35. VIRGINIA WOOLF

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Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf.
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Virginia Woolf
1. Life (1882-1941)
Her father Leslie Stephen was an eminent
Victorian man of letters.
She grew up in a literary and intellectual
atmosphere with free access to her fathers
library
Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.
Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse
led to depression
the death of her mother when she was 13
her stepbrothers
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Virginia Woolf
1. Life (1882-1941)
Suicide
The Second World War increased her anxiety and
fears. After rewriting drafts of her suicide
note, she put rocks into her pockets and drowned
herself in the River Ouse.
Virginia Woolf.
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Virginia Woolf
2. Literary career
The Bloomsbury Group ? In 1904 she moved to
Bloomsbury and became a member of the Bloomsbury
Group. This meant the rejection of traditional
morality and artistic convention.
Experimentation ? best known as one of the great
experimental novelists during the modernist
period.
The Bloomsbury Group
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Virginia Woolf
2. Literary career
Evolution of her style in her main novels

• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1917)
• Jacobs room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)

Traditional narratives
Narrative experimentation with the novel
A more completely developed stream-of-consciousne
ss technique
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Virginia Woolf
2. Literary career
A feminist writer ? the themes of androgyny,
women and writing
Describes Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Setons
relationship as young women

• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• Orlando (1928)
• A Room of Ones Own (1929)

Deals with androgyny
Shows Woolfs concern with the questions of
womens subjugation and the relationship between
women and writing
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Virginia Woolf
3. A modernist novelist

• Main aim ? to give voice to the complex inner
  world of feeling and memory.
• The human personality ? a continuous shift of
  impressions and emotions.
• Narrator ? disappearance of the omniscient
  narrator.
• Point of view ? shifted inside the characters
  minds through flashbacks, associations of ideas,
  momentary impressions presented as a continuous
  flux.

Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915, Tate
Gallery, London
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Virginia Woolf
4. Woolf vs Joyce
Woolfs stream of consciousness
Joyces stream of consciousness
characters show their thoughts directly through
interior monologue, sometimes in an incoherent
and syntactically unorthodox way
never lets her characters thoughts flow without
control, maintains logical and grammatical
organisation
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Virginia Woolf
4. Woolf vs Joyce
Moments of being
Epiphanies
Rare moments of insight during the characters
daily life when they can see reality behind
appearances
The sudden spiritual manifestation caused by a
trivial gesture, an external object ? the
character is led to a self-realization about
himself/herself
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• Takes place on a single ordinary day in June
  1923.
• Follows the protagonist through a very small area
  of London, from the morning to the night of the
  day on which she gives a large formal party.
• Clarissa Dalloways party is the climax of the
  novel and unifies the narrative by gathering all
  the people she thinks about during the day.

Cover for the first edition of Mrs. Dalloway,
London, Hogarth Press, 1925.
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Clarissa Dalloway

• A London society lady of fifty-one, the wife of a
  Conservative MP, Richard Dalloway, who has
  conventional views on womens rights.
• Had a possessive father, refused Peter Walsh, a
  man who would force her to share everything.

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorriss 1997 film adaptation
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Clarissa Dalloway

• Characterized by opposing feelings her need for
  freedom and independence and her class
  consciousness.
• Her life appears to be an effort towards order
  and peace, an attempt to overcome her weakness
  and sense of failure.

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorriss 1997 film adaptation
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Septimus Warren Smith

• A young poet and lover of Shakespeare.
• When the war broke out, enlisted for patriotic
  reasons.
• An extremely sensitive man who can suddenly fall
  prey to panic and fear, or feelings of guilt.

Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorriss
1997 film adaptation
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Septimus Warren Smith

• A character specifically connected with the war.
• Suffers from headaches and insomnia.
• Finally commits suicide.

Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorriss
1997 film adaptation
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Virginia Woolf
6. To the Lighthouse (1927)
No traditional plot ? a series of experiences,
memories, emotions and feelings held together by
symbols. The story develops over a period of ten
years.
Divided into three sections
1.
The Window ? It starts just before World War I.
It is set during a summer afternoon and evening
in a summer home on the Isle of Skye in the
Hebrides
The original St. Ives lighthouse, built by John
Smeaton in 1830.
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Virginia Woolf
6. To the Lighthouse (1927)
2.
Time Passes ? covers about ten years. The
children grow up, war breaks out, Mrs Ramsay dies
suddenly one night. Her eldest son, Andrew, is
killed in battle, and her daughter Prue dies too.
The summerhouse falls into a state of decay for
ten years until the family comes back.
The original St. Ives lighthouse, built by John
Smeaton in 1830.
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Virginia Woolf
6. To the Lighthouse (1927)
3.
The Lighthouse ? lasts less than one day. time
experienced, and especially recaptured in memory,
replaces outer time. Mr Ramsay, his son James and
his daughter Cam sail to the lighthouse. Lily
succeeds in finishing her painting.
The original St. Ives lighthouse, built by John
Smeaton in 1830.
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Virginia Woolf
7. To the Lighthouse characters
MRS RAMSAY

• A beautiful woman and loving wife, constantly
  provides support to the other characters in the
  novel.
• As a mother, her main objective is to preserve
  her son Jamess sense of hope and wonder in
  relation to the lighthouse.

Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf at Asheham, ca.
1910, National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Virginia Woolf
7. To the Lighthouse characters
MRS RAMSAY

• She realizes that the beauty of this world is
  ephemeral and should be protected.
• She has the ability to bring together different
  things into a whole.
• After her death, Lily and the other characters
  try to reach this unity.

Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf at Asheham, ca.
1910, National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Virginia Woolf
7. To the Lighthouse characters
LILY BRISCOE

• A painter who fears her work will end up in
  attics or under a couch.
• Rejects the conventional image of the woman
  represented by Mrs Ramsay.

Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell painting, 1915,
National Galleries of Scotland.
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Virginia Woolf
7. To the Lighthouse characters
LILY BRISCOE

• Her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay embodies her doubts
  at the beginning of the novel she cannot make
  sense of the shapes and colours that she tries to
  reproduce.
• Undergoes a drastic change evolving into an
  artist who achieves her final vision.

Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell painting, 1915,
National Galleries of Scotland.
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Virginia Woolf
8. To the Lighthouse themes
a.
Transience ? the idea that nothing lasts runs
through the novel

• Mrs Ramsay does not want her children to become
  adults.
• The house falls into decay.
• Death unexpectedly ends life.

St. Ives, Cornwall, the setting for The Lighthouse
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Virginia Woolf
8. To the Lighthouse themes
b.
Loss

• Minta loses her brooch on the beach.
• The family loses some of its members.

St. Ives, Cornwall, the setting for The Lighthouse
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Virginia Woolf
8. To the Lighthouse themes
c.
Art ? the ambition to stop the flux of time is
embodied by the artist Lily Briscoe.
d.
The force of love ? Mrs Ramsay believes that also
love can create durable memories making moments
permanent.
St. Ives, Cornwall, the setting for The Lighthouse
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Virginia Woolf
9. To the Lighthouse symbolism
The sound of the sea ? the fullness of life and
the imminence of death, uncertainty.
The land and the house ? idea of shelter and
stability.
The window ? the dividing and connecting point
between the self and society.
A scene from 2002s The Hours, directed by
Stephen Daldry.
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Virginia Woolf
9. To the Lighthouse symbolism

• The lighthouse
• a positive symbol linked to light, comfort, hope
  and enthusiasm, a reference point in a changing
  world.
• the inaccessible destination leading to
  frustration and threatening danger.

A scene from 2002s The Hours, directed by
Stephen Daldry.
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Virginia Woolf
10. A Room of Ones Own (1929)

• Woolf had been invited to give a lecture on the
  topic of Women and Fiction. She advanced the
  thesis that a woman must have money and a room
  of her own if she is to write fiction.
• Her essay is constructed as a partly-fictionalized
  narrative of the steps that led her to adopt
  this thesis.

A contemporary edition of A Room of Ones Own.
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Virginia Woolf
10. A Room of Ones Own (1929)

• She dramatizes that mental process in the
  character of an imaginary narrator (call me Mary
  Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name
  you please--it is not a matter of any
  importance).
• The narrator reflects on the different
  educational experiences available to men and
  women as well as on more material differences in
  their lives.
• The figure of Judith Shakespeare is generated as
  an example of the tragic fate a highly
  intelligent woman would have met.

 
A contemporary edition of A Room of Ones Own.
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Virginia Woolf
10. A Room of Ones Own (1929)

• She considers the achievements of the major women
  novelists of the nineteenth century and reflects
  on the importance of tradition to an aspiring
  writer.
• Woolf closes the essay with an exhortation to her
  audience of women to take up the tradition that
  has been so hardly bequeathed to them, and to
  increase the endowment for their own daughters.

A contemporary edition of A Room of Ones Own.
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Virginia Woolf
10. A Room of Ones Own (1929)
MAIN THEMES

• Womens position in fiction and in real life.
• Critique of patriarchal society.
• Struggle for womens rights.