Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VIRGINIA WOOLF Virginia Woolf was Bom in London in 1882 from Leslie Stephen, a man of letters, so she grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere, with free access to her father's library. She spent her summers with her family in Cornwall, and the sea remained central in her works as a symbol. Her mother's death, when she was 13, and sexual abuse from her stepbrothers brought her depression; then she began to revolt against her aggressive and sexist father. With her father's death, she felt free to begin her life. She moved to Bloomsbury, and with her sister she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which included the avant-garde of the 20th century in London, such as post-impressionism and pacifism. The members of this group were characterised by contempt (disprezzo) for traditional morality, Victorian respectability and bourgeois (borghesi) sexual codes, and rejection of artistic convention. Here she developed the stream of consciousness technique. In 1912 She married Leonard Woolf. Then she started her literary career as a novelist, essayist and critic. Tne Second World War increased her anxiety and fears. After rewriting drafts of her suicide note, she put rocks into her pockets and she drowned herself in the River Ouse. a modernist novelist By her works we can see her development in fact of narrative techniques and experimentations: Mrs Dalloway and to the Lighthouse are examples of perfect use of stream of consciousness. Virginia saw the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions. Her main aim was to give voice to the inner world of feelings and memory. The events that made up a story were no longer important, because it only mattered the impression they left on the character who experienced them. In her novels the point of view shifted inside the character's mind (flashbacks, association of ideas, momentary impressions), without an omniscient narrator. She was a feminist writer and in her novels, such as Mrs Dalloway, she deals with themes like androgyny, women and writing. MRS DALLOWAY On a Wednesday morning in June 1923, Clarissa Dalloway goes to buy some flowers for a party she is giving at her house. While she is in the flower shop, she hears a car brake (la frenata di una macchina), and shifts her attention the street, meanwhile Septimus and Lucrezia Smith, his wife, are walking to the psychiatrist, because Septimus is a shell-shocked veteran of World War |, and his condition has necessitated the help of a doctor. VVhile he is alone, Septimus jumps out of the window of his room and dies. Clarissa will know about his death because Septimus' psychiatrist is invited to her party, and she will feel a strong connection with him, even though she didn't know him. setting Like Joyce's Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway takes place on a single ordinary day in June and follows the protagonist through a small area of London. However, unlike Joyce, her character's aren't linked to the myth, but they hide themselves behind a social mask. The character's enjoy the sights and sounds of London, its parks, its changing life. Through the "tunnelling technique", she allows the reader to experience the characters' recollection of their past, background and personal history. characters The characters belong to the upper-middle class: they are doctors, lawyers, intellectuals and politicians. Mrs Dalloway is a 51 years old woman, married to a Conservative member of the Parliament, Richard Dalloway, who has conventional views on politics and women's rights. She experienced the influence of a possessive father and the need to refuse Peter Walsh, the man she used to love in her youth: all this has weakened her emotional self. She is characterised by opposite feelings: her need for freedom and independence and her class condition; to avoid this weakness, she imposes severe restrictions on her feelings. Septimus Warren Smith is an extremely sensitive man, a poet and lover of Shakespeare, who joined the war for patriotic reasons. He is characterised by a feeling of fear and guilt, because of his best friend's death during the war. He is a shell-shock case, a victim of industrialised war, he is haunted by the spectre of his best friend, he suffers from headaches, insomnia and he is sexually impotent. There is no connection between Clarissa and Septimus in the plot, but there is the theory that Septimus is Clarissa's double: because their response to experience is always given in physical terms and they depend on their partners for stability and protection. But there are a few differences between these two: Septimus is not always able to distinguish between fantasy and real life, so his situation leads him to suicide; while Clarissa Is always aware and prepared, and in the end she accepts her destiny. themes and style e The novel deals with the way people react to changes in social life: we can see the newspapers, use of cars and plains, the new standards of the marital relationship and the success of the cinema; Virginia Woolf uses some cinematic devices, such as close-up and flashbacks; She uses the tic-toc of Big Ben and clocks in general as a symbol of the passing of life;