Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway) e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! James Joyce James Joyce is one of the most important novelists of all time, he was born in Dublin in 1882. He started studying Italian, French and English at University College . In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle , his future wife; then he moved to Trieste where he worked on Dubliners : a collection of short stories written using a naturalistic style and “a Potrait of the artist as a young man” . In Trieste Joyce became friends with the Italian writer Italo Svevo, who greatly influenced Joyce’s style and themes. Another Joyce’s masterpiece is Ulysses which reproduces the structure of Homer’s Odyssey, using the now famous stream of counciousness narrative technique, where Joyce enters in Leopold Bloom’s mind ( the main character). James Joyce in 1920 moved to Paris, and 21 years later he will die in Zurich. Joyce and Ireland : a complex relationship Joyce’s literary works reveal his complex relationship with Ireland , his mother country: even though he left Dublin in 1904, Joyce’s works are all obsessively set in Ireland and its capital. For the Irish author, Ireland was a country dominated by stagnation and stasis, but it was also is source of inspiration: for this reason he will talk about Irish people, places and lives. Dubliners The structure of the collection Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories published in 1914. As the title suggests, the stories revolve around the lives of 15 typical inhabitants of Dublin and represents an ideal portrait of the Irish capital at the beginning of the 20th century. The stories can be divided into 4 groups: -childhood , with a strong sense of disillusionment and failure; -adulthood , which tackles issues such as man’s impossibility to escape from suffering , the passivity of Irish people and the paralysis of their will; -the relationship between Irish individuals and collective institutions , such as politics , the musical world and the Church; -and the concept of maturity. These stories, too, develop the concept of paralysis and its ramifications in private and public life. The city of dublin The Dublin that Joyce portrays is a rather static and provincial town, a place which does not have the cosmopolitan atmosphere of many other European capitals of that time. This influenced the life of the inhabitants who are stuck in this condition , and the city does not give the chance to grow and to develop their full potential as human beings. Paralysis What unites the characters in Dubliners is the common nature of failure they experience. Each of them has a desire : to fulfill their lives by overcoming all the obstacles to this ambition. This universal condition of inaction affects all the inhabitants of Dublin and is defined by Joyce as Paralysis , which is not just a physical condition: it is a spiritual stagnation of the self, a universal lack of growth that affects the whole Irish nation  spiritual and physical death. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. Being a woman , Virginia did not have the chance to go to university, but she received a fine home education and she was surrounded by artists and writers that’s why she became an intellectual and a prolific writer. Her masterpiece is Mrs Dalloway where is shown the influence that Sigmund Freud and Bergson had on Woolf’s immagination. Like joyce , Woolf used the stream of counciousness technique in her novles , however , unlike Joyce, she pushed it in different directions : Woolf’s novels are like mental voyages which centre around the contrast between inner and external reality ( she will call them moments of being and of not being ). When her mother died at the age of 49 , Woolf had a serious nervous breakdown : this is considered to be the beginning of the psychological instabity. She will commit suicide drowning herself in a river in 1941. Mrs Dalloway Plot The story of Mrs Dallloway takes place on single day ( June, 23rd ) in one single place- ( the city of London ). A middle-aged woman Clarissa is busy buying flowers for the party she organised in the evening. The narration follows her and her thoughts; in the novel Clarissa’s counterpart is Septimus Smith , a shell-shocked veteran of the war. The novel ends with Septimus suicide, and the news of his death reaches Clarissa while she is at the party and realises that Septimus death was essential for her to stay alive. Septimus and Clarissa The novel is named after its female protagonist: Clarissa Dalloway who has conservative political views and she was not open-minded. “Mrs” suggests that she was a mother and a wife, even a complex and frustrated woman because she was not able to express her feelings considering herself weak and imperfect.Clarissa’s mind is always pervaded by her past memories ( which the reader can follow through the s.o.c), she is split between the desire to celebrate her life and attraction torwards death. Clarissa’s counterpart is Septimus Smith , a shell-shocked war veteran; both have in common the attraction torwards deathand consider suicide as a liberation/freedom from the weight of life. At the end of the day only Clarissa is able to survive , infact when the news of Septimus’ death reaches Clarissa, she will understand how important life was, and finally to continue living. An experimental novel What interests Woolf was the workings of the human mind and how it was affected by reality. Mrs Dalloway abbandoned the traditionally-structured plot of Victorian novels in favour of a more experimental approach to writing, so all the actions are fragmented and disconnetted ( s.o.f ). Woolf like Joyce uses the s.o.c technique , but she uses it in a very unusual and poetic way. Unlike Joyce Woolf prefered to control and organise the characters’ thoughts. For this reason she uses a third-person-omniscent narrator never abandoning the syntax , grammar and punctuation. The contrast between subjective and objective time Influenced deeply by Berguson, Woolf made a dinstiction between subjective and objective time: the latter corresponds to the time measured by the clock  chronological time; on the other hand the subjective time was measured by the emotional intensity of that time, measured by the inner self and by the mind. In Mrs Dalloway there are a lot of references which symbolically show the passage of time , like the Big Ben striking. Essentially we have 3 main themes: 1) Womanhood , as we mentioned before reguarding Clarissa’s character; 2) The passing of time ( subjective and objective ); 3) Moments of being and moments of not being , which correspond to Joyce’s epiphany, and they are the moments when the character is aware or not of the situation he/her is living at that moment. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself The following excerpt represents the opening of the book: here the narrator presents Mrs Dalloway , an ordinary woman on an ordinary day in London, a city that inspires her and surrounds her with noises ( like the car) , stimuli and colours. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it? —”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered;