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Virginia Woolf - Coggle Diagram

- - - - “The fundamental conflict in Mrs. Dalloway is between those who identify with Establishment “dominion” and “leadership” and those who resist or are repelled by it. The characters in the novel can be seen as ranged on a sort of continuum with Bradshaw at one end and Septimus at the other. Thus far I have concentrated on the characters at the Establishment end of the scale: Sir Willian, Hugh Whitbread, Lady Bruton, Miss Parry and Richard Dalloway. Among the rebels(present or former) we must count Septimus Smith, Doris Kilman, Sally Seton and Peter Walsh, though there are important distinctions among them. And in the center of this conflict–its pivot, so to speak–stands Clarissa Dalloway.”(Zwerdling 75)
        
        In this essay, Alex Zwerdling argues that Clarissa acts as a mediator between the two opposite ends of the social classes represented in Mrs. Dalloway. In his essay, he writes: “Woolf’s picture of the Dalloway set is an attempt to understand an alien, powerful class whose existence in some sense determines her own.” (Woolf 70) By representing the upper classes with sympathy and humanity, Woolf reveals the cruel logic many powerful people use to justify and maintain their influence. One example he provides is her reaction to Septimus’ death(Zwerdling 74). She is the only member of the party genuinely upset by the news of his suicide. In this way, Woolf suggests that the upper classes dehumanize the suffering of those ‘beneath’ them in order to maintain power and influence. Clarissa, a deeply empathetic person who gently resists the push to participate in such dynamics, sees Septimus’ death as a way to free herself from the perspective her social class tries to force upon her. The bridge between these two characters partially exists in order to show that, in fact, the inhumanity is far more on the side of the wealthy than of the poor.
    - - In this essay, a central piece of Woolf’s oeuvre, Woolf argues that women are denied the economic necessities that would allow them to focus solely on the craft of writing. In this way, she suggests women from all social classes are bridged by their oppression. At one point in the book, she attends a luncheon with the founders of a women’s college. After listening to their long discussions of all the fundraising and negotiation it took to create the college in the first place, she reflects on what might have been if women were not discriminated against in the economic sphere.
        
        “It is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they had earned. It is only for the last forty-eight years that Mrs. Seton has had a penny of her own.” (Woolf 20)
        
        The potency of this passage is partially gained by its neglect in mentioning the lower classes. While it was certainly better to be a rich woman than a poor one, laws discriminating against women transcend the lines of wealth. Money is universally inaccessible to them, no matter the backgrounds they come from. In the case of women, no amount of wealth can cancel out the legal discrimination they face.
    - - “Orlando’s respectable marriage allows her to write overtly sapphic hymns to the charms of “Egyptian girls” without censure. When the voice of the age interrogates her suspiciously, hilariously, about her writing (“Are girls necessary?”), the narrator implies that having “a husband at the Cape,” while hypocritical perhaps, allows Orlando to elude moral surveillance of her lesbian poetry(265).” (Hovey, 402)
        
        It is interesting that marriage is the very thing which allows Orlando to continue living out her queer desires. Although discrimination against such behavior permeated every level of English society, Hovey claims that Orlando has found a unique way to manipulate the oppressive social system of which she is a part in her favor. This moment calls to mind Orlando’s connection with the poor, especially a group of Romani people that she encounters after changing genders. Throughout the novel, she deeply resonates with people and concepts which lie on the outskirts of society. By the end of the novel, when she is immersed once again in English life, Hovey’s essay shows how she uses her high social status to reach towards worlds far beyond her own.
  - - - Charles Tansley
        
        One of the more unlikeable characters in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse is Charles Tansley, a student spending the summer with the Ramsay family. Woolf’s thoughts on people like Tansley–those deeply rooted in preconceptions about class and social order–are well expressed in a passage from her diary: “It seems to me more and more clear that the only honest people are the artists, and that these social reformers and philanthropists get so out of hand and harbor so many discreditable desires under the disguise of loving their kind, that in the end there’s more to find fault with in them than in us.” (Zwerdling 69) Charles Tansley is very out of touch with the world around him, operating in a way that comes across as isolated from the collective nature of Woolf’s writing. Such ignorance becomes physical in a scene where he is blocking the view during a mealtime. In the following quote, Woolf writes:
        
        “What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying his spoon down precisely in the middle of his plate, which he had swept clean, as if, Lily thought(he sat opposite to her with his back to the window precisely in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure of his meals.”(85)
        
        As suggested by his comment on his companions’ conversation, Tansley’s views on social class and the wealthy prohibit him from participating in meaningful interactions with those around him. He embodies just the sort of the stubborn reformer who Woolf criticizes in her diary, refusing to afford the objects of his criticism with humanity. This lack of consideration manifests itself as general ignorance. As he silently judges his dining companions for the quality of their conversation, Lily judges him simply for blocking the view. Were he to give more weight to simple gestures–were he to possess a basic awareness of other people’s general likes and dislikes–he would seem much more enmeshed in the social world of the book.
    - - Sir William Bradshaw
        
        In Mrs. Dalloway, Sir William Bradshaw talks lightly of Septimus' suicide at Clarissa’s dinner party, suggesting that his death was meaningless and inevitable. However, the narrator speaks harshly of Bradshaw’s inability to consider perspectives or lives outside of his own. His dedication to silencing views different from his own is shown in the following quote:
        
        "Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women (she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered; Sir William with his thirty years' experience of these kinds of cases, and his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense; in fact, his sense of proportion."(Woolf, 84)
        
        Figures like Bradshaw resist the changing order of the world around them. By ‘worshiping proportion,’ he enacts the belief that everything in the world has its place. People of the lower classes must exist in order to ensure the survival of the wealthy–in other words, without subordinates, there are no lesser people to whom he can compare himself. Furthermore, it is interesting that he suppresses mystic, prophetic, or unconventional voices, often equating them with illness. He maintains his social position, and therefore his wealth, by refusing to accommodate any person or ideas that challenge it. This analysis of his character also accounts for Bradsha’s dismissive attitude toward Septimus’ death. By discussing tragedy in such a flippant manner, he reinforces the idea that people like Septimus pose a threat to order and therefore, their removal from this world is for the better–at least for Bradshaw and people like himself.
- - - - In this novel, Woolf plays with a linear representation of time as a means of questioning the form and genre of the biography. Orlando takes place over the course of three hundred years, following its protagonist through massive changes in time, place and gender. Biographies usually suggest a contained life, a book whose beginning and end is predetermined by the beginning and end of a person’s life. Woolf poses the question, what happens to genre when one of its categories is removed? What happens to a biography when a person’s life does not end? Furthermore, what does one do with a biography about a fictional character? Time is just one way in which Woolf stretches out the limits of what a biography can be.
  - - - Though Mrs. Dalloway follows its characters through a single day, it is punctuated by reflections on the past.
        
        Longbourne
        
        Many of the wealthy characters in this book, such as Clarissa, Peter, and Sally, frequently reminisce on their time at a summer estate in their youth. Decisions they made at Longbourne are the ones that shaped their lives in the present. Clarissa, once in love with Peter, chose to marry Richard Dalloway while she was there. Yet, Woolf seems to suggest that Clarissa’s most intense passion was reserved for her friend Sally. Memories of the two kissing under the moonlight are some of the most romantic images in the novel. All discontent in the present seems to stem from mishandling of such occurrences–Sally and Clarissa never act on their love for each other past the point of a kiss, and Clarissa chooses to marry the rather stale Richard Dalloway. Woolf’s nonlinear representation of time allows her to show how the past permeates the lives of her characters, and how it has shaped the current state of the relationships and emotions that connect them.
        
        World War I:
        
        Another pivotal character in the novel lies far outside of Mrs. Dalloway’s wealthy circles. Septimus Warren Smith, a World War I veteran, suffers from PTSD and lives modestly with his wife, Lucretia. Woolf distorts time once again in order to represent the quality of this condition–Septimus’ past forcefully shoves itself into the present in the form of upsetting hallucinations and dreams. For example, in one scene, he hallucinates that his implied lover, a commander from his regiment, returns to him in a park. At other times, he imagines himself reduced to nothing less than a collection of nerve endings. Septimus continuously reckons with the temporality of one’s physical self, a state uniquely produced by the conditions of war. This preoccupation with the past in Mrs. Dalloway requires time to be broken up and pieced back together. The disorienting nature of the novel is due to the disorienting nature of life itself–the ways in which moments from the past shape our present, for the better or the worse.
      - The Hours, Steven Daldry
        
        The Hours fluctuates through many different periods of time, adapting the nonlinear form of Woolf's writing to reflect the universality of its content.
        
        Laura Brown
        
        A third of the film is devoted to the life of Laura Brown, a 1950s suburban housewife who struggles with depression. She almost kills herself in one scene, choosing not to only after remembering how much she values being a mother to her son.
        
        Virginia Woolf :pen:
        
        Through these two women live different lives in different places, they are connected by their feelings of isolation and depression. The film distorts time as a means of suggesting that certain experiences transcend the lines of historical period. This structure also shows how Woolf, a famed writer, was able to capture the emotional landscapes of people very far removed from her own life. By drawing comparisons between Woolf and a normal woman in suburban America, the filmmakers further emphasize her humanity and her capacity to see the same depth in others–regardless of how different they might have been from herself.
        
        Another large portion of the film depicts Virginia Woolf as she writes Mrs. Dalloway, intensely struggling with her mental health as she does. When visiting with her sister Vanessa in one scene, the film notes how Woolf is trapped and unable to fly in the stifling environment of the home.
- - - - “Hume, Leslie Stephen, and Mr. Ramsay work directly in the transcendental Platonic tradition that assumes the separation of mind from body, and human consciousness from physical nature . . . . As an alternative, she(Woolf) celebrates human community and its continuity with all the world which sustains it. "Time Passes" plunges her narrative into the very energies flowing through the sea of being–the more-than-human Lebenswelt–in which people are no more consequential than brief flashes of light.”(Westling 862)
        
        Westling suggests that the very style, even the form itself, of Woolf’s writing rejects the Enlightenment rationalism embodied in Mr. Ramsay. Woolf uses nature to represent continuity rather than division, particularly between the natural and human worlds. This essay illuminates many of Woolf’s artistic choices in this novel, particularly in the section “Time Passes.” The section describes the Ramsay vacation during the years of its abandonment. Sea air, plants and rushes of wind intertwine themselves with the house, becoming one with an object originally intended solely for human use. In this way, Woolf shows how it is impossible to sever oneself from their surroundings, and that much more literary richness is gained by emphasizing connection and the ways in which our universe encourages it.
  - - - "People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected."(Woolf 32)
        
        This essay deals primarily with Woolf’s claim that literature has failed to grapple with the topic of illness in a serious way. Such failure stems from what she describes as a continuous separation between the mind and the body, and the value that Western society places on that disconnect. In this passage, she critiques the idea that they are separate entities that work solely as a means to an end. The private experience of illness reveals the ways in which the two are connected.
- - - - "Her room in the attic, where her husband “insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed,” holds a twin-sized, coffin-like bed: “the sheet was stretched and the bed narrow”; Clarissa feels isolated, mounting “up into the tower alone” while others are “blackberrying in the sun.” The door is shut, and the views are distant, and, like the sickroom that Woolf’s describes in “On Being Ill,” “the sounds came thin and chill.”40 The sickroom and body map on to each other, both caught between life and death. Clarissa’s illness shapes how she sees and experiences this room, and conversely, the room shaped how she experienced her illness and now shapes how she experiences its aftermath. Embedded here is the way a traumatic memory might work: a temporal moment—the acute stage of her illness—remains spatially mapped onto her body and the room where the moment took place."(Outka 114)
        
        Outka describes one of the few moments in Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa is left alone with her thoughts. It makes sense that Outka would interpret this quiet moment–the afternoon rest prescribed by her doctor, and which her closest companions intentionally leave her alone for–as a trigger for memories from her illness. Outka’s analysis highlights the isolation that comes with illness, particularly in the physical form of the sickroom. Because that space anticipates both death and life, its inhabitants are placed in a joyless state of the unknown. Yet, in spite of whatever trauma that might have created in the novel’s protagonist, Clarissa is forced by her doctor and her husband to come back to this room each day to rest. Trauma, and other people’s ignorance of it, is a central theme in Mrs. Dalloway–its main characters are made subject to recent, collective tragedies, and are expected to work through the aftereffects of their suffering in the most irrational of ways.
  - - - Septimus Smith
        
        Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared him, pardoned his weakness. But what was the scientific explanation (for one must be scientific above all things)? Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will become men? It was the heat wave presumably, operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of evolution. Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock."(Woolf 57)
        
        Though Septimus’ illness is not physical, Woolf often uses references to the body in order to represent his state of mind. In this passage, Septimus is sitting on a park bench as he hallucinates a nearby dog turning into a person. Making sense of this moment poses a challenge, considering that the modern language to talk about mental illness didn’t exist at the time Woolf was writing. Instead, she creates a physical representation of Septimus' decay. She describes his body as being smashed against a rock, destroying whatever buffer existed between him and the cruelty of the outside world. The same thing seems to have happened to his mind--this hallucinations suggest that there is no longer a line between what is real and what isn't.