Scarica Virginia Woolf e il flusso di coscienza in Mrs Dalloway e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! M R S D A L L O W A Y • Modern novelist In her literary production she aimed to give a voice to the complex inner world and memory of her characters. She was convinced that human personality was a continuous shift of impressions and emotions. She rejected the omniscient narrator and proposed a multiple point view, based on the personal perspective of characters through the use of associations of thoughts and flashbacks. —> She used also, like Joyce, the “stream of consciousness” but in a different way. Woolf presents the flow of thoughts with control and logic, organizing them with punctuation and grammatical structures. She created some sort of fusion between streams of thoughts and third-person, past tense narrative. She develops the concept of “moments of being and non-beings”, similar to Joyce’s epiphanies, which represent moments in the individual’s daily life, in which he can see the reality behind appearances and he becomes aware and conscious of his own experience. They are “self-explanatory moments” —> Life is made of moments and we can understand it in Mrs Dalloway, as she remembers the moments spent with Peter. Basically she focuses on trivial situations which are explanatory. She used a poetic, allusive and emotional language and fluidity was one of the main features of her way of writing. Woolf said that life is done on ordinary days but some of them are engraved in our mind. For this reason she decided to write the story of an ordinary woman on an ordinary day. • Plot and settings The plot is focused on a single ordinary day of the protagonist’s life, Clarissa Dalloway. It’s a day of June, in which Clarissa is organizing a party, as she does every year. What is interesting is that throughout the plot her life is intertwined (intrecciata) with other people’s life. THEME: The main theme of this novel is the pressure of society on the individual, which put the individual’s inner balance in difficulty and lead to a breakdown of the ego. The story told is the one of Clarissa Dalloway, which unfolds over the course of a day. The novel opens in a June day when Clarissa Dalloway is organizing a party. Clarissa leads a quiet life in accordance with the social conventions of the Victorian age which required a woman of a certain social class to marry a man of the same rank, and that’s why Clarissa marries Robert Dalloway, a man of government. Although Clarissa does everything to carry out her social duties, she ends up seeing marriage and her own life as a trap, in which she feels unsatisfied and empty. It is only through the organization of the party and through the meeting with old friends and acquaintances, that Clarissa understands what and how the real life is; the life that she has sacrificed in exchange for a more peaceful and normal one, but conditioned by social rules. Is at that point that Virginia Woolf actually develops a parallel plot based on the character of Septimus with other secondary characters, who are the doctor and his wife Lucrezia. Septimus is a veteran of the II World War, which is actually the cause of his psychiatric illness. He is haunted by the atrocities of the world and at the end of the novel he commits suicide. The two characters represent both the figure of the inept, but they have two different attitudes and Septimus becomes Clarissa’s double. The suicide of Septimus represent an important passage in the story, because it’s thanks to it that Clarissa realizes the concept of “moment of being”. That’s why during the party, all the guests were talking about Septimus' suicide, and Clarissa becomes aware of the distances from the society in which she lives and also from the people who are part of it. She begins to wonder about her existence, until she realizes her “moment of being”, that is her full acceptance of herself. It is also important to add that if we were able to analyze Clarissa’s character it was thanks to the use of the technique of the “stream of consciousness” that Virginia Woolf has used in order to make the reader more into the story and to allow him to understand in a deeper way the characters and the story itself. This a technique that Virginia Woolf has taken from James Joyce, who was the first one who adopt it.
