Mrs. Dalloway: Modernist Novel with Unconventional Themes in 20th Century London, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Mrs. Dalloway: Modernist Novel with Unconventional Themes in 20th Century London e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Virginia woolf Virginia woolf was the doughter of Leslie Stephen. She grew up in a literaly and intellectual atmophere and apart the school,her education was given thanks to the library of the father. She spent her summer in St Ives,Cornwall together with her parents and her 3 siblings. The sea was important for her in fact it remains into her art as a symbol. When her mother died in 1895 she was just 13 and it comtributed to her first breakdown. Then she started to revolt agaist her aggressive father and she stared being a domesticated woman. The Bloomsbury Group Only when her farther died in 1904 she stared to live free and to begin her literary career. She decided to move to central London, in Bloomsbury, and together with her sister Vanessa Bell she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group which included the avant-garde of early 20 th century London. For these artist the common denominators were a concept for traditional morality and Victorian respectability,a rejection of artistic convention and a disdain for bourgeois sexual codes. Bloomsbury members virtually defines the social,political and artistic themes of the coming mid- century:unconventional sexual practices,anti-war sentiment and socialism. Literary career In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf and in 1915 she published The Voyage Out,her first novel. During this period she attempted suicide by taking drugs. In 1925 Mrs Dolloway appeared,in which Virginia experimented with the narrative techniques. It was followed by To the lighthouse and orlando. Virginia was also a very talented literary critic and a brilliant essayist,as her volume of literary essays,The Common Reader. In 1929 she delivered two lectures at Cambridge University,which later became A room of one’s own,a work of great impact on the femminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1929 she began to work on her novel The Waves,in which she seemed to recognise that there was a link between her creative process and her mental illness. World was II increased her anxiety. Finally in 1941 she drowned herself in the River Ouse. A modernist novelist Virginia was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory and saw the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions. In her novel the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view shifted inside the different characters’ mind through flashbacks. Her contribution to Modernism is made clear by a statement in her essay Modern Novels. Mrs dolloway Plot At 10 a.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 a shell-shocked veteran of World War I,she is an italian girl. Septimus’s mental disorder has necessitated the calling in of doctors,first Dr holmes and now 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. Then he leaves Clarissa’s house and goes to Regent’s Park,where he catches a glimpse of the Warren Smith,who are going to Sir William Bradshw’s for an interview. The interview lasts three- quarters of an hour and results in Sir William’s arrangingfor Septimus to go into one of his clinics. At 6 p.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 character who have been in some way important during the day are present at Clarissa’s party. The Bradshaws arrive and Clarissa hears from them of Septimus’s death,with which she feels a strong connection. Setting Mrs Dolloway takes place on a single ordinary day in june. The novel follows the protagonist through a very small area of London,from the mornign to the evening of the day on which she made a party. Virginia woolf doesn’t want to elevate her characters but she wants to show their deep humanity behind their social masks. With the tunnelling technique she allaws the reader to experience the characters recollection of their past provindin a sense of background and personal history. Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the climax of the novel and unifies the narrative by inviting all the people she thinks about during a day. Characters The range of the characters is small: they belong to the upper middle class so doctors and lawyers. Clarissa is a London society llady of 51, the wife of the conservative MP ,Richard Dolloway, who has extremely conventional views on politics and women’right. She is characterised by opposing feelings: her need for freedom and indipendence and her class consciousness. Her life seems to be an effort towards order and peace. She emposes severe restrictions on her spontaneous feeling to be an home perfect women. Septimus Warren Smith is a young poet and lover of Shakespeare. He is an exstremely sensitive man and he is a man connective with the war. He had a shell-shock and after the war Septimus is haunted by the spectre of Evans. There is no connection between Clarissa and Septimus in the plot apart from the news of the death at the party. However they are similar in many respects: their response to experience is always given in physical terms and they depend upon their parents for stability and protection. There is a fundamental difference which has contradicted the theory that Septimus is Clarissa’s double. His psysic paralysis leads him to suicide whereas Clarissa never loses her awarness of the outside world. Themes and motifs The novel deals with the way people react to new situation and provide and insight into some of the most significant changes in the social life of the time. Virginia uses some cinema devices as flashback. She also adopts a motif “the striking oof big ben and of clocks in general” which acts both as structural connection and as a symbol of awarness of death. The insistent sound of the clock reminds to the reader the flow of the life to the death. Life expresses itself in moment of vision which are at the same time objective. Style Virginia Woolf subjective reality came to be identified with the stream of consciousness tecnique. Virginia never lets her characters thoughts flow without control and she maintains logical and grammatical organisation. Her tecnique is based on the fusion of stream of thounght into a third person ,past tense narrative. Similar to joyce epiphany are the Woolf’s moment of being that are rare occasions of insight during the character daily life. Virginia used to use words that are poetic,allusive and emotional. Clarissa and Septimus Mrs Dalloway said she would buy flowers herself: this is how the novel opens, and in the following pages Clarissa Dolloway is seen walking through Green Park,then up Bond Street to the flower shop. Just before reaching the shop, Clarissa is thinking about the realtionship between her 17 year old Ulysses is long,complex novel set near Dublin on one single day,16 June 1904. its 18 epidodes narrate the actions of three characters. First we met the young Stephen Dedalus. He is the protagonist of the first three episodes grouped as part I ‘the telemachiad’. The next and main section is called ‘the odyssey’ and focuses on the urban wanderings od Leopold Bloom,a middle age Jewish advertising salesman. Finally the third sections called ‘nostos’,brings Leopold back to home to his love Molly. Thesection ends with a monologue of Molly. A modern odyssey Joice’s Ulysses is an epic novel which offers different visions of daily life,personala ttitudes,political and cultural discussion. Its style are multiple and varied,its lenguage is an inventive structure for exampleupsetting the sentence structure. Joice’s stream of consciousness One of the most important thing of the tecnique of Joyce is the stream of consciousness. Thanks to it Joyce tries to reflect the workings of the mind of its protagonist,Leopol Bloom. Yes i said yes I will yes the passage represent a long fluc of thoughts passing through Molly’s mind. This episode is also the conclusion of Ulysses. Molly is Leopold’swife and the main character of this part. She is unfaithful to her husband. Although there is no punctuation,the word yes works as a connector bteween sentences and creates a sort of puntuaction. At the beginn of the passageMolly remembers the day Leopold asked her to marry him. She liked him because he was a sensitive man. She din’t answer immediately. Then she thinks about what happened to her before she knew Leopold. She remebers her youth in Gibraltas. In the last part Molly’s flux of thoughts goes back at when she and Leopold got engaged. She remebers she toldhim to ask again with her eyes and then she put her arms around him and said yes. There’s the interior mologue and the use of the stream of consciousness. She is in the bed in the morning. Organs from nowhere Khaty and Tommy have decided to speak to Miss Emily,their old headmistress at Hailsham boarding school. This school wanted to improve the living conditions of the clones and treat them as if they were human. The clones were used to extract their organs. many people preferred to see clones as clones and not as people because it was easier to justify the use of their organs. In this school they wanted to show that even the clones had a soul. the teacher tries to prove it by asking them to draw a drawing because she thought that a person who has no feelings is not capable of drawing. The school closes due to a scandal and the sponsors leave. the scandal is given by a scientist who was trying to create clones with a superior intelligence and this had frightened many people. ANIMAL FARM In the late 1930s news reached the West of Stalin's purge trials, which led to the death of three million people and sent many others to forced labour camps. In 1939 Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, which enabled the Germans to take over Poland and Czechoslovakia. Orwell's indignant reaction to these events caused him to write Animal Farm. He expressed his disillusionment with Stalinism and totalitarianism in general in the form of an animal fable. OLD MAJOR The story takes place on a farm where animals are able to reason and speak. The progonist of the story is Old Major who is a boar. The boar gives a speech to the other animals where he states that the human being is the enemy for them. The boar articulates this discourse a lot, using for example rhetorical devices such as rhetorical questions to make it more concincent. In history 7 commandments are mentioned that describe man as an enemy. A commandment also says that animals are equal but that some animals are better than others. The themes are the failer of the Russian revolution, tyranny and rebellion of the oppressed. The book is a short narrative set on a farm where a group of oppressed animals, capable of speech and reason and inspired by the leachings of an old boar, overcome their cruel master and set up a revolutionary government. The pigs lead and supervise the enterprise under the leadership of Napoleon, a power-hungry pig. At first the animals' life is guided by Seven Commandments based on equality; however, these are gradually altered by the pigs who become increasingly dictatorial and arrogate to themselves the privileges previously exercised by humans. At the end all the Seven Commandments are abandoned and only one remains: 'all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. Old Major stands for a mixture of Marx and Lenin,Farmer Jones is Czar Nicholas II: Orwell describes him as a drunk farmer who does not care about his animals, Snowball represents Trotsky, Napoleon is obviously Stalin. He uses terror and force in order to assert and maintain his power over the animals, the character of Boxer stands for the loyal, hard-working man Finally, the dogs are a metaphor for the Terror State which Stalin created in Russia as a means of keeping order and crushing political opposition.The tone of the book blends humour and sarcasm with horrifying scenes and a painful atmosphere. The book shows how an initial idealism can turn into exploitation and how ordinary people can lose their freedom in small incremental steps. Tyranny is by definition evil, regardless of its political nature.