• his wife, Lucrezia, tells him to go
on; the reader starts perceiving
reality from her point of view
• an Italian girl feeling completely
isolated and lonely now that her
husband is mentally disturbed
3rd passage
The party
• Dr Bradshaw arrives apologizing for being
late: a young man has committed suicide
• Clarissa’s physical reaction to such news:
metaphors of «burning»
• reaction of annoyance: her party will be
spoilt
• gradual identification with the young man
(physical, then psychological)
• she wonders HOW he did it
• she describes the man’s fall and
death from his perspective
• then she starts wondering WHY he
did it:
to preserve the thing that mattered, his
own intimate self
as an extreme attempt to communicate
/ a sign of extreme loneliness
If it were now to die, ‘twere now to be most
happy (Othello, II.i)
in Cyprus, when he learns that the ship
carrying Desdemona has not shipwrecked
Fear no more the heat of the sun
(Cymbeline, IV.ii)
a funeral song on Imogen’s presumed death
maybe he was a poet, who felt life
had been made intolerable by
doctors forcing your soul
terror, fear of living → Clarissa’s
identification with Septimus
becomes explicit (there was in the
depths of her heart an awful fear…)
use of metaphorical, «poetic»
language
describes herself as a small bird
crouching at the feet of her
husband reading the paper, while
she was trying to «revive», to
receive warmth and strength from
him
relationship between Mr and
Mrs Dalloway → compared
and contrasted with that
between Septimus and
Lucrezia (a piece of bone….)
Clarissa moves about the room, looks out,
sees the old lady opposite
no pleasure could equal this having done
with the triumphs of youth
perhaps she starts accepting her own life
and choices
and goes back to her party, finally reconciled
with life
Moments of being
From Nicole L. Urquhart, Moments of Being in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction
(http://writing.colostate.edu/gallery/matrix/urquhart.htm)
She first mentions moments of being in her essay, "A Sketch of the
Past," which was to be the beginning of her memoirs. She begins
with one of her earliest memories: a night in the nursery at St. Ives.
She vividly recalls the way the blinds fluttered in the wind, the light
coming through the window and the sound of the sea. She had a
feeling of "lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semitransparent yellow" (65). This memory is so strong that when she
recalls those sensations they become more real for her than the
present moment.
This observation leads her to wonder why some moments are so
powerful and memorable--even if the events themselves are
unimportant--that they can be vividly recalled while other events are
easily forgotten. She concludes that there are two kinds of
experiences: moments of being and non-being.
• Woolf never explicitly defines what she means by "moments of
being." Instead she provides examples of these moments and
contrasts them with moments of what she calls "non-being." She
describes the previous day as:
• Above the average in 'being.' It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first
pages . . . I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save
that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always,
was coloured and shaded as I like--there were the willows, I
remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I
also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book . . . which
interested me.
• She experiences each of these acts intensely and with awareness.
But she continues to say that these moments were embedded in
more numerous moments of non-being. For example, she does not
remember what she discussed with her husband over tea.
• Moments of non-being appear to be moments that the individual is
not consciously aware of events as she experiences them. She
notes that people perform routine tasks such as walking and
shopping without thinking about them. This part of the life is "not
lived consciously," but instead is embedded in "a kind of nondescript
cotton wool".
• It is not the nature of the actions that separates moments of being
from moments of non-being. One activity is not intrinsically more
mundane or more extraordinary than the other. Instead, it is the
intensity of feeling, one's consciousness of the experience, that
separates the two moments. A walk in the country can easily be
hidden behind the cotton wool for one person, but for Woolf the
experience is very vivid.
• Woolf asserts that these moments of being, these flashes of
awareness, reveal a pattern hidden behind the cotton wool of daily
life, and that we, "I mean all human beings--are connected with this;
that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of
art." But the individual artist is not important in this work. Instead she
says of all people, "We are the words; we are the music; we are the
thing itself" (72).
• Thus for Woolf a moment of being is a moment when an
individual is fully conscious of his experience, a moment when
he is not only aware of himself but catches a glimpse of his
connection to a larger pattern hidden behind the opaque
surface of daily life. Unlike moments of non-being, when the
individual lives and acts without awareness, performing acts as if
asleep, the moment of being opens up a hidden reality.
Tunnelling Process
• Virginia Woolf describes her streamof-consciousness technique as a
'tunnelling process'. 'I dig out
beautiful caves behind my
characters…I tell the past in
instalments as I have need of it.'
she refers to the way her characters
remember their pasts
in experiencing these characters'
recollections, readers derive for
themselves a sense of background
and history to characters that,
otherwise, a narrator would have
had to provide
A Room of One’s Own
• January 1928
Virginia Woolf is asked to give two lectures
about women and fiction to two female
colleges
she didn’t like giving lectures but accepted;
the topic started acting inside her
• October 7. 1928 in a letter she
appears annoyed by the engagement
• however, she gives the two lectures
at the end of the month
• feels the difference between herself, a
woman but a privileged person, and those
girls, “hungry, but brave young women.
Intelligent, greedy, poor, destined to
become schoolteachers…”
• feels the importance for the privileged
ones to elaborate a common language, to
give voice to all those “dumb” women
• 1929
Own
publication of A Room of One’s
Hogarth Press
• about the steps of the great exclusion of
women from history and culture
• she offers her listeners, and then her
readers, not a cultured lecture on
literature, but a passionate invective
against patriarchal culture
• proclaims women’s need for
economic independence and a space
of their own in which creativity may
find its voice
• urges her listeners to write, literature
being a way to save themselves from
silence