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Virginia Woolf George_Charles_Beresford_-_Virginia_Woolf_in_1902_-…

- - - - "The Soul Has Survived" for Readers of Literature
        Alex Zwerdling, “Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System”
        "In the novel, an obsession with Shakespeare (as in the thoughts of Septimus and Clarissa) is a kind of shorthand indication that the soul has survived, that some kind of sympathetic imagination is still functioning" (Zwerdling, 74).
        In contrast, the novel clarifies that certain characters (such as Hugh Whitbread and Lady Bruton) are non-readers. Woolf equates this "indifference or hostility to literature" with an unfortunate "lack of curiosity about life outside its precincts" (Zwerdling, 74). These characters are depicted as having little imagination, and adhering to their own Englishness and social class with seemingly little reflection.
      - FILM: Stephen Daldry, The Hours
        Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife in Los Angeles, is seen reading the first line from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway aloud: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
        Though Laura appears to suffer from some disillusionment about the reality of being a housewife, perhaps depression, she turns to the power of literature for solace, for a female character through which she could see her own reflection. Similarly to Clarissa Dalloway's continued interest in reading, this scene suggests that Laura's soul and imagination persists.
      - Clarissa's Reference to Shakespeare's Othello
        Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
        
        In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus and Clarrisa are both considered survivors of the Great War and the flu pandemic. These two also both continue reading and relating to works of literature, particularly Shakespeare's English plays. As Zwerdling suggests, their physical bodies are still recuperating from the maladies of illness and war, but their souls and imaginations have "survived."
        Literature allows these characters to look inward at their own emotions, and to even empathize across gender and racial lines. For example, Shakespeare's play allows Clarissa (a white Englishwoman who reflects upon a past same-sex love) to empathize with Othello (a Moor and a man; regarded as a "foreign" subject by the English).
      - Jamie Hovey, “‘Kissing a Negress in the Dark’: Englishness as Masquerade in Orlando”
        :star: I find it interesting that Mrs. Dalloway represents the public anxieties surrounding Englishwomen's moral decay and unconventional sexuality through Clarissa's recollection of a Shakespearean play. She finds herself relating to a male Moor character, but in a work of literature widely considered to be a great English classic. :star:
    - - The “Woman Artist”: Painting and Gender
        Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (“The Window”)
        -- Painting becomes an outlet for Lily Briscoe to escape social (gender) conventions (e.g., inability for women to paint or to wholly invest themselves in their creative passions).
        -- Lily becomes the “observer” overlooking the other characters and their interactions with each other; as she navigates her passion for art with her gendered expectations, she becomes a reflection of Woolf herself.
        -- Her painting, which she works on throughout the novel, is informed by her perspectives and experiences as a woman; and her life as a woman is in turn shaped by her being a painter. She seeks to capture reality and interiority with her painting.
      - Painting as an Escape from Marriage Expectations
        Woolf's To the Lighthouse ("The Window")
        -- Lily perceives painting as her “salvation” or "escape" from the expectations of marriage; this creative pursuit distances Lily from conventionality.
        -- “For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution” (Woolf, "The Window," Section 17).
    - - The Art of Writing Poetry as Conversation, Engagement with the Natural World
        Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
        "Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?...What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods..." (Woolf, 325).
        -- "Stammering answer." The art of poetry is inherently unsure, and Orlando the poet has no direct "objective truth" when trying to describe something.
        -- "Voice and voice." Orlando does not simply document her surroundings as if it were an object, but instead engages and converses with it.
  - - - Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
        
        Woolf employs internal monologue that encourages readers to understand each characters' perspective and have sympathy for them. As such, characters are not split between heroes and villains, but are dynamic and complex individuals with their own moral compass and social, political, and gender influences.
    - - Louise Wrestling, excerpt from “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World”
        "Mr. Ramsay, a quintessential Victorian patriarch and philosopher who is a satiric portrait of Woolf's own father, Sir Leslie Stephen" (Wrestling, 860).
        Wrestling interprets Mr. Ramsay as a satirical figure in To the Lighthouse who serves as an "attack" on the Platonic tradition in Western culture (which includes the traditional separation of mind from body, and human consciousness from physical nature).
      - Lady Bruton as a Critique of the English "Reformer"
        Alex Zwerdling, “Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System”
        -- Woolf used satire to offer social commentary on the English class system and social hierarchies.
        -- In Mrs. Dalloway, the reformer Lady Bruton is a personification of the "preaching" that Woolf so detested (such as in fiction). This character thus serves as a vessel for Woolf's social criticism.
        “Lady Bruton in Mrs. Dalloway, whose passionate dedication to the cause of emigration is described as liberating her ‘pent egoism…half looking-glass, half precious stone’” (Zwerdling, 69).
  - - - The (Futile) Pursuit of Truth in Orlando's Poetry
        Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
        “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces” (Woolf, 17).
        -- The biographer questions the "truth" behind literary descriptions; can words truly the "truth" of an object or an experience, or simply one's perception of it at a given time?
        -- Quotation illustrates the tension between literature, i.e. the product of mortal human activities, and its relation to the expansive natural world of non-human phenomena.
        
        Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
        “‘I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false’. And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection” (Woolf, 102).
        Another quotation that depicts young Orlando's struggle as a poet to capture the true "essence" of his surroundings in his words and stanzas. Every perception or experience he jots down is "utterly false," as there is no one objective "truth" to the non-human world that can be captured in human words.
      - Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
        "To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian" (Woolf, 192).
        Woolf values fiction for its ability to present a multitude of observations and representations that can inspire readers to make conclusions for themselves of "reality." A biographer or historian would be overstepping their abilities to "proclaim" a particular truth about, say, London society during a particular time period.
        
        Woolf, A Room of One's Own
        "When a subject is highly controversial---and any question about sex is that---one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker" (Woolf, Ch.1).
        Woolf suggests to her readers that fiction is necessary to "get at" the truth; the modern biographer has needed to become an artist rather than just prod in fact (as she also mentions in Orlando: A Biography). Here, she also alludes to the inherent biases of writers.
    - - Alex Zwerdling, “Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System”
        "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 judgment 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, 69).
- - - - Louise Wrestling, excerpt from “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World”
        Woolf represents the "truth" of human mortality and even insignificance by juxtaposing human lives and even human ambitions with the vast natural, non-human world.
        She incorporates descriptions of landscapes, of the weather and of other "geological forces" over which humans have little influence.
      - Woolf's To the Lighthouse undermines the concept of “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”. Indeed, in various of her novels, Woolf acknowledges that nature will continue even after our deaths, a concept of utter indifference to human life and structures that is comforting.
        
        Woolf, To the Lighthouse, "Time Passes"
        In "Time Passes," the bond of sympathy between humans and nature is broken and dissolved, in part due to nature’s indifference to humans. Humans are outsiders to nature; as such, Woolf rejects the presumption of human transcendence, of human supremacy and mastery over nature by breaking the “bond” between humans and the natural world.
        In this middle section of the novel, the vast forces of the nonhuman world overcome the intricate structures of the human community (e.g., the Ramsay house). This leaves behind a life seemingly without human presence, and only the diminished remains of the Ramsay house following WWI. In doing so, Woolf portrays the nonhuman world as immensely great, and humans in comparison as mere momentary presences or "blips" in history.
      - Elizabeth Outka, “On Seeing Illness: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway”
        Septimus’s senses in the sickroom are heightened to the beauty and sounds of outside (Outka, 136). It appears that outside of the sickroom, life and the natural world progress forward, regardless of the status of a singular mortal life. This emphasizes the "special realization" of nature's indifference to the human sufferers of (personal) illness and tragedy.
    - - FILM: Stephen Daldry, The Hours
        Clarissa brings the ill Richard flowers for his apartment as one of her many frequent visits, and expresses that she is terrified to lose him. Richard responds in the film that she must accept his illness and that he is dying. The scene's representation of a withering Richard in contrast to a more healthy Clarissa, and the vibrant colors of the flowers she brings in contrast to the grim, darkened room, emphasize the relationship between the two as patient and mourner.
      - Death that invades the domestic sphere
        
        Woolf, To the Lighthouse, "Time Passes"
        Mr. Ramsay experiences the sudden loss of his wife silently, when he wakes to an empty bed and is unused to the empty space beside him.
        "[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty]" (Woolf, 128).
        
        Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
        Orlando visits her country estate toward the end of the novel and finds the empty rooms and passageways as silent as a tomb. The nobles, i.e., mortals of high social standing and reputation, are long gone, but their material possessions and the forces of nature themselves persist in this estate. The eerie, silent atmosphere as Orlando ambles around emphasize the presence of human mortality in physical spaces.
        
        Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
        An air of death and illness follows Clarissa around; when she returns from her errands around London, she describes her own house as cool as a vault, and her retreat up the stairs as if she were a nun. Evidently, Clarissa’s illness (and post-pandemic body) shapes how she sees and experiences the space around her, particularly the room she enters upstairs; and how the room shaped how she experienced her illness and now its aftermath. There is overlap between the physical body and the architecture that surrounds it.
        A moment in the past, it seems, has remained “spatially mapped onto her body and the room where the moment took place” (Elizabeth Outka, “On Seeing Illness: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway”).
  - - - How does Woolf depict the aftermath of illness and the pandemic outbreak in her writing?
        
        Imagery and Sounds of Death and Grim Contagion
        Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
        The narrative contains images of bells, mourners, sickrooms, and contagion to convey the aftermath of the flu pandemic that pervades London.
        Woolf also uses silence and sound in the background of particular scenes, such as a bell tolling (a literary trope of death and the unstoppable passage of time). This draws attention to the pandemic's "spectral presence" vibrating through bodies and permeates the atmosphere, blurring the borders that separate and shield characters from each other.
        
        Elizabeth Outka, “On Seeing Illness: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway"
        The narration of Mrs. Dalloway crosses the conventional boundaries of linear, chronological time, and is much more fluid as it shifts from one character's consciousness to another's without warning. According to Outka, this roaming spirit of a narration resembles a virus that nimbly, invisibly jumps from body to body. This plot represents the movement of a contagion itself throughout the novel, as it is "defined less by linear timelines and more by temporal and experiential fluidity" (Outka, 141).
        
        Elizabeth Outka, “On Seeing Illness: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway"
        Outka argues that the pandemic as described in Mrs. Dalloway poses one benefit to women in particular: "unexpected freedoms and new creative energy" (Outka, 111). Woolf believes that the public would not have been able to withstand the misery of sympathizing both the Great War and the flu pandemic, as that would “overburden and cripple the imagination, end creative endeavors, and leave only horror and despair” (Outka, 111). Instead, Woolf envisions illness as having the power to alter, perhaps even enhance, an invalid's "powers of observation." The presence of illness and sickrooms provided women during this time with, literally, a room of one's own where “light, sounds, colors are experienced differently” (Outka, 111). Indeed, illness served as a respite from women's more cramped domestic lives, and supplied them instead with the solitude, time, and physical space to acknowledge and channel their creative energy.
    - - Louise Wrestling, excerpt from “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World”
        In "Time Passes" of To the Lighthouse, the Ramsays lose their son in the war. His death, among others in his family, are reduced to minor incidental "facts" mentioned offhand in quick blurbs. This serves as a rejection of anthropocentrism, and of human-centeredness.
        This portion of the novel, then, emphasizes “the enormous forces of the nonhuman world and the carnage of WW1 have torn away the illusions of knowledge, control, and transcendence” (Wrestling).
      - Elizabeth Outka, “On Seeing Illness: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway”
        In Mrs. Dalloway, veteran Septimus Smith can be interpreted as a “brutal portrait of the damage that war inflicted, from the romantic delusions that compelled men into battles for which they were unprepared, to the constant terror of injury and death that persisted long after the fighting, to the ensuing grief, guilt, and trauma that could tip them into madness” (Outka, 112). Septimus is an isolated, marginalized figure who returns to London as a survivor and victim of the war. However, he is surrounded by noncombatants who primarily seem interested in forgetting the war. What purpose does memory serve a war victim and survivor plagued with mental health conditions, such as PTSD? It's also important to note that Septimus is another one of Woolf's "representative" characters who embody a particular social criticism or message, such as the devastation of war.
- - - - Woolf, A Room of One's Own
        
        In her polemic, Woolf asks "what conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?" (Woolf, 25).
        1.) Woolf argues that women need experiences, need to travel, in order to write; cannot simply remain sheltered indoors. She suggests that there are social aspects (like time, space, and support) that affect creation vs. an individual's emphasis on simply personal genius.
        2.) Physical needs (i.e., a room to herself) and material and economic needs (i.e., the sad dinner at the women’s college; link between dining and thinking) for women to write and write well.
        
        Woolf alludes to the deformity of poverty, constraint, and oppression, and its consequences observable in women’s writing, through her praise of men’s writing as having the full liberty of unrestrained creativity.
        
        In the final chapter of A Room of One's Own, Woolf insists on the need for “unity of the mind"---a fusion of the sexes amid her utopian vision of androgyny. After all, an androgynous mind that isn’t obstructed by anger or the sorrows of gender roles and inequality (i.e., Shakespeare)
        would be capable of a full expression of creativity.
      - FILM: Stephen Daldry, The Hours
        
        In her spare moments, housewife Laura Brown is shown reading a copy of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. As expressed in Woolf's A Room of One's Own, though, Laura does not have the time to become fully absorbed or invested in novels or pursue other intellectual pursuits she may have because she is a housewife first and foremost. The scene shifts to her baking a cake with her son for her husband's birthday. She has become distracted, it seems, with domestic tasks, and with the responsibilities that accompany motherhood.
    - - The "Ugly"
        
        Various of Woolf's novels associate racial minorities with the failure of an Englishwoman to live a "proper" life. This also leads to the association of Victorian femininity, of a perfect housewife, with white Englishness.
        Women who rebel, then, lose their English racial purity and are instead compared to racial Others. In To the Lighthouse, many references are made to Lily Briscoe's Chinese eyes, which counters the matriarch Mrs. Ramsay's proper "Greek" stature. In Mrs. Dalloway, the bold, improper, and perhaps non-heterosexual Sally Seton is described as having "French blood" in her to further distance the woman from an English "ideal."
        
        Jamie Hovey, “‘Kissing a Negress in the Dark’: Englishness as Masquerade in Orlando”
        British imperialism: Honey argues that the morally upright, heterosexually respectable Englishwoman had come to be associated at home and in the colonies with notions of racial purity.
        Public anxieties about this rebellious Englishwoman heightened around the time Woolf published her novels. This would be post-World War I, when gender roles became increasingly blurred, and masculine women and lesbianism became more visible in English society.
        
        Public anxieties increased surrounding the cross-dressed lesbian, the masculine woman, and the working woman. Such a white Englishwoman now seemed to pose a threat to the restrictive model of femininity during the Victorian era.
        
        In other words, Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, which features a character to magically experiences a sex change, is the product of public anxieties about race and nation, and it contests national ideologies of Anglo-Saxon racial homogeneity and heterosexual respectability (Hovey).
        
        The 1920s linked colonial immigrants and sexually emancipated white women as foreign and morally suspect subjects
        
        Orlando’s exploration of queer white female sexuality can be seen as firmly anchored in the national and racial concerns of 1920s England.
        The supposedly “uncontrollable” sexuality of poor white women in particular was cast as the cause of English moral decay and vice (Hovey).
        
        The yearning to escape one's domestic duties
        
        FILM: Stephen Daldry, The Hours
        The film offers a glimpse into the lives of three separate women who find themselves somehow, on some thin thread, connected to each other through Woolf's writings. The three of them navigate the gendered expectation for them to become domestic-minded, to be content as housewives and natural caretakers. Housewife Laura Brown and author Virginia Woolf, for example, become upset with their lived realities and think of suicide (or even the act of running away from one's loved ones or responsibilities) as a means of escape.
        
        Woolf, To the Lighthouse, "The Window"
        "For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself...To be silent; to be alone. All the being and doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others" (Woolf, "The Window," Section 11).
        Here, Mrs. Ramsay finds a moment to herself after having devoted her daytime hours to fulfilling her domestic duties, and to prioritizing the needs of her family and their guests. Her moments of solitude and introspection remind me of the end of Mrs. Dalloway, when Clarissa excuses herself from the party to be alone. In this scene, Mrs. Ramsay visualizes herself as a "wedge-shaped core of darkness," which seems to recall a preservation of the self and simultaneously an annihilation of the self. It is curious that she associates this “darkness” (which sounds negative) with freedom, peace, and stability for inner self…
        
        Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
        "'The perfect hostess', he said to her, whereupon she winced all over. But he meant her to feel it. He would have done anything to hurt her after seeing her with Dalloway" (Woolf, 44).
        Clarissa thinks back to the times Peter Walsh would satirically applaud her seemingly perfect abilities as a hostess and as a wife to Richard Dalloway, as if she had simply followed a heteronormative, gendered script of what a woman of her station was to do with her life in 1920s England. Multiple times during the novel, Clarissa expresses sorrow at this compliment that she should theoretically be proud to hear, thereby implying that Clarissa is rethinking the decisions she has made that have led to her current status as a housewife.
      - The "Bad"
        
        Alienation from one’s own life
        
        A Housewife's Introspection: Was This the Right Choice?
        FILM: Stephen Daldry, The Hours
        In the film, the housewife Laura is seen baking a cake for her husband's birthday, but she also finds herself distanced from domestic life (as Clarissa in 2001 will similarly feel, even as she partners with another woman).
        
        Dan (Laura's husband) buys the flowers for himself even though it is his own birthday: a reversal of "which gender does what" in Mrs. Dalloway. Laura does not seem to have prioritized her own wants in life and is simply following a script---the instructions of a recipe, even---of what society has expected from her as a woman and now as a wife and mother.
        
        Mrs. Ramsay, the Matchmaker
        Woolf, To the Lighthouse
        In the novel, Mrs. Ramsey
        enforces normative ideas of marriage and what proper, "perfect" women should and should not do. For example, she persistently tries to pair the young adults together as if she were a matchmaker.
        However, her insistence on matching pairs together is not always successful...For one, Lily Briscoe refuses to marry, despite social pressures and Mrs. Ramsay's own wishes.
      - The "Good"
        
        Mrs. Ramsay, the Pinnacle of Victorian Womanhood
        Woolf, To the Lighthouse
        Mrs. Ramsey in the novel is an object of adoration, a figure of maternal love in the novel.
        As a proud housewife, Mrs. Ramsay wishes for her daughters to experience this privilege as well. She also frames domesticity and being a perfect housewife who prioritizes her husband and children as the pinnacle of Victorian femininity: the greatest accomplishment and contribution a woman can have.
        
        Furthermore, Mrs. Ramsay expresses her desire to be remembered for her domestic role. In this novel, then, feminine work such as hers is portrayed as something to be proud of, and is not considered (at least in her eyes) as "lesser than." Rather, she exists as the "other half" that completes her husband, for otherwise the balance of her marriage and her family life would collapse.
        Ultimately, caretaking work is recognized in the novel as actual work, as "true labor," not simply frivolous. This counters the frequent devaluing of feminized work in a social hierarchy that places (male) reason on top.