Virginia Woolf's Novels: Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Virginia Woolf's Novels: Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VINA WO Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. (she was the daughter of an important literary man of those times, the founder of the dictionary of national biography) Being a woman, Virginia was unable to attend university, but she received education from home; education that allowed her to start writing and publishing many books, articles and novels. Her most important novels are: To the Lighthouse andMrs Dalloway (both influenced by the thinking of Proust, Freud and Bergson) Like Joyce, in her novels she used the technique of the stream of consciousness; unlike him, however, Virginia's novels are centered on mental voyages based on the contrast between internal and external reality. (After the death of her parents and a serious emotional breakdown, she moved to Bloomsbury, where she joined a group of local intellectuals and after married Leonard Woolf, thanks to which she discovered a new group whose purpose was to publish novels by emerging artists) She died in 1941, drowning herself in a river (suicide) M DAW (1925) PLOT The story unfolds in the city of London in a single day. Clarissa Dalloway wanders around town looking for items for the party she's organizing for the evening. The narrative follows the development of her thoughts and actions throughout the day. The woman's counterpart is a war veteran who roams the city, Septimus Smith; the figure of him develops towards self-destruction that will take place at the end of the novel with his suicide. Upon hearing of her the news of Septimus's death, Clarissa understands that it was an essential step to keep her alive, she will therefore be grateful. SEPTIMUS AND CLARISSA Clarissa Dalloway is a middle-age woman, not open-minded. She is clearly complex and frustrated by her being wife and mother, which for her meant a limitation of freedom. Her deepest thoughts and her past memories, can be followed by the reader thanks to the stream of consciousness. Clarissa is divided by the desire to celebrate life and the morbid attraction towards death, the same sensations also belong to the character of Septimus Smith, Clarissa's counterpart. He suffered all the effects of the terrible vision of war and that is why he too was attracted to death. At the end of the novel only Clarissa will be able to survive. AN EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf decides to focus on a single character, in a single day and in a single place. She therefore proposes a radical change from the Victorian tradition, embracing the modernist one. ➔ The novel abandons the traditional structure of the Victorian plot in favor of a more experimental one. Here, unity is not given by logical chain of actions, but by the coherence of thoughts and impulses. ➔ In the narrative she uses the stream of consciousness, but unlike Joyce, Virginia prefers to show the character's thoughts in a more controlled way. For this reason she uses an impersonal and omniscient third-person narrator. ➔ As for the language, Woolf embraces a logical and elegant structure with prose style. THE CONTRAST BETWEEN SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE TIME The way Virginia treats time is unconventional. The contrast between subjective and objective time is an important element of the novel. (Time is represented by Big Ben) Objectivity refers to the current duration of time, subjectivity instead refers to the mental one, which can move backwards and forwards very quickly. TO TE LITE (1927) PLOT The novel consists of three parts: the windows, Time Passes' and the lighthouse. The work is set in the First World War; Mrs Ramsay and his family are spending their summer holiday on a remote island. ❖ In the first section, his youngest son, James, wants to reach the lighthouse, but his father advises him against bad weather. ❖ In the second section, the novel condenses 10 years, during which Mrs Ramsay dies. ❖ In the third and final section, the Ramsays return to the house on the island and go on a trip to the lighthouse. On the one hand the British who want to impose their power on the colonies, on the other hand the loss of an identity by the Indians. THE COMPLEXITY OF INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTERS The novel focuses on an overlying theme: the complexity of the encounter between cultures, especially in a context such as colonialism. Forster is very critical of Kipling's thought of the right to colonize less influential populations and it is for this reason that the novel advises us on a pessimistic idea of what "the cultural encounter" between peoples is. The theme of incommunicability is in fact at the center of this novel and expresses the gap between nations. AN INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTER The passage of this novel describes the failed cultural encounter between Indian women and English women, who having different cultures, customs and traditions cannot find a common point. GE ORL (ER ARR BA) George Orwell (whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair) was born in India in 1903. He was an essayist and novelist. He was educated in England and, after, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He returned to England and then moved to Paris where he decided to become a writer. All of his works were based on the interest in the political and social conditions that he observed throughout his life. The most important works of him are: ➔ Down and out in Paris and London (describing the poverty conditions of the two capitals) ➔ Homage to Catalonia (written after the Spanish Civil War) ➔ Animal Farm (an anti-soviet satire, where the protagonists were 2 pigs) ➔ Nineteen Eighty-four (a despotic vision of the future where the government managed the life of every single individual) He died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950 He’s part of the group of “Dystopian novel”, his works are characterized by ad imaginary future asciutto, crudele. ORWELL'S ANTI-TOTALITARIANISM Orwell is one of the strongest anti-totalitarian literary voices. His works express the danger of totalitarianism and we can see it in his two works: ● In Animal Farm, through political allegory, Orwell denounces the selfishness and threat of the government. It does this by transforming human characters into animals (2 pigs). ● In the novel Nineteen Eighty-four, the author conveys a strong message against totalitarianism. In this, in fact, the individual lives in a society where the oppressive government manages human actions and thoughts. (In the essay Why I Write, Orwell conveys his thought of wanting to transform political writing into art, through a quote) NIEN EGY-FO (1948) The novel is set in Oceania. Big Brother heads The Party, whose government controls citizens through a violent and rigid system. A new language has even been created, Newspeak. A journalist named Winston Smith and a young girl named Julia decide to rebel against this despotic regime according to the thought that freedom is free and must be respected. However, once discovered by the Thought police both betray each other, confessing. Both are subjected to mental and physical torture. At the end of the novel, Wiston becomes an emotionless being. POWER AND DOMINATION The title reflects the frightening future of England in the year 1984, exactly the opposite of the year in which he wrote the work. This however examines the role of power in an imaginary domination of a society and offers us a nightmare vision of an oppressive and violent government. THE CHARACTER OFWINSTON SMITH Winston Smith is the protagonist. His name on the one hand refers to Winston Churchill, while his surname is the typical English surname. He is one of the few human beings to still possess an identity that had not yet been completely wiped out by the totalitarian regime. In the end, however, instead of preserving his humanity and his love for Julia, he will eventually become an emotionless member of The Party. BIG BROTHER The figure of the big brother, displayed on posters and on television screens with the slogan “Big brother is watching you” reflects the regime in which citizens can be spied on, where nothing remains private. THE INSTRUMENTS OF POWER: NEWSPEAK AND DOUBLETHINK Newspeak is the name of the new language reform implemented by the regime. In this there is a drastic reduction of the vocabulary, removing any possibility of independence and of concepts such as "democracy" and "freedom". Another power tool used by The Party on the masses is certainly the doublethink or the ability to possess two conflicting ideas at the same time, so as not to be able to erase the past.