Virginia Woolf: A Modernist Author's Literary Life and Techniques, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Virginia Woolf: A Modernist Author's Literary Life and Techniques e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in 1882. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent Victorian man of letter. Thus, she grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere and, apart from a few courses at king’s college, London, her education consisted of private Greek lessons and, above all, access to her father’s library, where she read whatevers she liked. She spent her summers at St Ives, Cornwall, and the sea remained central to her art as a symbol. For Virginia, water represented two things: what is harmonious and feminine + stood for the possibility of the resolution of intolerable conflicts in death. The death of her mother in 1895, when virginia was only thirteen, affected her deeply and brought about her first nervous breakdown. She began to revolt against her father’s tyrannical character and his idealisation of the domesticated woman. It was only with her father’s death in 1904 that Virginia began her own literary life and career. She decided to move together with her sister. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, and in 1915 she published the voyage out, her first novel. At this time, she enteres 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. 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 began to work on her novel The Waves (1931), she recognised 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. 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 continuous shift of impressions and emotions. What mattered was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them. In her novels the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view gifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas. Her contribution to modernism is made clear by a statement contained in her essay Modern Fiction (1919). Woolf vs joyce As for James Joyce, subjective reality came to be identified with the technique called ‘stream of consciousness’. Differently from Joyce’s characters, who show their thoughts directly through interior monologue and sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically unorthodox way, Woolf never lets her characters’ thoughts flow without control, and she maintains logical and 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 connection between the inner and the outer world, the past and the present, speech and silence. Similar to joyce’s ‘epiphanies’ are Woolf’s ‘moments of being’, rare moments of insight during the character’s daily life when they can see reality behind appearances. While joyce was more interested in language experimentation and worked through the accumulation of details, woolf’s use of words was almost poetic, allusive and emotional. Fluidity is the quality of the language which flows following the most intricate thoughts and stretches to express the most intimate feelings. Mrs dalloway 1925 The setting Mrs Dalloway takes place on a single ordinary day in June of 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 large formal party. Unlike Joyce, woolf does not elevate her characters to the level of myth, but shows their deep humanity behind their social mask. They all enjoy the sights and sounds in London, its parks, its changing life, its flavour. Moreover, through what she defined as the tunnelling technique, she allows the reader to experience the characters’ recollection of their past, thus providing a sense of their background and personal history. Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the climax of the novel and unifies the narrative by gathering all the people Clarissa thinks about during the day. A changing society The novel also deals with the way people react to new situations, and provides insight into some of the most significant changes in the social life of the time, for instance the spread of newspapers, the increasing use of cars and planes, new standards in marital relationships. Woolf also adopts a motif, the striking of big ben and of clock in general, which acts at the same time as a structural connection and symbol. The insistent chiming of clock reminds the reader of the temporal grid which organises the narrative, of the passing of the time of life and of its flowing into death. So life expresses itself in moments of vision which are at the same time objective (the clocks, the streets, the cars, the flowers) and yet subjectively creative, since they are recreated every moment by active consciousness. The connection between Clarissa and Septimus Clarissa is a London society lady of fifty-one, the wife of a conservative MP who has extremely conventional views on politics and women’s rights. The influence of a possessive father, the frustration of a genuine love, the need to refuse Peter Walsh, a man who would force her to share everything - all this has weakened her emotional self and split her in two. She is characterised by opposing feelings: her need for freedom and independence and her class consciousness. Her life appears to be an effort towards order and peace, an attempt to overcome her weakness and sense of failure. She needs to make her home perfect to become an ideal human being, but she imposes severe restrictions on her spontaneous feelings. Septimus Warren Smith is an extremely sensitive man who can suddenly fall prey to panic and fear or feelings of guilt. The cause of these feelings lies in the death of his best friend, Evans, during the war. He is a shell-shock case, one of the victims of industrialised warfare. After the war, Septimus is haunted by the spectre of Evans; he suffers from headaches and insomnia. He cannot stand the idea of having a child, he is sexually imponent. The plot does not connect Clarissa and Septimus Spiegazione In the traditional novel → omniscient narrator ora just point of view. I modernisti, intravedono l'esperienza della coscienza: linguaggio espressione della coscienza. Il primo titolo di mrs dalloway era the hours, solo successivamente fu modificato con il titolo attuale. Setting: london (streets of london) Time: a single day of time (modernist concept of time) Protagonist: clarissa dalloway (the title is not clarissa but mrs dalloway - important because it recalls the idea of the social role she has and she feels oppressed by) Three men who are important in her life: Richard dalloway: member of parliament, he is a rational man, usually very calm and patient towards her. She has a good life, her role is to be his wife, a perfect wife. Stability, he offered this to her. Peter walsh, was her first love, the young man she has deeply fallen in love with but as far as it concerns the personality he’s completely different from richard → storm, irrational, unpredictable. He was the first man that proposed to her, she refused and chose richard. Despite the fact that she looks like having a satisfy life, Peter is a vivid memory in her life (greta in the death, dubliners). La memoria non è la storia, l’importanza che diamo agli eventi è la memoria, la storia è la registrazione oggettiva di questi eventi, la memoria è tremendamente soggettiva. Peter walsh was in india on business, but now he’s back and she has invited him to the party. Clarissa is not in love with peter but with the memory she had in those years. Clarissa is living in the past. Going forward and backward to the present and the past. Chronological order no interest at all. (all’inizio doveva suicidarsi clarissa poi cambia e si suicida septimus) Septimus warren smith, he came back from war. He should be a hero, he came back from war and now he has everything to be happy. But he had lived a lot of atrocities, his mental condition is not stable. He’s seen has the double of clarissa: 2 lifes that never meets. In the very end when clarissa is at her party there’s a doctor who is talking about a case: the case of septimus (he escribes his mental pains, clarissa is the only one who is able to understand the deep tremendous feeling and his suffer, all the other guests were unable to understand his suicide) we have the idea about at the time there weren’t psychologist. Those were the years of freud. At those years they were just doctor. Septimus è visto da due medici, uno non capisce un cazzo, non c’era consapevolezza. L’altro stava capendo un