Transcript WOOLF - unibo.it

VIRGINIA WOOLF
1882-1941
Mrs Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway (published in 1925) takes
place on a single June day in 1923 and
tracks the parallel lives of two very
different Londoners, Clarissa Dalloway
and Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa
is a 51-year old woman who is giving a
party that night for her husband,
Richard Dalloway, a Conservative
member of Parliament.
THE VOYAGE OUT (1915)
• Clarissa is “a tall slight woman, her
body wrapped in furs, her face in veils”.
Her husband is a conservative politician
who is against women’s vote.
Septimus Warren Smith
• In the only introduction Woolf wrote for any of
her novels, she says that she originally
intended that Clarissa would die in the novel,
perhaps by suicide. Then she decided to
create another character who would be the
one to die. This new character was Septimus
Warren Smith, a 30-year-old veteran of the
WWI. This character allows Woolf to explore
some aspects of madness that she had
experienced herself, and also to condemn
war and the false patriotism she associates
with it.
From Woolf’ s Diary
• “Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book
[she published a short story, “Mrs.
Dalloway in Bond Street,” in 1923]; and I
adumbrate here a study of insanity and
suicide; the world seen by the sane and
the insane side by side--something like
that. Septimus Smith? is that a good
name?” (October 14, 1922)
Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses
– MD as a response to ULYSSES
• "I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far," Virginia
Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and
reports that she has been "amused, stimulated,
charmed, interested ... to the end of the Cemetery
scene."
• Later, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, &
disillusioned" "by a queasy undergraduate scratching
his pimples." She thinks of Ulysses as an "illiterate,
underbred book ... of a self taught working man”.
SIMILIARITIES
• BOTH TAKE PLACE ON A SINGLE
DAY (16th JUNE 1904 AND 13th JUNE
1923)
• TECHNIQUE: STREAM OF
CONSCIOUSNESS (BUT INTERIOR
MONOLOGUE VS FREE INDIRECT
SPEECH/STYLE)
DIFFERENCES
• TITLE (No mythical method)
• THEMATIC (absence of real
communication)
• SPIRITUALITY VS MATERIALISM (see
MF)
Modern Fiction
• Modern fiction is an experiment:
• It is for the historian of literature to decide; for
him to say if we are now beginning or ending or
standing in the middle of a great period of prose
fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We
only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities
inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile
land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this
perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some
account.
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924)
• In her essay W warns readers that they
must get used to “a season of
fragments or failures” and adds that
they would have to be patient and learn
to tolerate “the spasmodic, the
obscure”.
• They will be rewarded because she is
certain that “we are trembling on the
verge of one of the great ages of
English literature”.
Modern Fiction 2
• Polemic against Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy
• If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word
we should say that these three writers are
materialists. It is because they are concerned not
with the spirit but with the body that they have
disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that
the sooner English fiction turns its back upon
them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only
into the desert, the better for its soul.
Modern Fiction 3
• If we fasten, then, one label on all these
books, on which is one word materialists,
we mean by it 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.
Modern Fiction
• Let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the
form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than
secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit,
truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or
on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such illfitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on
perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and
thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases
to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the
enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to
life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but
labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting
out the light of the conception.
• The writer seems constrained, not by his own free
will but by some powerful and unscrupulous
tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to
provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air
of probability embalming the whole so impeccable
that if all his figures were to come to life they
would find themselves dressed down to the last
button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The
tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But
sometimes, more and more often as time goes by,
we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of
rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the
customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be
like this?
• Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being like this. 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. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of
innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life
of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the
moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a
free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he
must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon
convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love
interest or catastrophe in the accepted style (…)
• 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. Is it
not the task of the novelist to convey this
varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed
spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it
may display, with as little mixture of the alien
and external as possible?
• However this may be, the problem before
the novelist at present, as we suppose it to
have been in the past, is to contrive means of
being free to set down what he chooses. He
has to have the courage to say that what
interests him is no longer “this” but “that”:
out of “that” alone must he construct his
work. For the moderns “that”, the point of
interest, lies very likely in the dark places of
psychology. At once, therefore, the accent
falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon
something hitherto ignored
Conclusion
• (…) there is no limit to the horizon, and that
nothing—no “method”, no experiment, even of the
wildest—is forbidden, but only falsity and
pretence. “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. And if we can imagine the art of
fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she
would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her,
as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is
renewed and her sovereignty assured.
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
• And they said “Begin by saying that her father
kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent.
Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in
1878. Discover what her mother died of.
Describe cancer. Describe calico.
Describe…” But I cried “Stop! Stop!”(…) I
knew that if I began describing the cancer
and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to
which I cling though I know no way of
imparting it to you, would have been dulled
and tarnished and vanished for ever.”
Present/Past
• August 30, 1923
“My discovery: how I dig out beautiful
caves behind my characters; I think that
gives exactly what I want; humanity,
humour, depth. The idea is that the
caves shall connect & each comes to
daylight at the present moment”
Also “tunnelling process”
And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—
fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed
to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which
she could hear now, she had burst open the French
windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How
fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in
the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a
wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as
she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there
at the open window, that something awful was about to
happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the
smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling
Moment of Being
• She went on, into the little room where the Prime
Minister had gone with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there
was somebody there. But there was nobody (…)
What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at
her party? A young man had killed himself. And they
talked of it at her party— the Bradshaws, talked of
death. He had killed himself—but how? Always her
body went through it first, when she was told,
suddenly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body
burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had
flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising,
went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud,
thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness.
So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the
Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
• She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine,
never anything more. But he had flung it away. They
went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms
were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all
day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of
Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that
mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter,
defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day
in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved.
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to
communicate; people feeling the impossibility of
reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them;
closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone.
There was an embrace in death.
• But this young man who had killed himself—had he
plunged holding his treasure?
• She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in
the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! (…) She
was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was fascinating to
watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the room,
coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating,
with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to
watch that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the
blind now. The clock began striking. The young man had killed
himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour,
one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on.
There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was
dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came
to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to
them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very
like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad
that he had done it; thrown it away. (…) But she must go back.
She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she
came in from the little room.
• What is this terror? what is this ecstasy?
he thought to himself. What is it that fills
me with extraordinary excitement?
• It is Clarissa, he said.
• For there she was.