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Virginia Woolf - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Woolf constantly shifts perspectives without warning throughout the novel, giving the internal dialogue and ideas of each character, the perspective shifting at a whim and often unexpectedly.
        
        These spontaneous switches in perspective often cause some confusion to the reader as to whose perspective they are being let in on, which is a crucial element of what things are being highlighted and what opinions are being shared.
      - In The Hours, Daldry shifts the story line between the perspectives of three women, and plays on this connection between identity and perspective and truth, because, though these women all have vastly different lives and live in very different time periods, each one faces similar struggles with relationships and life, and all learn similar lessons despite the differences in identity and perspective
      - From In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens: “Virginia Woolf wrote further, speaking of course not of our Phillis, that "any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert "eighteenth century," insert "black woman," insert "born or made a slave"] would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard [insert "Saint"], feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts [add "chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one's body by someone else, submission to an alien religion"] that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty" (Walker 404).
        
        The parenthesis can serve to emphasize the way that black people are often censored and their work disregarded if including the unpleasant and violent truths of slavery and their struggles, and by placing them in parenthesis can show how some people choose to leave it out in order to be more palatable to white and nonblack readers. The parenthesis can also emphasize how Woolf left out the narratives of black people and essentially “othered” them, not including their truths and stories in her writing.
        
        This image represents the way that white voices and white stories are glorified and highlighted, while the stories of people of color fall to the wayside and are omitted from conversation
  - - - This image gets at the idea that there are many layers to the self and that some are more visible and surface level than others
      - From To the Lighthouse: "So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy" (38).
      - In Westling's Woolf and the Flesh of the World it is shown that through the change in Mr. Ramsay's character Woolf rejects "the humanist pretensions of separation and transcendence." She then creates a focus on embodiment and contrasts the common dismissal of the living world as done by the society.
  - - - From Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway: "... feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless, the grinding, blowing, flowering of the day, out of doors, out of the window, out of her body and brain which now failed, since Lady Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her" (31
      - From Woolf's On Being Ill: "All day, all night, the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens; colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, illness and health, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself into smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that have come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe."
        
        This quote brings up an important point about the dismissal of the body's state in most literary writing. The "drama" of the body is too often forgotten and the happenings of the mind given the attention, omitting the important role the state of the body plays on the mind. By ignoring the body, writers ignore this crucial relationships between physicality and mentality, which thus leaves novels in a way unfinished due to the missing information regarding the characters' physical forms beyond simple, objective descriptions.
        
        By including many instances of the state of the body in Mrs. Dalloway- the first example coming to mind being the rigidness of Lady Bruton, the tightness of her face and general unrelaxed physical state- Woolf better conveys the reality of the characters and, through both perspective and body state, allows us to truly feel as through we are living vicariously through the characters, genuinely able to step into their experiences detailed in the novel.
        
        This can also be put into connection with illness and the impact of health on character, as seen in Clarissa herself as she is regarded as unwell throughout Mrs. Dalloway. This can also connect to Outka's On Seeing Illness, achapter on Woolf's regard of illness. She comments on the way that plagues and pandemics are often set as a background feature of literature of those times despite the devastating and monumental effects illness like that has on the psyche and society.
- - - - In A Room of One's Own Woolf concludes with a message of androgyny. Earlier sections pertained to allowing women to be themselves and have a unique voice from men in their own spaces, which made this conclusion on of interest. Of course androgyny and gender fluidity is a beautiful thing but it was interesting how the final point was one that didn’t pertain to women being given a space to be purely feminine but rather in a mix of femininity and masculinity. It could have been a choice made to remain fairly under the radar and to avoid stirring up too much controversy.
        
        Fluidity: Fluidity is explored notably in Orlando. Within the confines of society there has been built a structure that inflicts a binary upon people where there is truly a spectrum, which causes a lot of issues for people in their understandings of themselves and others.
        
        this symbol is used to convey the fluidity of gender a person can experience, existing outside of the binary
        
        In Sally Potter's Orlando, the depiction of change in time via visual elements such as fashion and technology emphasize the fluidity and abnormal nature of time in the novel, an element that contributes to the fantastical and contemporary elements of the biography
        
        From Orlando: “Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male and female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above” (189).
        
        This quote brings up the important role that clothing plays in gender expression, and expression of identity in general, and how often they can hold us to preconceived standards of what our clothing means, indicating gender, profession, class, etc. Often our clothes cannot capture the complexity of our identities.
      - In Three Guineas the use of letters serves to elevate the strength of Woolf's argument through trying to convince the unnamed man of her points
        
        The use of letters can also diffuse the "finger-pointing" nature that may be seen in argumentative pieces. By having the letters directed at an anonymous man, it can take the heat off of the reader and onto that figure, possibly keeping the reader open-minded rather than on defense.
      - Through these two novels she creates a narrative representing mainly "the daughters of educated men" and works to create solutions for this simultaneously broad and exclusive category of women.
        
        From A Room of One's Own: "Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other name you please—it is not a matter of importance."
- - - - The use of language and imagery in regards to the feelings Clarissa towards each of her "partners" reveals much of the nature of her love: the intense, almost orgasmic language when describing the explosion of feelings Clarissa has for Sally is never matched by the language when describing Peter or Richard, also hinting at the queer undertones of the character of Clarissa
        
        This intense imagery versus more mundane language can give the reader an essence of Clarissa's true feelings, and as we are placed so deeply in their perspectives are more impacted by this intensity of emotion demonstrated via imagery.
      - This image portrays the hands of society and pursuit of money/power/status pushing people into marital relationships. Their expressions of concern and worry go to show the fact that these marriages aren't made out of love or in the best interest of those pushed together.
    - - Orlando's odd time scale also plays into the unconventional nature of relationships because there is often a standard time scale to which people try to conform their relationships, something that does not come into play with the character of Orlando
      - In Stephen Daldry's The Hours The relationship between Richard and Clarissa vastly deviates from the expected and conventional love story
      - Shel cannot believe that Orlando is a woman because she is "as tolerant and free-spoken as a man" and Orlando cannot believe that Shel is a man because "he is as strange and subtle as a woman."
      - By calling Orlando a "biography" Woolf is able to play on the conventional points within a biography, contorting it to make it her own. In Micir's The Sense of Unending: Revisiting Virginia Woolf's Orlando, it is noted how Orlando is essentially unfinished. Woolf reworks the natural time scale and expected life path seen in stereotypically successful and complete lives.
        
        In Potter's take on Orlando, she proposes a new ending beyond that offered by Woolf, in this case Orlando's writing career being reignited in the 90s. Because Orlando does not die at the end of the story in the manner that many biographies do end, and because they obviously transcend the natural aging and death process, the ending is something the readers can imagine or create for themselves beyond the expected end of life story often depicted.
        
        From Westling"s Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World: "Each of her novels was a distinct epistemological exploration of that "semi-transparent envelope," part of a series of experiments seeking a crepuscular looseness and lightness of form that eschewed the traditional scaffolding of plot and increasingly placed human ambitions and systems of meaning against the backdrop of enormous geological forces and vast reaches of time. Increasingly she sought to portray the non human, or what David Abram calls the "more than human" world within which we are tiny and only momentary presences. Her experiments with point of view and narrative structure absorb the epistemological lessons of relativity, wave theory, and the interdependency of observer..."
  - - - This quote exemplifies Woolf's use of stream of consciousness. This usage creates a very human dialogue, flowing from one idea to the next as thoughts cross the mind.
        
        The use of stream of consciousness mimics the patterns with which these thoughts would arise in our own minds, allowing us to step into the mind of Clarissa and experience these very human contemplations of life and death.