Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: A Modernist Exploration of Inner Reality and Everyday Life, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: A Modernist Exploration of Inner Reality and Everyday Life e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VIRGINIA WOOLF Virginia Woolf was born in 1882. Her father, Lesile Stephen, was an eminent Victorian man of letters. She grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere and, apart from a few courses at King's College, Lonfon, her education consisted of private Greek lessons and, above all, access to her father's library, where she read whatever she liked. She spent her summers at St Ives,Cornwal, and the sea remained central to her art as symbol. For Virginia, water represented both something harmonious and femininine but also the possibility of the resolution of intolerable conflicts in death. The death of her mother at the age of thirteen affected her deeply and brought about her fist nervous breakdown. She began to revolt against her father's tyrannical character and his idealisation of the domesticated woman. In 1914, when Virginia's father died, she began her own literary life and career: starting by moving to Bloomsbury with her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which included the avant-garde of early 20th century London. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, and in 1915 she published "The Voyage Out", her first novel, which still followed a traditional pattern. At this time, she entered a nursing home and attempted suicide by taking drugs. In 1925 the novel "Mrs Dalloway" appeared, in which Virginia successfully experimented with new narrative techniques, followed by "To the lighthouse" (1927) and "Orlando" (1928), which was devoted to Vita Sackville West, a novelist and biographer with whom she had an intense relationship. She was also a very talented literary critic and a brilliant essayist, as her volume of literary essays, "The Common Reader" (1925), shows.In 1929 she delivered two lectures at Cambridge which later became "A Room of One's Own" (1929), a work of great impact on the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in which she explored many issues connected with women and writing but above all insisted on the inseparable link between economic independence. The same year she also began to work on her novel "The Waves" (1931), in which she seemed to recognise that there was a link between her creative process and her illness. The Second World War increased her anxiety and fears. She became haunted by the terror of losing her mind. Finally she could stand it no longer and drowned herself in the River Ouse, when she was fifty-nine. A MODERNIST NOVELIST Woolf was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory and conceived the human personality as a continuos shift of impressions and emotions. So the events that traditionally made up a story were no longer important for her; what mattered was the impressions they made on the characters who experienced them. In her novels the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view shifted inside the characters' minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas and momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux. WOOLF VS JOYCE For both Joyce and Woolf subjective reality came to be identified with the technique called Waughts directly through interior monologue and sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically third grammatical organisation. Her technique is based on the fusion of streams of thought into a third-person past tense narrative. Thus she gives the impression of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer world, the past and the present, speech and silence. Woolt also introduce the so called "moments of being', similar to Joyce's epiphanies; which are rare moments of insight during the characters' daily life when they can see reality behind appearances. Another difference is the use of the language: Joyce was more interested in language experimentation and worked through the accumulation of details; while Woolf's use of words was almost poetic, allusive and emotional. Also, fluidity is the quality of the language which flows following the most intricate thoughts and stretches to express the most intimate feelings MRS DALLOWAY THE STORY At 10a.m on a Wednesday early in June of 1923, Clarissa Dalloway, the protagonist of the novel,goes to Bond Street to buy some flowers for a party she is giving that evening at her house. While she is in the flower shop, a car drives noisily past and shifts the attention to the street, where Septimus and Lucrezia Warren Smith are walking; he is an estate agent's clerk and shell shocked veteran of the First World War, she is an italian girl. Septimus's mental desorder has necessitated the calling in of doctors, first Dr Holmes, and then Sir William Bradshaw, a famous nerve specialist. Clarissa walks back home and there she receives an unexpected visit from Peter Walsh, the man she used to love in her youth. He then leaves Clairssa's house and goes to Regent's Park, where he catches a glimpse of the Warren Smiths, who are going to Dr Bradshaw for an interview. This last one results is that Septimus has to go into one of the doctor's clinics. At 6 a.m Septimus* jumps out of the window of his room, and the ambulance carrying his body passes by Peter Walsh, who is going back to his hotel. All the characters who have been in some way important during the day are presenta t Clarissa's party. The Bradshaws arrive and Clarissa hears from them of Septimus's death, with which she feels a strong connection. THE SETTING Mrs Dalloway takes palce on a single ordinary day in June 1923, and it follows the protagonist through a very small area of London, from the morning to the evening of the day on which she gives a party. Woolf shows the character deep humanity (she does not elevate them to the level of myth like Joyce) behind their social masks. They all enjoy the sights and sounds in London, its parks, its changing life. Moreover, through what she defined as the 'tunneling technique', she allows the render to experience the characters' recollection of their past, thus providing a sense of their