NOVEL II Lecture 9

1. NOVEL IILecture 9

2. SYNOPSIS • VIRGINIA WOOLf • Her Major Works- A Quick Look • Theme of Feminism • To the Lighthouse

3. SYNOPSIS 7. Interior Monologue 8. Mrs Dalloway and Modernism • Homosexuality • Mental illness 9. Orlando and Modernism 10. Contextual Background 11. Another Perspective 12. Summary- To the Lighthouse (Chapter 1-9)

4. Works • The Voyage Out (1915): tells the story through South America of a rich woman, Rachel Vinrage, her love story with Terence Hewett and his sudden death due to a tropical fever, when she believes that she has reached happiness. • Night and Day (1919): critical towards society, the plot focuses on two women, sweet Katherine Hilbert and emancipated Mary Datchet. • Jacob’s Room (1922): tells of a young student at the University of Cambridge, his loves and his journeys in France and Greece ad of his death during the world war I. • Mrs Dalloway (1925): the story begins and ends in a span of 12 hours, during which Mrs Dalloway prepares a party. • To The Light House (1927): tells the excursion of a group of characters to one of the Hebrides islands. The landscape is the bond that unites the characters among themselves and with landscape itself.

5. Works • Orlando (1928): is a sort of biography of Victoria Sackville-West. In the book are told the reincarnations of the protagonist Orlando (that at some point changes sex) in various historical periods, the vicissitudes of the Sackville-West family from the Elizabethan age to the present. • The Waves (1931): a kind of poem in prose, where the impressions of some characters, are presented through a series of monologues. • The Years (1937): marks a partial return to traditional storytelling techniques. Narrates the story of a generation and their vision of life. • Between the Acts (1941): reveals as the most poetic of the writer’s novels, which seeks an appropriate narrative form for years to attempt to faithfully express their world and changing perceptions. The book lacks a proper conclusion.

6. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN “ Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own ” The main theme is t FEMINISM

7. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN • The title anticipates the first interpretation of the problem which Woolf develops through book. In fact women have never had a room to study, read or just think. • For Woolf fundamental to be an independent woman is the room and 500 pounds a year • The extract about Shakespeare and his talented sister: Woolf wants to show that, there are different opportunities offered to women and men and the choice involves different effects according to the fact that you are a woman or a man.

8. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN Woolf considers writing fundamental to her existence and she thinks that to be an artist means to have a perfect combination of masculine and feminine qualities, so she tries to solve the problem by adopting two different styles: • one for her pieces of criticism and essays, which were clear, logical, concise ,”masculine”; • the other one for her works of imagination, which were poetic, clear, transparent, flexible, rhythmic, ”femminine”.

9. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN She has tried all her life to combine the male and the female into an androgynous mind: calm, stable, not touched by the consciousness of sex, but she realizes that this idea is utopian because it represents an escape from the confrontation with femaleness and maleness… “Who can measure the fervor and violence of the heart of a poet when taken and remains trapped in a body of a woman?

10. To the Lighthouse

11. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE The novel is highly autobiographical. It is based on her childhood recollections of holidays in Cornwall, which becomes an isle in the Hebrides in the novel. There are close links between Virginia’s chidlhood and the Lighthouse • Mr & Mrs Ramsay and their relationship  Virginia’s own father and mother • Premature Death of Mrs Ramsay  death of her mom • Death of one of Ramsay children in war  death of Victoria’s own brother She writes this novel prompted by a deep psychological urge to distance herself from obsession of her childhood memories .Memories element in the novel, however, are transformed and take on a symbolical and universal values.

12. The lighthouse • It’s in the centre of the novel and has a symbolic rule: its alternation of light and darkness represents the contradictory aspects of life. • In fact, as the sea, it reflects – in the first part - the situation of happiness and enjoyment of the character. • Then-in the second one- the destructive aspects symbolizes the pain of the family.

13. Interior Monologue • Interior monologue is often confused with Stream of Consciousness but the former is the verbal expression of a psychic phenomenon. • It’s distinguished by immediacy  Immediate speech is freed from introductory expressions like “he thought, he remembered, he said..”, from formal structures and from logical and chronological order. • Interior monologue in the “To the Lighthouse” is characterised by: • The narrator is present within the narration; • The character stays fixed in space while his-her consciousness moves freely in time.

14. Immediate speech without introductory expressions Verbal expression of a psychic phenomen Interiormonologue Lack of chronological order Narrator present Action takes place within the character’s mind

15. Mrs Dalloway and Modernism Feminism • As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies both sexual and economic repression. • She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a politician, but she is still able to express herself in the parties she throws. • Sally Seton, who Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent woman: she smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag, and made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. • When Clarissa meets her in the present day, she turns out to be a perfect housewife, having married a rich man and had five sons

16. Homosexuality Clarissa Dalloway was strongly attracted to Sally at Bourton -- twenty years later, she still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about women "as men feel“ but she does not recognize these feelings as signs of homosexuality. She and Sally fell a little behind. T hen came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it Sally stopped; picked a flower; kiss her on the lips. Mrs Dalloway

17. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (Woolf, 36)

18. Mrs Dalloway Mental illness • Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the treatment of insanity and depression. Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse through Septimus's decline and ultimate suicide: • his doctors make snap judgments about his condition, talk to him mainly through his wife, and dismiss his urgent confessions before he can make them.

19. Similarities in Septimus's condition to Woolf's own struggles with manic depression (they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of a window as Septimus finally does) lead many to read a strongly auto-biographical aspect into Septimus's character. Woolf eventually committed suicide by drowning

20. Existential issues When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life." By focusing on character's thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of private thoughts, rather than concrete events, in a person's life. Most of the plot points in Mrs. Dalloway are realizations that the characters make in their own heads. Mrs Dalloway

21. Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized as a woman who appreciates life. • Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and create happy moments. Her charm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of joie de vivre, always summarized by the sentence, "There she was." • She interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life, and her mood remains light even when she figures out her marriage is a lie.

22. Orlando and Modernism • TRANSLATION OF LIFE INTO LITERATURE: the life of a writer which is the story of writing; the turning of life into text and vice versa, which characterises biography in general; the problem of literary representation , which tries to turn world into word. • TRANSFORMATION: oscillation from one state of being another, in stases of flux and repetition. She links forms and concepts of subjectivity to historical periods and explores the relationship between durable and mutable selves. • ANDROGYNY: the sexual ideal is a combination of male and female attributes which are known and given from the start. • DEPTH OF UNCONSCIOUS: Orlando lives through the centuries but never contains the totality of time. The self is composed not only of multiple identities but of multiple temporalities, and the existence of the unconscious suggests a continuity of identity through time.

23. To The Lighthouse

24. Context • Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, a descendant of one of Victorian England’s most prestigious literary families. • Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and was married to the daughter of the writer William Thackeray. • Woolf grew up among the most important and influential British intellectuals of her time, and received free rein to explore her father’s library.

25. Her personal connections and abundant talent soon opened doors for her. Woolf wrote that she found herself in “a position where it was easier on the whole to be eminent than obscure.” • Almost from the beginning, her life was a precarious balance of extraordinary success and mental instability.

26. As a young woman, Woolf wrote for the prestigious Times Literary Supplement, and as an adult she quickly found herself at the center of England’s most important literary community. • Known as the “Bloomsbury Group” after the section of London in which its members lived, this group of writers, artists, and philosophers emphasized nonconformity, aesthetic pleasure, and intellectual freedom, and included such luminaries as the painter Lytton Strachey, the novelist E. M. Forster, the composer Benjamin Britten, and the economist John Maynard Keynes.

27. Working among such an inspirational group of peers and possessing an incredible talent in her own right, Woolf published her most famous novels by the mid-1920s, including The Voyage Out,Mrs. Dalloway,Orlando, and To the Lighthouse. • With these works she reached the pinnacle of

28. Woolf’s life was equally dominated by mental illness. Her parents died when she was young—her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904—and she was prone to intense, terrible headaches and emotional breakdowns. • After her father’s death, she attempted suicide, throwing herself out a window. Though she married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and loved him deeply, she was not entirely satisfied romantically or sexually.

29. For years she sustained an intimate relationship with the novelist Vita Sackville-West. Late in life, Woolf became terrified by the idea that another nervous breakdown was close at hand, one from which she would not recover. • On March 28, 1941, she wrote her husband a note stating that she did not wish to spoil his life by going mad. She then drowned herself in the River Ouse.

30. Woolf’s writing bears the mark of her literary pedigree as well as her struggle to find meaning in her own unsteady existence. • Written in a poised, understated, and elegant style, her work examines the structures of human life, from the nature of relationships to the experience of time. • Yet her writing also addresses issues relevant to her era and literary circle.

31. Throughout her work she celebrates and analyzes the Bloomsbury values of aestheticism, feminism, and independence. • Moreover, her stream-of-consciousness style was influenced by, and responded to, the work of the French thinker Henri Bergson and the novelists Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

32. This style allows the subjective mental processes of Woolf’s characters to determine the objective content of her narrative. • In To the Lighthouse (1927), one of her most experimental works, the passage of time, for example, is modulated by the consciousness of the characters rather than by the clock.

33. The events of a single afternoon constitute over half the book, while the events of the following ten years are compressed into a few dozen pages. • Many readers of To the Lighthouse, especially those who are not versed in the traditions of modernist fiction, find the novel strange and difficult. Its language is dense and the structure amorphous.

34. Compared with the plot-driven Victorian novels that came before it, To the Lighthouse seems to have little in the way of action. • Indeed, almost all of the events take place in the characters’ minds.

35. Although To the Lighthouse is a radical departure from the nineteenth-century novel, it is, like its more traditional counterparts, intimately interested in developing characters and advancing both plot and themes. • Woolf’s experimentation has much to do with the time in which she lived: the turn of the century was marked by bold scientific developments.

36. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined an unquestioned faith in God that was, until that point, nearly universal, while the rise of psychoanalysis, a movement led by Sigmund Freud, introduced the idea of an unconscious mind.

37. Such innovation in ways of scientific thinking had great influence on the styles and concerns of contemporary artists and writers like those in the Bloomsbury Group. To the Lighthouse exemplifies Woolf’s style and many of her concerns as a novelist. • With its characters based on her own parents and siblings, it is certainly her most autobiographical fictional statement, and in the characters of Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe, Woolf offers some of her most penetrating explorations of the workings of the human consciousness as it perceives and analyzes, feels and interacts

38. Another Perspective… • Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is sandwiched between Virginia Woolf’s other two most famous novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Orlando (1928). • In our opinion, Woolf is totally at her best here, as she engages with her ongoing themes of memory, family, and fiction.

39. To the Lightbouse takes on some elements of Woolf’s own life: she felt stifled by her father in much the same way that Mr. Ramsay squeezes the life out of his children. • And the sudden deaths of her mother and her sister Stella left her in deep mourning (echoes of Mrs. Ramsay and Prue’s deaths in To the Lighthouse).

40. But, Woolf herself got fed up with critics who insisted on reading the Ramsays as direct representations of the Stephens (Stephen was Woolf’s maiden name). • To the Lighthouse is also an extended meditation on the relationship between art and life, and on late Victorian family structures. (Source: Mark Massey, “Introduction,” To the Lighthouse. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Books, 2005,

41. What makes To the Lighthouse important in literary terms is Woolf’s ambitious formal experimentation. • She’s really working her signature style in this novel, as she takes two days, separated by ten years, to evoke a whole picture of the Ramsay family life.

42. Her run-on sentences and meandering paragraphs work to replicate what her characters are thinking in addition to what they’re doing. • Woolf is a great example of the Show Don’t Tell School of Narration. Instead of sketching us a stiffly realistic portrait of her characters, Woolf goes for the emotional impact of their internal landscapes.

43. Summary- To the Lighthouse • Part One spans approximately seven hours and takes up more than half the book. It’s set at the Ramsay’s summer home, where the Ramsays and their eight children are entertaining a number of friends and colleagues. • The novel begins with James Ramsay, age six, wanting to go to the Lighthouse that’s across the bay from the Ramsays’ summer home.

44. His mother, Mrs. Ramsay, holds out hope that the weather will be good tomorrow so they can go to the Lighthouse, but Mr. Ramsay is adamant that the weather will be awful. Charles Tansley, one of Mr. • Ramsay’s visiting students, chimes in and supports Mr. Ramsay’s view that the weather will be rotten. He’s a very socially awkward young man who is obsessed with his dissertation.

45. Numerous small bits of action occur. For example, after lunch, Mrs. Ramsay takes pity on Mr. Tansley and asks him to accompany her into town. By the end of the trip, Mr. Tansley is in love with the much older, but still beautiful, Mrs. Ramsay (by the way, she is 50).

46. Later, as she sits in a window and reads a fairy tale to James, Mrs. Ramsay remembers that she must keep her head down for Lily Briscoe’s painting.

47. (If you’re wondering who Lily is, we are in the same boat. Although, we gather she’s a family friend.) Mrs. Ramsay has the fleeting thought that Lily will have a hard time getting married, but she likes Lily anyway and decides that Lily should marry William Bankes, an old friend of Mr. Ramsay’s.

48. William Bankes, who is also visiting the Ramsays, comes up to Lily and the two of them go for a walk. • They talk about Mr. Ramsay. Meanwhile, Mr. Ramsay walks along the lawn and worries about mortality and his legacy to humankind, and then pesters Mrs. Ramsay to soothe his ego.

49. Mrs. Ramsay does calm her husband, and then starts worrying about Paul (the Ramsays’ guest), Minta (another guest), Nancy Ramsay (daughter), and Andrew (son), who are not yet back from the beach. • She hopes that Paul has proposed to Minta.

50. At dinner, Mrs. Ramsay triumphs. The food is delicious; she is beautiful; Mr. Bankes has stayed for dinner; and Paul’s proposal to Minta has been accepted. • She wishes she could freeze the moment but knows it is already part of the past. She tucks her youngest two children into bed and then sits with her husband as he reads.