Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway e the modernist novel, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway e the modernist novel e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VIRGINIA WOOLF She was born in London in 1882 into a wealthy family. After the death of her mother, Virginia went through a long period of depression and began to show the first signs of the mental illness that characterised her whole life. During these years she spent much time in her father's library reading and writing articles and essays and at the same time began to develop a conflictual relationship with her father due to his authoritarian and tyrannical character. After her marriage to Leonard Woolf, these years were characterised by another period of depression that culminated in a suicide attempt. Meanwhile, mental disorders continued to torment the writer, who was always overwhelmed by bouts of anxiety and insecurity. The Second World War worsened her fears, as she walked through the war-torn streets of London and saw the disintegration of the world around her, she began to hear voices in her head and fearing she would go mad, she chose the only possible course of action for her: 'death by water' by drowning herself in the River Ouse (Sussex) near her home in 1941. THE MODERNIST NOVEL Virginia Woolf, like James Joyce and other of her contemporaries, adopted the new narrative techniques. The writer was convinced that the narration of events in chronological order was now a superficial and imperfect way of presenting life. Virginia Woolf was interested in giving voice to the inner world of man, whose consciousness was conceived as a continuous flow of emotions and impressions. Freud's psychoanalysis had revealed that our consciousness is made up of several layers of which much is unknown to us. The unconscious is the mysterious part of our mind and is driven by irrational forces that reason cannot explain. The French philosopher Henri Bergson also elaborated a new theory: according to him, a distinction must be made between chronological time, composed of the orderly sequence of past, present and future, and psychological time, whose duration varies from individual to individual and is measured by the emotional intensity of a moment. Virginia rejects conventional narrative techniques, the events that construct a story are no longer important, just as chronological time and external reality do not matter, what matters is psychological time, the life of the characters' minds, where past, present and future overlap. The omniscient narrator disappears and the point of view shifts to the minds of the characters, where everything flows as a continuous stream and is rendered through flashbacks, associations of ideas, impressions and temporary emotions. Unlike James Joyce, who expresses his characters' thoughts through inner monologue sometimes taken to extreme consequences, Virginia Woolf controls the flow of thoughts by maintaining logical and grammatical order. The writer narrates her stories in the third person, giving the impression that there is a link between the outer and inner worlds. While Joyce uses epiphanies a moment of sudden spiritual revelation, Virginia Woolf uses what she calls Moments of Being, (momenti dell’essere) rare moments of great intensity and perception that allow the characters to clearly see the reality of their condition. Woolf explored many themes typical of the modernist novel such as anxiety, crisis and communication difficulties, but she also dealt with themes very close to her own such as loneliness, the distinction between dream and reality, mental illness and prejudice against women that prevented them from expressing their identity. Here we can connect to THE AGE OF ANXIETY—> AGE OF ANXIETY This is a period from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. With positivism it was thought that science could explain the world, then there were the first signs of mistrust with decadentism. But when Freud published 'Interpretation of Dreams' in 1899 and began to work on the human unconscious, abandoning traditional medicine and devoting himself to psychoanalysis, which also influenced literature and art (representation of the object not only from a physical point of view), there was a crisis of all the certainties that existed at that time. This fall of certainties was mainly due to 1) the birth of psychoanalysis; 2) the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe and the outbreak of the First World War; 3) Einstein's theories and quantum theory. MRS DALLOWAY Mrs Dalloway is the novel in which Virginia Woolf abandons the structure of the traditional novel, i.e. the chronological narration of events in favour of the technique of stream of consciousness and inner monologue. We follow the life of Clarissa Dalloway and the other characters over the course of a day in the Bond Street area of London and their inner monologue is intertwined with the sounds and noises of the city. Virginia Woolf describes the contrast between psychological time and chronological time, for as Clarissa walks through the streets of London on her way to the flower shop, we also follow the path of her mind and thoughts going back and forth in time in a very short interval (subjective time); at the same time Clarissa perceives the outside world, for example the sounds of cars and in particular the chimes of Big Ben, which interrupt her thoughts. Big Ben is the symbol of time passing (chronological time) and is felt by all the characters in the novel, creating a connection between them. Clarissa Dalloway is a fifty-one year old upper middle class woman, her husband is a Conservative Party member of parliament who has narrow views on women's rights and politics. Clarissa is a complex, contradictory and frustrated woman, she experiences marriage as a limitation for her freedom, but she cannot really express her feelings spontaneously and her need for independence. She organises parties to gain the approval of others, she tries to maintain peace and harmony and to make her home perfect to highlight her status, but she is not satisfied, she constantly remembers her past, in particular her love for Peter Walsh to whom she had preferred Richard Dalloway simply because he was richer. Parallel to Clarissa's story, we follow the story of Septimus Warren Smith, a mentally ill World War I veteran and patient of Dr Bradshaw. Clarissa and Septimus do not know each other personally, we first see Septimus walking down Bond Street with his wife while Clarissa is in a flower shop, then back in Regent's Park where he is seen by one of his friends. On that same