Larking and Plunging

1. Larking and Plunging HUM 3285: British and American Literature Spring 2011 Dr. Perdigao February 2, 2011

2. Robert Harms’ Mrs. Dalloway (1995) http://www.durhampress.com/harms/index.html

4. Like Ulysses? (Sorry, it won’t go away) • http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/TVSeminar/dallwalkmap.html

5. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) • Born Adeline Virginia Stephens on January 25, 1882 in London • Father Leslie Stephen “Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer, and scholar” (2080), member of “intellectual aristocracy” of Victorian England; mother Julia Jackson Duckworth, of Duckworth publishing family • Mother died in 1895, Virginia suffered mental breakdown; half sister Stella ran household until her death in 1897 • Father died in 1904, Virginia suffered second mental breakdown; brother dies of typhoid in 1906 • Vanessa ran household, moves family to Bloomsbury; “The Bloomsbury Group” • Leonard Woolf had joined Civil Service, returned in 1911; married Virginia

6. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) • Virginia starts writing The Voyage Out in 1908, finishes in 1913, published in 1915 • Second realistic novel Night and Day (1919) • 1917—Woolfs start own press, Hogarth; Virginia publishes through it after 1921; press published Eliot’s Poems (1919) • Moved back to London from Surrey; publishes Mrs. Dalloway (1925) • Orlando (1928), masculinity, femininity • Jacob’s Room (1922) • Mrs. Dalloway (1925) • To the Lighthouse (1927) • The Waves (1931) • Three Guineas (1938) • Between the Acts (1941) [posthumous]

7. A shopping list • Technology—planes, trains, and automobiles? • Sky-writing; ideas of language • Race, class, gender, sexual orientation • Repression and burial; return of consciousness • The double—Dr. Jekyll, Dostoevsky’s “The Double” • Presence of war, for Dalloway and for Smith • As “war novel” • Unfulfilled characters, concealed relationships • Peter, Evans, Sally • Changing perspectives: “eye” versus “I”

8. Reflections and refractions • Five years after the war, 1923 • Day in June—back to Ulysses; Woolf’s reception of Joyce’s text • Constructing character of Clarissa, shifting perspectives, “not this” and “not that” • Third person omniscient narrator; free indirect discourse with limited omniscience (learned from Joyce) • Dichotomies within the text • Movement between attraction to solitude and connection to others • Angst and delight • Death as solitude or embrace? • Uses of memory—for Clarissa, for Septimus

9. Writing as revision • “The Hours” as working title • Differences in manuscript, with ending: Clarissa’s suicide as double plot; madness/sanity split • Party to end with her death: • “Eight said Big Ben, nine, ten, eleven; and then with a sort of finality, though presumably the strokes were accurately spaced the last no more empathic than the first twelve . . . But Clarissa was gone” • Changes to “For there she was” as symbolic death • http://litimag.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/06/25/litimag.imq018.full

10. Deconstruction • Versions of Clarissa at end; disembodied in last 8 pages, only alive in dialogue, part of conversations but absent (mentioned 32 times after her body disappears) • “Where’s Clarissa?”: “There she was” • Does she return? • Has the experience changed her view? • Postmodernist absent presence

11. Playing parts • No body, in memory with Peter—her dress, “something floating” : Nobody? • Must be completed by others because she is not real, a symbol • Idea of voyeurism—Clarissa in London; characters viewing Clarissa; Ellie at party • Insights come from watching others • Clarissa enacts his death • Actress all along