Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Virginia Woolf, Key: Blue, pink, purple, mint: themes/topics,…

- - - - The perceived slowing down of time
        
        To the Lighthouse's bookend sections take place over a single day each, bridged by a short section expanding over several years. The two longest parts covering a combined less than 48 hours works to build the impact of the death of Mrs. Ramsay, the matriarch of not just the Ramsay family, but of the rest of the characters in the novel. She played a pivotal role in their lives, so to fully comprehend the weight of her passing, Woolf lets the reader live in a world with Mrs. Ramsay's light, which only allows the audience to more fully understand what happens when that light goes away. By placing the concluding section of the novel over a single day, as well, only several years later, Woolf is able to explore the lasting ramifications of her death, the longevity of grief
        
        The events of Mrs. Dalloway take place over the course of a single day, allowing the reader to take a deep-dive into the minds of the characters. While the actions themselves (up until the climax of the novel) may be less than riveting, the audience is able to more meaningfully understand the heart of the characters (their motivations, fears, desires, etc.) through Woolf's use of free indirect discourse, which "takes turns" exploring everyone's point of view from the 3rd person perspective.
      - Time jumps and skips
        
        Most notably exhibited in To the Lighthouse, Woolf will sometimes jump over long periods of time. In this instance, several years are passing by, with many significant events for Ramsay family occurring, including the deaths of family members. This time jump isn't used to minimize the significance of these events; on the contrary, she uses this device to emphasis just how jarring and unexpected they are, especially in the case of Mrs. Ramsay's death. At that point, the novel takes a deep dive into grief. This grief is explored, in part, through the glossing over of important life events. It's how Woolf gets the audience to feel as off-kilter as her characters feel.
      - In "The Sense of Undending," Melanie Micir explores how Orlando could and should be viewed through a difference lens, specifically a queer and feminist one. Even by modern standards, it is considered near revolutionary for a woman protagonist's story to not end in death or some romantic climax. Oftentimes, the audience will need to search a world beyond the source material--or, beyond the ending--to discover a satisfying conclusion. Orlando, however, twists these expectations from the beginning. The novel subverts the "standard" timeline of a heteronormative world, introducing the audience to one of queer temporality instead. Orlando's life in unconventional, experiencing birth and rebirth, life and death, in an order at opposition to that of what the audience has been brought up to expect.
    - - From "Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World" by Louise Westling: "At the same time as she wrote against sterile systems of logic, however, Woolf also recognized the efficacy of science and mathematics in opening windows upon the workings of Nature."
      - In the section "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse, nature is used as a running metaphor for the feelings of the Ramsays after Mrs. Ramsay's death. Not only does it showcase the torment, consumption, and destruction of grief, but it provides the audience with the same sense of displacement and shock. This is Woolf showing, rather than telling, the state of distress and shock the characters are thrown into.
  - - - The film The Hours, loosely inspired by Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, explores the lives of three women, including Woolf herself, and their relationships with mental illness and suicide. Each character has complicated experiences of the issue, with the film depicting two suicides and one attempted suicide. It takes many of the issues more subtly express in Mrs. Dalloway and embodies them onto the film's characters, letting them explore the feelings and mental health issues present in the novel across three different settings and time periods.
      - Mrs. Dalloway exists in a time of conflict not unlike our own in 2021. Recovering from World War I and a deadly pandemic, England is left in shambles behind the carefully placed curtain. Elizabeth Outka outlines the lasting impact both the war and the virus have had on the health of those in the novel, as well as how Woolf was impacted herself. These conflicts of left lasting scars both somatically and mentally. While it may be more obvious that war will damage your mental health and virus will damage your physical health, Outka argues that both experiences leave their mark across the mind and body.
        
        "Seeing illness, then, requires a new paradigm, a way of seeing the world through the body and acknowledging that the mind's perceptions are inextricably tangled with that body. Woolf attempted precisely this vision in Mrs. Dalloway. Here, though, she suggests all the elements that make representing this perspective so difficult: the body's unpredictable nature, its powerlessness, its isolation, and the knowledge that in this war, there are only solitary soldiers against encroaching, intangible enemies" (Outka).
- - - - "Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement" (Woolf 2)
  - - - "So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel.[...] but all the other crimes raised their heads and shook their fingers and jeered and sneered over the rail of the bed in the early hours of the morning at the prostrate body which lay realising its degradation; how he had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; outraged Miss Isabel Pole, and was so pocked and marked with vice that women shuddered when they saw him in the street. The verdict of human nature on such a wretch was death" (Woolf 91).
    - - "Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it" (Woolf 2)
- - - - "Woolf's own methods as a social critic, then, studiously avoid propaganda or direct statement. For her, fiction is a contemplative, not an active, art. She observes, describes, connects, provides the materials for a judgement about society and social issues; it is the reader's work to put the observations together and understand the coherent point of view behind them" (Zwerdling pg. 69)
  - - - In the nonfictional narrative A Room of One's Own, Woolf positions economic strife and oppression as a driving factor behind the infeasibility for women to write and partake in fiction. The issue is one that impacts both access to and quality of education, it is also true, as she points out, that financial stability alone would knock down substantial barriers that stand in the way of women being able to control their own literature and narratives.
    - - "For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release. They were Creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality—which is the basis of Art—that the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane. Throwing away this spirituality was their pathetic attempt to lighten the soul to a weigh their work-worn, sexually abused bodies could bear.
        What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood" (Walker 1972)
- - - - Throughout her work, Woolf makes the argument for the importance of education. Having received no formal education herself because she's a woman, she holds a unique, radical perspective that not only should it be accessible, but transformed completely.
        
        Three Guineas features the most radical of her arguments. Woolf poses that the institution as it is only serves society as it currently operates, so simply making those institutions more accessible won't change anything. The input, while different, does not change the actual output. Yes, there needs to be investment in the education of women, but if we rely on education as it stands, we can't expect the world to change. For the world to change, we need to change education.
    - - Motherhood, childbearing, and domestic work; the duties of a woman
        
        As explored in Three Guineas, women, particularly in the West, are held at a severe, systematic disadvantage to men. Those who are provided a formal education don't receive the same resources and funding, and there's even less they are able to achieve with it. Their main purpose, their only important function in society, as Woolf discusses, is to be accessories to men. A women's duty is to her man, and aiding and uplifting him.
        
        "Even stranger, however, than the symbolic splendour of your clothes are the ceremonies that take place when you wear them. Here you kneel; there you bow here you advance in procession behind a man carrying a silver poker; here you mount a carved chair; here you appear to do homage to a piece of painted wood; here you abase yourselves before tables covered with richly worked tapestry. And whatever these ceremonies may mean you perform them always together, always in step, always in the uniform proper to the man and the occasion"
        
        Orlando the novel, at least towards the beginning of aftermath of the sex change, takes a more tongue-in-cheek tone when discussing the social responsibilities of a woman. As Orlando comes to know how others perceive them as a woman, they're amused. They're amused by what's new, by the freedom -- and expectation -- to outwardly express emotion, and by the presentation of it all. These, of course, come with their limitations, namely the external pressure that these are almost requirements, removing that option of choice.
        
        "Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. 'If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,' Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman's beauty has to be kept covered, lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head. 'A pox on them!' she had said, realising for the first time, what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood" (Woolf 157).
      - Emotional, romantic labor
        
        Orlando the film rejects the notion of the marriage plot. While this version of Orlando meets Shel, they part ways when they realize their aspirations in life no longer align. Orlando longs for more than what they are destined for as a woman in English society, and we see them reject these roles. Most prominently, by the film's end, she is raising her young daughter as a, presumably, single woman and homeowner.