MRS DALLOWAY - VIRGINIA WOOLF, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica MRS DALLOWAY - VIRGINIA WOOLF e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VIRGINIA WOOLF - MRS DALLOWAY In Mrs Dalloway, there are all the sensitives of a woman written by a woman. The story of Mrs Dalloway focuses on one single character (Clarissa Dalloway) on one single day (a Wednesday in June) in one single place (London). So there is no plot and no chronological sequence of events→ subjective and psychological time. The “plot”: Mrs Dalloway is busy buying flowers and objects for the party she has organised for the evening. She takes a little nap and then she gets ready for the party. In the end, there is the party. → From an ordinary day, we see all her life (cfr. Ulysses - Joyce). Woolf had read Ulysses and she said that it was horrible. In fact, she has a different sensitivity and attitude from Joyce. However, she was influenced by him. Similarly to what Joyce does in Ulysses, in Mrs Dalloway Woolf uses the stream of consciousness technique. However, unlike Joyce, who does not filter his characters’ thoughts and lets them flow in an uncontrolled and rather incoherent way, Woolf prefers to show her character’s thoughts in a more controlled and organised way. For this reason, she uses a third-person, impersonal and omniscient narrator, so the narrator guides the reader. She never abandons the stability of syntax and grammar (there is punctuation) and her prose style is always logically structured. So actually Mrs Dalloway is characterised by interior monologue more than by the stream of consciousness. THE BEGINNING (“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”) This is the opening of the book where the narrator presents Mrs Dalloway, an ordinary woman on an ordinary day in London, a city that inspires her and surrounds her with noises, stimuli and colours. To present Clarissa, the narrator makes us be inside her mind, while she is walking in London. So this passage shows us the use of the indirect interior monologue. Similarly to the madeleine by Proust, the squeak of hinges of the doors makes her think of the squeak of hinges of the house of her youth where she spent the summer when she was eighteen. So the same sound makes her remember the past. → past and present coexist. Then she remembers Peter: Peter was her first love, he was her fiancée but they didn’t get married. She was very in love with him but he decided to go to India and she decided not to go with him because she didn't want to give herself too much to him. She married Richard Dalloway who is a political man (he was a tory). In a way by marrying Richard, she has renounced a part of herself: now she is “Mrs Dalloway”, so she is defined by her marital status. However her marriage with Richard guaranteed her stability, her husband makes her feel protected and safe and in a way, she loves her husband. Nevertheless, the relationship between Clarissa and Richard is not so strong: The bed is always empty, so probably they have no sex life, so their love is not so intense. Instead, Peter is represented with a pocket knife, which evocates his virility, so with him there was a more intense love. She also remembers Sally, in particular, she remembers her kiss with her. It is interesting to notice that all the impressions from Peter are feated away and she remembers only stupid things. This shows us how memory works. (cfr. Woolf’s essay - modern life). Mrs Dalloway is described very shortly with few details, using the impressionistic technique. As the impressionists just painted with rushes not defined, Woolf doesn’t give us a full description of the characters. You can only create a general idea from the few details given. The general idea that you have of Mrs Dalloway is that she lives in Westminster, she is rich (she is married to a rich man), she is very snobbish and, as the neighbour Scrope says, she is very charming. She is quite frail (pronuncia: freil) physically: in fact, she is described like “a touch of the bird” and then we know that she gets health problems with her heart. When it says “-how many years now? over twenty-”, Clarissa is talking. So we see the presence of different levels of narration and so different points of view. From the opening, we see the point of view of Clarissa, Scrope the neighbour and the narrator. So we are continuously immersed in the mind of different characters. → SHIFT OF POINTS OF VIEW (cfr. Joyce; theory of relativity) The solemnity is given by Westminster but also by Big Ben. When it is written that “Big Ben is striking”, this reminds us of the external chronological time. At the end of this passage, in her thoughts, she declares her love for life. She has started living again after a period of illness and now she feels at the centre of everything. In that period, London was full of life, that is the beginning of the century, there are the first cars, so in general, there is a positive attitude, which is well represented by Mrs Dalloway’s feelings. CLARISSA’S PERSONALITY - HER TRAIN OF THOUGHTS (“She had reached the Park gates”) Mrs Dalloway is leaving her house to buy some flowers and she has a train of thoughts. In a way, this passage can be considered an example of a stream of consciousness. From this passage, we understand something more about her personality, which is very contradictory. She thinks that she is not clever (“Not that she thought herself clever”) and that she is not cultivated (“She knew nothing”). Actually she had a private teacher. The fact that “she knew nothing” is what Mrs Dalloway thinks about her so it is relative (the narrator doesn’t say that). She knows people instinctively so she is very sensitive and sympathetic. She is full of contradictions: “She felt very young: at the same time unspeakably aged” so she felt young and old at the same time, which is something typical of a middle-aged woman; “She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside” so sometimes she felt like the centre of everything, while other times she felt she was just a spectator, so quite irrelevant. “She had a perpetual sense (..) of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day” because maybe one day you can say or do something wrong with your friend or parents, which can ruin your entire life. “To her it was absolutely absorbing” so all you do every day, all your life is absorbing. In a way this can also be positive: for instance life in the city is positively absorbing to her (cfr. the beginning of the novel). After a long train of thoughts, there is “she thought”. In this way, the narrator underlines that these were not the narrator’s ideas. She is very sensitive and charming: in fact, “she purred” “like a cat”. This passage is very similar to Molly’s monologue in Ulysses. She is absorbed by life and just after thinking about life, the free association is with death. The first thing she says about death is that “she must inevitably cease completely”, so death is seen like the end of everything, so there is no afterlife. She has a negative feeling about death, a very sad idea about it, because she thinks “all this must go on without her”. But then she realises that it doesn’t matter. In fact, in a way it is “consoling to believe that death ended absolutely” because from a Christian perspective after death you can go to hell, while from this perspective you die and that’s the end of suffering. Maybe then she says that death is not the end but life continues in other people’s memory. So people will still remember you and your essence will remain “like a mist”(=nebbia), so we will continue to