Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, "In Mrs. Dalloway, she had, in fact, centered a novel…

- - - - Narrator observes Orlando observing race
        
        Audience observes Woolf
        writing on race
        
        The narrator's playful commentary throughout Orlando makes interpreting the narrative's stance on race complex. This self-reflexivity leaves readers to wonder if Woolf's criticism and parody are supposed to fit into the matter-of-fact historical narrative presented by the biographer or who holds any particular view expressed in the novel- Orlando, the narrator, or Woolf herself. As an audience with knowledge of Woolf's complicated relationship to race, exemplified in the Dreadnought Affair, it's also difficult not to see where Woolf's social criticisms fail or become problematic. Like her author, Orlando often comes close to blackface or racial caricature herself, even if it often seems to be in service of criticizing English social norms or British imperialism. But, with the middleman of the narrator, it's not clear where the criticism begins or ends.
- - - - Suicide is often contemplated by characters in both Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours , and is framed as a way to escape the restrictions of illness (for Septimus and The Hours' Richard) or dissatisfaction with a restricted life (Laura Brown, Virginia Woolf, and Clarissa Dalloway)
- - - - In To the Lighthouse, Lily struggles and succeeds in understanding her companions after Mrs. Ramsey's death, but her grief ultimately brings her to a better understanding of them and their relationships.
        
        "Looking up, there he was--Mr. Ramsay--advancing towards them, swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite? she repeated. Oh, no--the most sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the best; but, looking down, she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical, he is unjust; and kept looking down, purposely, for only so could she keep steady, staying with the Ramsays. Directly one looked up and saw them, what she called "being in love" flooded them. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love" (32)
- - - - Woolf's writing on women often focuses on gender performance, which is expressed both in character (Clarissa Dalloway's "mask" and dissatisfaction) and plot (Orlando's struggle to fit in to English structures of gender after her transition)
- - - - Stream of consciousness writing in Mrs. Dalloway