Interior Monologue in 'Ulysses' and 'Mrs. Dalloway': A Comparative Exploration, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Interior Monologue in 'Ulysses' and 'Mrs. Dalloway': A Comparative Exploration e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! MODERNISM Modernism developed between the years 1910 and 1930. We know that 1922, the year of the publishing of Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “The waste land”, is the peak year of modernist literature. Modernist writers lived in a world that was more complex, less sure of itself and less stable after the first world war. Because of this, their writing reflected these conditions. Modernist writing is aesthetically radical, there is no chronological development, the writing isn’t linear, it expands like a web. It is linguistically active, because the type of language used was as important as the story, even though there was no real story. The characters are different from traditional ones, now every character is presented as a multi-faceted, complex and contradictory self. There is no real plot anymore, the novels are made up of series of fragmentary moments and discontinuity in the events. Endings are often unresolved. Their style uses two narrative techniques mostly: the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness. Interior monologue: Exterior narration (actions): chronological time Interior narrations (character’s mind): fictional time, which can be expanded and contracted. In this time past present and future coexist. It is an experimental technique to show the characters’ mind realistically: it derives from the soliloquy (drama- Hamlet’s to be or not to be), which then became the dramatic monologue in poetry and the interior monologue in prose (no narrator is present). If it is direct interior monologue it presents the characters’ thoughts in first person. It can feature: Wrong use of syntax and punctuation (but it is present), grammar mistakes, slips of the tongue, sudden shifts of the tongue (lapsus), use of free association of thoughts. Joyce also uses the indirect interior monologue, which presents thoughts as seen from within the characters’ mind, but reported by an external third person. Virginia Woolf always uses the third person. Example: in Ulysses, all of the events happen on the 16th of June. All that happens is that a man, Leopold Bloom, just walks around in Dublin. Most of the book just shows what’s going on in his mind. In “to the lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf, in the first part the events take place on a span of two days and not much happens, but we enter the character’s mind so we end up with 70-80 pages of actual text. The second part is 10 pages long, in which we have the description of the house 10 years later than what we were reading in the first part. And in the third part some of the characters come back to this house, the events take place in one day but we read many pages. Stream of consciousness: it is an extreme version of the interior monologue, we have association of ideas, no syntax and no narrator is present. It’s basically thoughts on paper. In Ulysses both stream of consciousness and interior monologue are used. It describes the mental processes of a character in a continuous flow of thoughts, freely associated without apparent logical links, with ellipses and fractured syntax. It is a psychological process, used by Joyce to portray the way the human mind works. Extreme interior monologue: we can find this only in Joyce’s “Finnegan’s wake”. When he wrote this he had gone blind, so the descriptions given mostly use other senses than sight. Sense of hearing, of smell…. Modernist writing is difficult to read, so their ‘flaw’ is that they made their writing inaccessible for many readers. The point of view in their writing is never external, we have the point of view of multiple characters, which can be given one at a time or multiple at once. For example, in “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf, we have multiple characters who are thinking while walking the streets of Dublin but we don’t know when they are walking. The only indication we have is the ringing of the big ben, which happens at the same time so we know that these characters are walking at the same time. In “the waves” we have 8 characters who are thinking, and we switch from one character to another with no indication. So it is very difficult to get whose thoughts we’re reading. JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) Life He was born in Dublin, the capital city of Ireland, but he felt suffocated by its provincial atmosphere, which is why he will leave the country in 1904. He had a degree in modern languages: he studied French and German literatures. When he had money problems Svevo helped him find a job as an English teacher. He first got published only in 1936, quite late. Dubliners (1914) The collection ‘Dubliners’ contains 15 short stories. Joyce wanted to represent the 4 periods of life: childhood, adolescence, adult life and public life. Eveline is part of the Adolescence section, and The dead is part of the Public life. He used these categories because he wanted to demonstrate that the attitude of Irish people was the same in all of them. It was an attitude of paralysis, a spiritual, physical, psychological and intellectual block that doesn’t let Irish people live. They aren’t able to react to the political slavery of the British. Joyce wants to show some specific moments of their lives, some common experiences in which he detects meaningful revelations. We have some brief moments of self-awareness in their lives that he calls epiphanies. An epiphany is a term that derives from ancient Greek, that was used to indicate a god’s manifestation to humans. In whatever form this god would appear, he would be an epiphany. In Christianity it became jesus’s revelation to the magi. Joyce uses it in a laic way: the epiphany is a moment of a sudden and deep revelation of a truth about oneself or another person. After it, life goes on normally, the protagonist is back in a state of paralysis. The 16th of June, the day in which ‘Ulysses’ takes place, is Bloomsday, celebrated by Irish people. 1922 was the first time Ulysses was published, but in France only. This was also the year Joyce’s eye troubles started. Later, in 1934, it was published in the US as well. In reality in the US it was serialized in 1918 in a magazine called ‘little review’, but it got denounced for obscenity (censorship). ____Eveline___p.306 She is immobile, motionless, in a state of paralysis. Things are described to be ‘dusty’, because dust is everywhere in the Dubliners, the dust represent the dead. The point of view is Eveline’s. she has to make a decision, the only way out of her paralysis is leaving Ireland. She’s decided to leave but hesitates (l.22) because she’ll never see those objects again. The photo of a priest is described, who left and is now in Melbourne, Australia because he left Ireland. The broken harmonium represents the broken harmony of this family, the instrument was played by the mother who is now dead: she was the one who kept that family together. Frank is Eveline’s boyfriend (symbol of honesty-name). Buenos Aires means good air, so it could be the symbol of a new and better life. But according to some critics ‘going to Buenos Aires’ means being a prostitute. Eveline hasn’t told anyone she’s leaving, but she left two letters. She begins to think about the memories of her old family life, when her mother was alive and her brother was living at home, and notes that she did promise her mother to dedicate herself to the labyrinth, just as Joyce had to escape from Dublin’s labyrinth. This reference to mythology is Joyce’s ‘mythological method’, because he uses it frequently. In this work Joyce first uses the technique of the interior monologue, and we can see how the language used changes accordingly to the character’s age. Joyce was able to change the language according to the personal evolution of the character, he adapted the language to the character. ___a flight into freedom___ scheda The extract is from the last chapter; Stephen Dedalus, now a university student, is standing at the steps of his library watching some birds flying above his head. This makes his mind wander and he thinks about his family, his church, and his country. Stephen watches a flock of birds circling above and tries to identify their species and their number. He reflects on the idea of flight and on the fact that men have always tried to fly. His thoughts turn to lines from a Yeats play that has recently opened, lines that characterize swallows as symbols of freedom. Stephen's long meditation on the birds circling overhead is an important sign of his own imminent flight. He cannot identify what species the birds are, just as he is not sure about his own nature. All he knows is that the birds are flying, as he too will fly. He will build his wings alone, just as his mythical namesake Daedalus alone crafted the wings with which he escaped from his prison. The birds offer Stephen relief from his daily worries: although their cries are harsh, the "inhuman clamor soothed his ears in which his mother's sobs and reproaches murmured insistently." He thinks about his mother, which reveals his wish to evade from Dublin. The significance of the birds is, however, morally ambiguous. Stephen is not sure whether the birds are "an augury of good or evil," just as he cannot be entirely sure whether his decision to leave his family, friends, and university will have good or bad consequences. Finally, the birds are a symbol of literature and national politics as well. They remind Stephen of a passage from a recent Yeats play he has just seen, lines that refer to the swallow that wanders over the waters. As the nationalist play has attracted patriotic criticism, this swallow is a potent political symbol to which Stephen responds deeply. Ulysses (1922) The novel is about one day (16th of June), in the life of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, two antithetical characters (son/father, intellectual/ordinary man). The events that happen during the day seem to be unimportant and trivial, but what is relevant is the way the natural flow of mental reflections, and the shifting moods and impulses in the characters’ minds are presented. Both of the protagonists face a crisis: Stephen’s is a spiritual one, Leopold’s a material one. the two characters are often juxtaposed. Leopold spends his day wandering along the streets of Dublin and carrying out his ordinary activities but what he is really looking for is the meaning of life itself. The two characters meet at the end of the novel: Leopold goes home to his wife Molly/Marion, and Stephen embarks on an uncertain future. ___Leopold: the Flaneur___scheda Idk read it there’s not much to it. This is an example of interior monologue, Leopold is in front of the glasses shop and he is thinking. We can find grammar mistakes (l.7-8), and we can see the shift from the outside to the inside. ___Howth Castle___scheda Molly The last chapter in Ulysses is written completely with the stream of consciousness technique, and it takes place on the 17th of June when Molly recollects memories of all kinds. This starts at 2am, she is waiting for her husband, she is just about to fall asleep. Her mind starts to wander while she is in this still, immobile position (best to let the mind do its thing). Leopold and Molly report two points of view of the same event: because as Virginia Woolf stated, ‘it is not the evet itself that counts but the impression it has on the mind’. They both think about their proposal, in very different ways. l.3 the word yes, which was used in ‘the dead’ as well to show that we are in the character’s mind. Here we reach a sort of climax (in every single sense possible ) towards the end where the use of the word is very frequent. ‘I got him to propose to me’: she is convinced that she persuaded him to propose to her l.4 ‘like now’: shift from past to present she talks about ‘the Spanish girls’, ‘the greeks’, ‘the arabs’… she recalls the things happened on the trips she went with her husband on, during their travelling together. Leopold He is drunk while he is thinking. His recalling of the event is very different from Molly’s: he simply notices where they are, nothing interests him except for Molly. She is the moment, the queen, the drama. He remembers the biscuit they ate (in the most disgusting way possible), her nipples (ok sure???) and a goat, which shows that he remembers the realistic elements. Leo is more concrete, more physical and more focused on molly. She, however, mingles his memory of him with other experiences with other men. VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) Life She was born Virginia Stephen, from her father Leslie Stephen, who was a well-known Victorian intellectual (critic, author and historian), which allowed her to grow in an intellectual atmosphere. She had access to her father’s library, which was not really a common thing for the time, allowing girls to study as much as they wanted. She was homeschooled and studied greek, among many other things. Her mother died in 1895, when she was 13, which caused her to have her first mental breakdown and her first attempt to commit suicide. Her father remarries, he had four kids (Vanessa and Virginia, and two other boys) and he marries a woman with three kids so in the end it became a family of 7 kids total. Virginia’s half-sister, who was much older than her, became like a sort of mother to her but then she marries and dies as well. Two years later her other half-sister dies. From her diaries we can tell that both she and Vanessa were abused by their brothers… In 1904 her father dies as well, and Vanessa and Virginia decide to move to Bloomsbury, in London. The four siblings decide to go on a trip in Greece, where Vanessa falls ill, but survives but when they come back her brother Thoby falls ill and dies. At this point Vanessa and Virginia decide to open their house to the circle of intellectuals they knew and they founded the ‘Bloomsbury group’: many intellectuals gathered at their house every Thursday evening. The thing is, they were two women doing it, which was very unusual and looked down on because they were inviting strangers (men) into their house. Nevertheless, the Bloomsbury group became a very renowned thing, because of the elite group of people that were in it. Writers, painters, journalists, Forster and Clive Bell (Vanessa’s future husband) and Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s husband), who was a publisher. In 1912 Virginia gets married, at the age of 30, which was quite late for the time. Even though her time dedicated to writing was limited, she produced a lot of works. Leonard helped her find a balance with her writing, she would write only in the mornings and in the afternoon she would do manual work for the ‘hogarth press’, Leonard’s publishing house. It was good for Virginia to do this because if she had spent more time writing, and thinking, and stressing her brain, she would have had a lot more mental breakdowns and it would have been too heavy on her. She wrote diaries, novels, essays, stories, reviews (so she read the books and then reviewed them) and more. This mental illness was probably in her family already, but even though her mental breakdowns got worse each time, she never got cures for them. The time she was the most fragile was after she wrote a book. In 1929 she gave two lectures at Cambridge university: she was the first woman asked to give a lecture there. The two lectures were then combined to make one of her most famous essays: ‘A room of one’s own’. In this work she insists on the link between the economic independence and the artistic independence of a woman. This was a feminist ante litteram work, it was extremely inspiring for the feminist movement too. She imagines Shakespeare’s sister, if he had a sister she would’ve become nothing more than a good house wife. Even in her own time, for a woman to express her talents, she must have ‘a room of her own’. Jane Austen wrote her novels in the dining room, but she wasn’t allowed to write, so she had to hide them every time someone entered the room. She wrote literary essays too: ‘modern fiction’ is the most famous one. Here she explains that it is useless to have an external omniscient narrator, because he wouldn’t be able to tell the multiple aspects of every single event, every aspect it contains. The different impressions of one event on the mind. The impression that a single, even meaningless event has on every different mind. She uses the interior monologue technique, but hers is more guided than Joyce’s. She uses two devices for this: the 3rd person, and the past tense. In Virginia’s works we have moments of insight (not epiphanies), which she calls the ‘moments of being’: rare moments of insight during the character’s daily life, when they manage to see a meaning beyond appearances. Her writing is personal, she calls it ‘feminine writing’, because of the use of colors, emotional words, metaphors, rhymes, which all create a certain fluidity in her writing. Mrs Dalloway (1925) A novel dealing with a middle - aged character, Mrs. Dalloway, who is analyzed from all perspectives, mixing outer reality with her innermost feelings, using the Modernist technique of free indirect speech to give a full portrait of the lady. Mrs. Dalloway, originally called “The hours”, develops over the course of one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class housewife, who runs errands in London to prepare for the party she will host that June evening. The same goes for the other characters, who will all reunite that evening at the party. All