Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VIRGINIA WOOLF BIOGRAPHY Virginia Woolf was born into a literate, wealthy family in London, the second to last among several siblings and half- siblings, in 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the founder of the Dictonary of National Biography, while the mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen, was a woman who travelled a lot and worked as a model. Being a woman, Woolf did not have the chance to go to university, but she was educated and extremely well-read. When her mother died at the age of 49, Woolf had a serious nervous breakdown: it was the beginning of her psychological instability. Her father’s death and her subsequent sexual abuse by her half-brothers contributed to Woolf’s mental illness. She became friends with several notable intellectuals and artists including E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keyes, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Leonard Woolf, and this social circle was soon known as the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912, but she also had an influential affair with the writer Vita Sackville-West. Woolf was a prolific writer, producing essays, lectures, articles, stories, and novels until the year of her death. She also founded the Hogarth Press, a publishing company whose aim was to publish the works of experimental writers. In 1941 che committed suicide (at the age of 59), drowning herself in a river. Her works helped shape modernist literature, psychology, and feminism, and she is considered one of the greatest lyrical writers of the English language. She took inspiration from the theories of Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson. Like Joyce, she used the stream of consciousness technique. Her novels are like mental voyages which centre around the contrast between inner life and external reality. “MRS DALLOWAY” ➔ PLOT The story takes place on one single day in one single place, London, during one day and night in mid-June, 1923. Clarissa Dalloway is an upper-class housewife married to Richard Dalloway, a politician in the Conservative Party (Thory). Clarissa is busy buying flowers and objects for the party that she is throwing that night. She enjoys the small sensations of daily life and often muses on her late teenage years at Bourton, her family’s country home. The narration follows her, her thoughts and her actions and tries to capture the myriad incoherent impressions that the modern city of London produces in and on her. Clarissa returns home and is visited by Peter Walsh, an old friend from Bourton who has been in India for years. Peter was once passionately in love with Clarissa, but she rejected his offer of marriage. Peter and Clarissa have always been very close but also very critical of each other, and their brief meeting is laden with shared memories. The point of view shifts to Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of World War I who is suffering from shell shock. Septimus and his Italian wife, Lucrezia, wait in Regent’s Park. Septimus imagines that he is a kind of prophet and has hallucinations of his dead soldier friend Evans. Septimus was once an aspiring poet, but after the war he became numb and unable to feel. He believes his lack of emotion is a crime for which the world has condemned him to death, and he is often suicidal. The novel ends with his death. The news of his death reaches Clarissa while she is at her party. She sees Septimus’s suicide as an act of communication. ➔ MAIN THEMES PRIVACY, LONELINESS, AND COMMUNICATION Throughout Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf gives us glimpses into the minds of her characters while at the same time showing their outward communication with other people. This framework leads to a complex series of relations, and her characters deal with the privacy, loneliness, and communication of these relationships in different ways. Clarissa, who loves parties, deeply experiences her own incommunicable thoughts and the independence of her existence. She enjoys mingling with other people, but thinks that the true heart of life lies in the fact that the old woman across the way has her own room, and Clarissa has hers. The inherent privacy of the soul is not always positive, though, and it often appears as loneliness. Septimus is the greatest example of this. No one understands his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and inner turmoil. Woolf shows the loneliness of the soul in nearly every interaction between characters, as she contrasts people’s rich inner dialogues with their often mundane, failed attempts at communication with each other. Richard tries to say “I love you” to Clarissa, but is unable to do so and gives her flowers instead. Clarissa even sees Septimus’s suicide as an act of communication, but by its very nature Septimus can receive no response from the world. The important reunion pointed to by the entire book (the meeting between Clarissa, Peter, and Sally) only takes place beyond the page, just after the novel ends. With all this privacy, loneliness, and failed communication Woolf shows how difficult it is to make meaningful connections in the modern world. Something as seemingly-frivolous as Clarissa’s party then takes on a deeper, more important meaning, as it is an effort by Clarissa to try to draw people together. SOCIAL CRITICISM Though Mrs. Dalloway’s action concerns only one day and mostly follows a lady throwing a party, Woolf manages to thread her novel with criticism of English society and post-War conservatism. In Woolf’s time the British Empire was the strongest in the world, with colonies all across the globe (including Canada, India, and Australia), but after World War I England’s power began to crumble. England was technically victorious in the War, but hundreds of thousands of soldiers died and the country suffered huge financial losses. Mrs. Dalloway then shows how the English upper class tried to cling to old, outmoded traditions and pretend that nothing had changed. This is tragically exhibited through Septimus, as society ignores his PTSD.