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Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf, Nature as a Being, Connection, Connection,…

- - - - "Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone. So, after a long silence, 'I am alone,' he breathed at last, opening his lips for the first time in his record." (p. 18)
  - - - Here, solitude is most reflective in the lives of Laura Brown and Virginia Woolf, who are each interconnected despite living during different points in time. When we first observe Woolf, she's locked inside her room as she begins writing Mrs. Dalloway, which is symbolic of her argument about privacy and literature in A Room of One's Own. Further on, she's eager to move back to the city, but her husband doesn't allow her because he wants to supervise her concerning health. Therefore, Woolf also experiences a state of solitude that contributed to her depression, which drove her to act on impulse to escape her reality, both physically and mentally through literature. On the other hand, Laura Brown's character struggled mentally, which is representative of Septimus' illness, as she played a wife that was left on her own with her child in their home. In her solitude, Laura also acts on impulse to reciprocate the original fate of the fictional Clarissa Dalloway, as she contemplates suicide to be the way to escape the loneliness of her illness.
    - - Septimus Smith: Given his psychological incapacities, the trauma of the war and its violence within humanity haunts Septimus and destroys his ability to perceive life with any motivations or appreciation, as his fears isolate him from the rest of society because he's convinced that human nature is nothing but cruel and malicious. Although isolated in this form, Septimus contemplates a sense of eternal solitude through death, because if living meant that his illness would continue to subject him as an outcast in the world, then not having to see another day would allow Septimus to feel nothing but pure tranquility in his tired soul.
        
        “Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know” (p. 92)
      - Clarissa Dalloway: Despite he willingness to contribute to societal customs like playing hostess at a party and inviting her neighbors, Clarissa is more emotionally isolated because of her anxieties of failing to conform to societal conventions in the same manner as her peers and her other fears regarding life after death as she nears old age. For this reason, Clarissa distracts herself with the luxuries of throwing a party to avoid the insecurities that she dwells on internally, in order to present herself as best composed as possible, in comparison to the mix of worries she feels on the inside.
        
        “But often now this body she wore, (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture) this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing–nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress…” (p.10-11)
      - Peter Walsh: In association to the symbolism of the "solitary traveller", this depiction can be representative of Peter, as he finds comfort with this figure of his dreams. For the most part, Peter's solitude can be interpreted with the way he distanced himself from the city and his peers during his time in India. This opportunity allowed him to gain experience outside of the traditions of English society and perceive life under a new outlook, but even then does he reminisce the memories of his youth before.
        
        "Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace…" (p. 57)
  - - - "All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point---a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction..." (p. 4)
- - - - This close study over the significance of Orlando's sexuality examined the restrictions that existed in femininity during this era in England, specifically through racial, national, and sexual identities of the time. All this information relates back to historical context, as English imperialism played an influential part in the transformation of race and sexual identities across Europe. Although mystical, Woolf's novel tackles real-world discourse through Orlando and her experiences as a man and woman, including her relationships of all kinds. This ambiguity that exists within Orlando contributes to the critique against whiteness and heterosexuality, as gender identity is perceived as a social construct, in regards to the limitations established onto them.
        
        "The ‘playful’ exchange of racial others for sexual tolerance allows the novel both to interrogate and to affirm the national belonging of the queerly gendered Englishwoman, notwithstanding Woolf's well-known mistrust of the nation as a political affiliation for women: "What does 'our country' mean to me an outsider?" (p. 398)
    - - "And as all Orlando's loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardly of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man."
        (p. 161)
    - - "Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking..." (p. 188)
  - - - "It was Sally Seton—the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!" (p. 72)
  - - - "The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together..." (p. 3)
    - - "Only Jane Austen did it and Emily Brontë. It is another feather, perhaps the finest, in their caps. They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that." (p. 75)
  - - - "Then why did she mind what he said? Women can’t write, women can’t paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it?" (p. 86)
- - - - "This presumption of human transcendence has remained at the heart of subsequent philosophy, as well as functioning as the metaphoric grounding of modern science and technology, which are predicated on human superiority to all other life and our right to control the natural world, of which we are assumed not really to be a part." (p. 861)