35. VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf

1. Life (1882-1941) Her father Leslie Stephen was an eminent Victorian man of letters. She grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere with free access to her father’s library Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.

Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse led to depression the death of her mother when she was 13

her stepbrothers

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

1. Life (1882-1941) Suicide The Second World War increased her anxiety and fears. After rewriting drafts of her suicide note, she put rocks into her pockets and drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Virginia Woolf.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

2. Literary career The Bloomsbury Group  In 1904 she moved to Bloomsbury and became a member of the Bloomsbury Group. This meant the rejection of traditional morality and artistic convention.

Experimentation  best known as one The Bloomsbury Group

of the great experimental novelists during the modernist period.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

2. Literary career Evolution of her style in her main novels •

The Voyage Out (1915)

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Night and Day (1917)

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Jacob’s room (1922)

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Mrs Dalloway (1925)

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Traditional narratives

Narrative experimentation with the novel

To the Lighthouse (1927)

A more completely developed “stream-of-consciousness technique”

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

2. Literary career A feminist writer  the themes of androgyny, women and writing

• Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Describes Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton’s relationship as young women

• Orlando (1928)

Deals with androgyny

• A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Shows Woolf’s concern with the questions of women’s subjugation and the relationship between women and writing

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

3. A Modernist novelist • Main aim  to give voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory.

• The human personality  a continuous shift of impressions and emotions.

• Narrator  disappearance of the omniscient narrator.

• Point of view  shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas, momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux. The Prose and the Passion

Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915, Tate Gallery, London

Virginia Woolf

4. Woolf vs Joyce Woolf’s stream of consciousness

Joyce’s stream of consciousness

never lets her characters’ thoughts flow without control, maintains logical and grammatical organisation

characters show their thoughts directly through interior monologue, sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically unorthodox way

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

4. Woolf vs Joyce Moments of being

Epiphanies

Rare moments of insight during the characters’ daily life when they can see reality behind appearances

The sudden spiritual manifestation caused by a trivial gesture, an external object  the character is led to a self-realization about himself/herself

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925) • Takes place on a single ordinary day in June 1923. • Follows the protagonist through a very small area of London, from the morning to the night of the day on which she gives a large formal party.

Cover for the first edition of Mrs. Dalloway, London, Hogarth Press, 1925.

• Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the climax of the novel and unifies the narrative by gathering all the people she thinks about during the day. The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925) Clarissa Dalloway

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

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A London society lady of fifty-one, the wife of a Conservative MP, Richard Dalloway, who has conventional views on women’s rights.

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Had a possessive father, refused Peter Walsh, a man who would force her to share everything.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925) Clarissa Dalloway

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

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Characterized by opposing feelings: her need for freedom and independence and her class consciousness.

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Her life appears to be an effort towards order and peace, an attempt to overcome her weakness and sense of failure.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925) Septimus Warren Smith • A young poet and lover of Shakespeare. • When the war broke out, enlisted for patriotic reasons.

Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

• An extremely sensitive man who can suddenly fall prey to panic and fear, or feelings of guilt.

The Prose and the Passion

Virginia Woolf

5. Mrs Dalloway (1925) Septimus Warren Smith • A character specifically connected with the war. • Suffers from headaches and insomnia. Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

• Finally commits suicide.

The Prose and the Passion