Scarica Virginia Woolf: A Pioneering Feminist Writer and Literary Innovator e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VIRGINIA WOOLF "A free, daring woman, who belongs to a world of free spirits, who at the beginning of the century invented new forms not only of thought, but of life in Bloomsbury," this is how the critic Nadia Fusini presents the writer Virginia Woolf. She is not only one of the greatest authors of the 1900s, she is not only an unconventional writer who rejected and changed the stereotype of the Victorian age, but she is also a woman outside the box, ahead of her time, a feminist who tried to create a new feminine ideal. In her life he wrote novels, articles, essays, short stories, letters and even a diary. She deeply loved to write; writing is living, it is not possible to live without writing. Virginia Woolf has a word instinct: a verbal impulse and a complete confidence in the word. In addition, a recurring symbol in his works is the sea, the wave, seen as the cyclical nature of life. Probably, it was precisely her foresight that drove her to suicide; she dies by drowning so once again she chooses water, a new cycle, a journey that had ended or had just begun. Virginia Woolf wanted to use new literary forms that could do justice to the complexities of modern consciousness, that is the stream of consciousness technique, on which her work “Mrs Dallowey” is based. It talks about an upper middle class woman who has to prepare a party for the evening. The story develops in a single day, with events not related to the action, but to the protagonist's interiority and emotions. Therefore, the plot refers to the people she meets, the suggestions she receives, the memories she has, her reflections and according to someone she has a superficial view of life. For instance, in the incipit “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers” she says “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” and so on. There is a continuous flow on an emotional level and, in this sense, also on a chronological level because time follows the flow of thought: “Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes”. There is a particular interpretation of this story: the party is an offer, because Mrs Dallowey opens the doors of her house, she shares her house, so on one side there is an opening; whereas, on the other side, there is a closure, there is death. Clarissa says “in the middle of my party here is death", when Septimus commits suicide. It is in that moment that Clarissa knows death and Woolf's extraordinary writing makes us feel that Clarissa is living death, she is living death with Septimus, she is Septimus at that moment, because it is the only way she can understand and know death. Virginia Woolf was also an antelitteram feminist, a feminist of difference, of freedom and of thought. This means that for her emancipation was not becoming little men, but being a woman means being mothers, daughters, sisters, lesbians, and everything that women wanted to be. This is an absolutely new vision because these things will be clearer only at the end of the 20th century; it will even be the inspiration for Elena Ferrante's TV series "the brilliant friend". She writes two main works about this "Three guineas" and “A room of One’s Own”, in which she expresses the idea that to achieve emancipation there is a need for material goods, such as money, an education, a job; she will say "500 pounds a year is more important than the right to vote". In particular, in “A room of One’s Own” she says that the angel of the house must be physically killed, therefore the stereotype of the woman who is not the protagonist of her own life, in order to be free. Women need a room all to themselves, a space where they can write, write down their reflections, their expectations, their ideas, their dreams, to build an identity. This space was previously denied to women, in fact she gives the example of a hypothetical sister of Shakespeare, a talented woman, as gifted as her brother, who would have never had the possibility to write a great work of art because of the economic and social conditions women were subjected to, in Shakespeare’s time”. The passage “Shakespeare’s sister will be born some day” begins with a series of ironic and provocative phrases, such as “Young women, I would say you, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization”. Then we read surely the main sentence of the text: “We have had other work on our hands” because we had to keep the world going.
