Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway
identity
Even though the whole novel is what happens in just one day, the reader gets to see many memories from the past. Along with thoughts from the present.
A Room of One's Own
To The Lighthouse
Three Guineas
Big Ben is a symbol of time.
time
feminism
gender
The painting represents dedication to a feminine artistic vision. The painting and Lily's vision reflects Woolf’s writing. In the way that she shows how her characters come to a balanced and truthful look of the world.
Though the film was based off Michael Cunningham, they were both inspired by Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway.
Orlando
Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”
Alex Zwerdling, “Mrs. Dalloway’s Social System”
Elizabeth Outka, “On Seeing Illness: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway”
Melanie Micir, "The Sense of Unending: Revisiting Virginia Woolf's Orlando"
This reading describes the philosophy in Woolf's works since the beginning. To The Lighthouse and Between the Acts are the most used examples.
Orlando become oppressed through out the novel by having to fit into the gender role of the time he is in. They in the end become mature and is able to resist this conformity.
Genders conforming to society's gender roles
War motivated Woolf to write this essay-novel, when a man writes to her and asks how society could stop war.
Peter Walsh's pocket knife is a symbol of sexuality and power. Peter is playing with his pocket knife suggesting that he is not comfortable with his masculinity.
As time is changing Orlando is changing with it. They change from what they wear to how they act.
Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus all fear death. Septimus is the only one though that actually comes in contact with death. His death however helps Clarissa come to peace with the death around her.
Clarissa doesn't pursue her love interest for Sally, because she knows her friends and society won't approve of it. She is scared to resist conformity.
war
death
Time is so important in the novel that Woolf almost named it The Hours
Takes place after WWI
Orlando's sexuality change seems to not affect their life at all at first. But after some time they begin to feel different. The skirts they are wearing, and how people treat them now make them feel different and thus act differently.
Gender is an idea put on people in society. Thus when society allows the freedom of gender neutrality, people will be able to be more free as individuals and to then act truly upon their nature and personality.
When Orlando goes out at night, they being a woman dress as a man. They do this for their safety. Yet they find themselves acting like a man.
Women and men are so similar what they are all able to dress in whatever clothes they want.
Stephen Daldry, dir., The Hours
Bold
Clothes don't define the identity of someone
The women of The Hours try to define their roles in life in society the way society want them to. But they don't want to sacrifice their own identities.
Laura Brown's cake for her husband is a symbol of her desire to become her role as a mother and housewife. The cake makes her think that the idea of having a family may not be enough for her.
Virginia Woolf, Clarissa Vaughan, and Laura Brown in The Hours search for meaning in their lives and see suicide as a way of escaping the problems they face. Each moment causes them to see how they feel about being alive. In The Hours, Virginia Woolf tries to decide which character should die in her book.
Virginia eventually takes her own life away, so her thinking about who should die in her book and when reflects her own personal struggles, which lead her to suicide.
In the film water is a symbol for death. Whenever there is water around death is also near. Virginia Woolf takes her life by drowning in the river. When Laura Brown is thinking about taking her life in the hotel room, water surrounds her before she realizes she is doing wrong.
Virginia Woolf sees the dead bird in the film as a symbol of death. here she find death intriguing but come to sense that she is not ready to die yet. However she does end up taking her life later on.
Lily Briscoe sees that human relations are the worst between men and women. Giving the example of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay relationship. The novel gives the understanding that women should be responsible for soothing men’s damaged egos. Lily as a single woman want to break this concept society has put on them, but she in the end caves in.
Lily’s painting represents a struggle against gender convention in the novel. How Charles Tansley’s says that women can’t paint or write. Then both Lily and Woolf prove him wrong.
The boar's skull is a symbol for death. It is a scary reminder that death is always ahead of us. It is always there even in the happiest times.
Characters, like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, are afraid of mortality.
The sea is a symbol for time. Loosely, the ever-changing, ever-moving waves reflect the constant moving forward of time and the changes it brings.
Sally Potter, dir., Orlando
Money is the main thing that prevents women from having a room of their own. Thus money is really important. Without money women will continue being second to men.
Women are treated unequally in society and that is why, to society, they have done less impressive works of writing than men.
Woolf uses Judith to show how society discriminates against women. Judith shows to be just as talented as her brother William Shakespeare, yet he gets recognized and praised by their family and society. However Judith’s talents are underestimated and looked down on.
She uses the room as a symbol for many larger issues, such as privacy, leisure time, and financial independence, each of which is an essential component of the countless inequalities between men and women.
The film was inspired by the novel.
Woolf says that society in her time is patriarchal and gives suggestions on how this gender inequality can be resolved.
Wages are a clear proof of the difference between men and women. Women can make a maximum wage of £250, but men don't have this limit.
Woolf argues that men fear the possibility that their patriarchal society might be brought down.
Money is an obstacle.
Women didn't have freedom.
Women were seen as slaves and animals (mules).
Women were not seen as the incredible humans they are.
Some women became mothers without fulfillment and enter marriages without love.
Water in the form of tears is a symbol for trying to make the best out of the worse.
It is was punishable crime for a black person to read or write for a woman.
The freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist.
This gives more information of the time surrounding the time Mrs. Dalloway takes place in.
Mrs. Dalloway is an examination of a single class and its control over English society
The given references suggest that the class under examination in the novel is living on borrowed time
Though the War had transformed the lives of millions of people, Septimus seems to be the only who has been effect the worse.
Septimus is seen as a threat to governing-class values because he insists on remembering the war when everyone else is trying to forget.
Sally once radiated "a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything" (p. 37), that made Clarissa fall passionately in love with her.
Clarissa feels unseen because of her marriage and her public identity.
Describes how Virginia Woolf’s real life experiences with the war and it illness influenced the context of Mrs. Dalloway
Woolf initially treated the outbreak of the flu as a side note to the larger story of the war.
Woolf's mother died years before after complications from a severe case of flu, and Woolf was infected with the flu in the years after.
Woolf draws connections between illness and war.
Clarissa and Septimus are both survivors in the novel, whether it be from the pandemic or the war.
This reading talked a lot about curtain places in time.
Metaphoric guests in the novel include death, living death, guilt, mental and physical illness, and a temptation to forget.
This reading described the informal format of the novel Orlando. It is clearly not a simple biography.
Orlando is an “biography” of Woolf's lover, Vita Sackville-West and it is an unfinished aesthetic of queer feminist modernism.
Moves our minds towards a more general unfinished piece of queer feminist modernism.
Thus it's part of a continuing feminist argument.
Through the reading one is able to see further why Woolf chose the times to be in her novel. They are all related to Vita's real life.
This chapter shows us how Woolf used Orlando to criticize the sexist conventions of English inheritance law.
Louise Westling, "Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World" (excerpt)
Each of Virginia Woolf's novels have a distinct epistemological exploration of that "semi-transparent envelope,"
