#virginia woolf mrs dalloway analysis

[readbooksummary]

Mrs Dalloway Summary, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.

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[areadersuncertaintyprinciple]

Mrs. Dalloway captures the sense of rupture caused by a catastrophic war

Beneath the seemingly mundane surface of a single day in London, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway paints a haunting portrait of a society fractured by the trauma of World War I. The novel's exploration of this rupture goes beyond explicit references to the battlefields, weaving the threads of displacement and fragmentation into the very fabric of its narrative.

One of the most potent tools Woolf employs is the fragmented narrative structure. The novel leaps between the consciousnesses of various characters, creating a kaleidoscope of thoughts and experiences. This fractured form mirrors the shattered state of post-war society, where traditional structures and expectations lie in ruins, leaving individuals adrift in a world that no longer feels familiar or coherent. Clarissa Dalloway, the novel's central figure, embodies this internal fragmentation. Haunted by the ghosts of a lost past and grappling with the hollowness of her present, her stream-of-consciousness reveals a mind struggling to find meaning in a world irrevocably altered by the war.

The novel's temporal tapestry further underscores the sense of rupture. Flashbacks and shifts in consciousness disrupt the chronological flow of time, creating a feeling of disjointedness and dislocation. This temporal disorientation echoes the profound loss of continuity experienced by those who lived through the war – a past that haunts the present and casts a long shadow on the future.

The contrasting perspectives of the characters further highlight the social ruptures caused by the war. Clarissa, clinging to pre-war values and traditions, represents the privileged upper class desperately trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy. Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran, embodies the trauma and disillusionment borne by those who witnessed the horrors firsthand. This stark juxtaposition reveals the chasm that now separates different segments of society, a consequence of the war's devastating impact.

Woolf's masterful use of the stream-of-consciousness technique allows readers to delve into the characters' raw and unfiltered emotions. Their internal monologues, chaotic and fragmented, mirror the psychological fractures caused by the war. Clarissa's anxieties, Septimus's paranoia – these intimate glimpses into their minds reveal the profound emotional ruptures that lie beneath the surface of everyday life.

Through its fragmented form, disjointed timeline, and contrasting perspectives, Mrs. Dalloway delivers a powerful and multifaceted portrait of a society grappling with the aftermath of a catastrophic event. The novel's exploration of rupture is not merely a historical artifact; it resonates deeply with our own fragmented times, reminding us of the enduring consequences of trauma and the ongoing struggle to find meaning in a world forever changed.

#tumbler of misc whisperings #areadersuncertaintyprinciple #mrs dalloway #virginia woolf #woolf works #stream of consciousness #septimus warren smith #shell shock #world war 1 #novel analysis

[bookalooza]

Female Voices in Literature: Celebrating Empowering Women Authors Every Student Should Read

In the rich tapestry of literature, female voices have contributed significantly, offering unique perspectives, compelling narratives, and profound insights. Students need to explore the works of empowering women authors whose words resonate with strength, resilience, and a celebration of womanhood. This article delves into the literary realm, highlighting women authors whose contributions have left an indelible mark on the literary landscape.

Introduction

A. The Importance of Female Voices

The literary world is enriched by its diverse voices, and female authors bring a distinct perspective that deserves recognition. Celebrating these voices is an acknowledgement of their talent and an exploration of the various narratives that shape our understanding of the world.

B. Empowerment Through Literature

The power of literature lies in its ability to empower and inspire. Through their works, female authors empower readers by addressing societal norms, challenging stereotypes, and offering narratives that resonate with women's experiences.

Empowering Women Authors, Every Student Should Read

A. Maya Angelou

Autobiography of a Diverse Life

Maya Angelou's autobiographical works, including "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," provide a poignant exploration of race, identity, and resilience. Her prose and poetry illuminate the complexities of being a woman of color in America.

B. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Feminism and African Identity

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, with novels like "Half of a Yellow Sun" and "Purple Hibiscus," explores the intersection of feminism and African identity. Her narratives challenge stereotypes while offering a nuanced portrayal of the female experience.

C. Toni Morrison

Unraveling the African American Experience

Toni Morrison's masterpieces, such as "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon," delve into the African American experience, weaving tales of strength, resilience, and the impact of historical injustices on women. Her prose is both lyrical and powerful.

D. Virginia Woolf

Stream of Consciousness and Feminist Perspectives

Virginia Woolf's innovative use of stream-of-consciousness writing in works like "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse" explores the inner lives of women. Her feminist perspectives and literary experimentation make her a key figure in modernist literature.

E. Jane Austen

Social Commentary and Feminine Agency

Jane Austen's novels, including "Pride and Prejudice" and "Emma," provide insightful social commentary and depict women exercising agency in a society that often limited their choices. Her wit and satire continue to resonate with readers.

F. J.K. Rowling

Empowering Through Fantasy

J.K. Rowling, with the "Harry Potter" series, not only captivates with magical storytelling but also empowers through themes of friendship, courage, and the strength of the female characters like Hermione Granger.

The Impact of Female Voices on Literary Canon

A. Shaping Cultural Narratives

The works of these empowering women authors have played a crucial role in shaping cultural narratives, challenging societal norms, and fostering a deeper understanding of the diverse experiences of women.

B. Expanding Perspectives

Students gain a broader perspective on the human experience by including female voices in the literary canon. Exposure to varied narratives contributes to empathy, tolerance, and a more inclusive worldview.

Integrating Female Authors into Educational Curricula

A. Diverse Reading Lists

Educational curricula should embrace diversity by incorporating works by female authors from different backgrounds and periods. Diverse reading lists contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of literature.

B. Encouraging Critical Analysis

Students should be encouraged to critically analyse the themes, characters, and societal commentary present in the works of female authors. This fosters a deeper appreciation for the impact of diverse voices on literature.

Conclusion

A. The Continued Relevance of Female Voices

In conclusion, celebrating empowering women authors in literature is a nod to their historical significance and an acknowledgement of their continued relevance. These voices continue to inspire, challenge, and shape the literary landscape for future generations.

B. Empowering Readers Through Words

Empowering women authors contributes not only to literature but also to readers' empowerment. Their words have the potential to instil a sense of strength, resilience, and understanding, making them essential reads for every student.

Publish your book now at www.bookalooza.com/newbook

[smokeyloki]

More thoughts on The Hours under the cut for mentions of a very unpleasant character/real person demise

The Hours film opens with the reading of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband. 

In The Hours, two people commit suicide by the end of the film and another character almost succeeds in doing it. 

I understand that in matters of this kind of death, these people shouldn’t be viewed as monsters.  They aren’t in a right frame of mind, and are not to be thought of as being fully culpable for their actions.  We cannot know a person’s soul or their thoughts, and we don’t know what drove them to that decision. 

But the act in of itself, person and situation aside, was revealed to me in a way I have never really grasped before; namely, that to kill oneself is a supreme act of selfishness, presumption, and a twisted pride.  Woolf writes to her husband and says that her greatest happiness was the time she was with him, and that she’s become a burden on his life, and he will go on without her, etc., etc. 

But what struck me was the audacity of it.  To presume that your current suffering will outweigh the suffering of your loved ones when you’re gone.  To presume to know how other people will feel about your absence, or how they feel about you right then.  That kind of pride that convinces you that your suffering is greater than yourself, your situation, God’s grace to see you through your suffering...

It isn’t a feel-good message at all, but if nothing else, this movie really showed me the ugliness and the selfishness that marks any suicide/suicide attempt.

#tw suicide #suicide #death #Mrs. Dalloway #The Hours #Virginia Woolf #things to pray about #analysis #film analysis #literary analysis

[vagueandominousvibes]

A couple of days ago, in a seminar on Franz Kafka, our lecturer said something that stuck with me: "We didn't have a choice in being born, so we have to learn to deal with the world"

Seeing the world in its current state, our lecturer's words don't seem all that optimistic. And yet I found them oddly comforting

I've thought about it, and I think this is why I found them so comforting:

My parents chose to have a child, and that child turned out to be me

They decided to shelter me, to make sure I didn't have to deal with the world — with politics, with activist movements, with everything that requires critical thinking — they were always supposed to be my wall of defence, and chew and digest the world for me

As a young adult, I've struggled to deal with the world. I hide. I'm scared and anxious and terrified of making mistakes and disappointing the people around me

I don't know how to "deal with the world"

But if this is something that can be learned — a skill, like knitting or drawing or skiing — then there's still hope

There's still a chance for me to learn — to write that book, to open that online bookshop, to get that apartment with that little kitchen and those green plants, to get that Norwegian Forest Cat and that Bernese Mountain Dog, to learn to bake red velvet cake, to make my own holiday traditions closer aligned with my own beliefs and values, to host exchange students, to create a home where nobody has to hide parts of themselves for fear of losing love and respect

There's still a chance for me to build a life I love

.

Kafka's The Trial is a pre-existential text. There's many ways to read it, but I'd like to emphasise this: the topic of change and resultant confusion

Most readings assume that Josef K, the protagonist, is in the right, and that the society around him is in the wrong — that Josef K is an anchor point of normalcy in a text of absurdity

But an existential reading does away with this assumption. An existential reading focuses on the difference — on Josef K's confusion, on his refusing to understand the people around him, on his refusing to accept the social laws

My partner suggested this could be read as neurodivergence, and I did also consider it. However, while it would be immensely meaningful to neurodivergent people to have that kind of representation, I'm hesitant to apply such a reading for two reasons:

I don't know enough about Kafka as a person, or his other works, to write that analysis;

and it would limit the understanding we gain of general life in Kafka's time period, if we assume that Josef K's confusion only represents neurodivergent confusion (I'm saying this as someone who's probably also somewhere on the scale of neurodivergence)

What we do know, is that Kafka was writing into the modernist tradition, in the early 20th century, between WWI and WWII. Modernist literature is confusing. It's absurd. Just look at James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, or Samuel Beckett's plays. Kafka might not be writing stream-of-consciousness, but he's still firmly grounded in Josef K's experience of reality, and that reality is as confusing and absurd as Joyce and Woolf's texts sometimes are

It's generally accepted that this is a reflection of the political and economical changes in the early 20th century. The world was changing quickly and radically from what it had been in the late 19th century. Social structures and social laws had to change to accommodate the new normalcy that was emerging, and to those who were used to what was before, this may very well have been a challenge. They may very well have been confused and refused to accept or understand that the world worked differently to how they had been told it would

.

I've seen people jokingly (and not so jokingly) compare 2016 and onwards to the early 20th century, but I don't think it's too far off

If we understand Kafka's time period to be one of quick and radical change, and of confusion, then I think we see some of that in our own time — at least for those of us in our mid-twenties or older. We were born into a world that promised us something different, and now we have to learn to deal with what we actually got

It's not necessarily pleasant. It's not necessarily straight-forward. Like Josef K struggles to accept the world around him, we might struggle to accept the world around us. Maybe "accept" isn't the right word in this context, because there are things we shouldn't have to accept. But acceptance of the situation as it is is the first step towards healing. When we know what we're dealing with, we can make the changes we want and need

And maybe that's the key to The Trial, to a world in upheaval: to learn to deal with the world, to get where we want, we have to first accept that this is how it is right now

#personal #kalh is on the loose #franz kafka #the trial #literary analysis

[skonnaris]

Books I’ve Read: 2006-2019

Alexie, Sherman - Flight

Anderson, Joan - A Second Journey

                          - An Unfinished Marriage

                          - A Walk on the Beach

                          - A Year By The Sea

Anshaw, Carol - Carry the One

Auden, W.H. - The Selected Poems of W.H. Auden

Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice

Bach, Richard - Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Bear, Donald R - Words Their Way

Berg, Elizabeth - Open House

Bly, Nellie - Ten Days in a Madhouse

Bradbury, Ray - Fahrenheit 451

                        - The Martian Chronicles

Brooks, David - The Road to Character

Brooks, Geraldine - Caleb’s Crossing

Brown, Dan - The Da Vinci Code

Bryson, Bill - The Lost Continent

Burnett, Frances Hodgson - The Secret Garden

Buscaglia, Leo - Bus 9 to Paradise

                         - Living, Loving & Learning

                         - Personhood

                         - Seven Stories of Christmas Love

Byrne, Rhonda - The Secret

Carlson, Richard - Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Carson, Rachel - The Sense of Wonder

                          - Silent Spring

Cervantes, Miguel de - Don Quixote

Cherry, Lynne - The Greek Kapok Tree

Chopin, Karen - The Awakening

Clurman, Harold - The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre & the 30s

Coelho, Paulo -  Adultery

                           The Alchemist

Conklin, Tara - The Last Romantics

Conroy, Pat - Beach Music

                    - The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son

                    - The Great Santini

                    - The Lords of Discipline

                    - The Prince of Tides

                    - The Water is Wide

Corelli, Marie - A Romance of Two Worlds

Delderfield, R.F. - To Serve Them All My Days

Dempsey, Janet - Washington’s Last Contonment: High Time for a Peace

Dewey, John - Experience and Education

Dickens, Charles - A Christmas Carol

                             - Great Expectations

                             - A Tale of Two Cities

Didion, Joan - The Year of Magical Thinking

Disraeli, Benjamin - Sybil

Doctorow, E.L. - Andrew’s Brain

                         - Ragtime

Doerr, Anthony - All the Light We Cannot See

Dreiser, Theodore - Sister Carrie 

Dyer, Wayne - Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life

                     - The Power of Intention

                     - Your Erroneous Zones

Edwards, Kim - The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

Ellis, Joseph J. - His Excellency: George Washington

Ellison, Ralph - The Invisible Man

Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Essays and Lectures

Felkner, Donald W. - Building Positive Self Concepts

Fergus, Jim - One Thousand White Women

Flynn, Gillian - Gone Girl

Follett, Ken - Pillars of the Earth

Frank, Anne - The Diary of a Young Girl

Freud, Sigmund - The Interpretation of Dreams

Frey, James - A Million Little Pieces

Fromm, Erich - The Art of Loving

                       - Escape from Freedom

Fulghum, Robert - All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Fuller, Alexandra - Leaving Before the Rains Come

Garield, David - The Actors Studion: A Player’s Place

Gates, Melinda - The Moment of Lift

Gibran, Kahlil - The Prophet

Gilbert, Elizabeth - Eat, Pray, Love

                            - The Last American Man

                            - The Signature of All Things

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader - My Own Words

Girzone, Joseph F, - Joshua

                               - Joshua and the Children

Gladwell, Malcom - Blink

                              - David and Goliath

                              - Outliers

                              - The Tipping Point

                              - Talking to Strangers

Glass, Julia - Three Junes

Goodall, Jane - Reason for Hope

Goodwin, Doris Kearnes - Team of Rivals

Graham, Steve - Best Practices in Writing Instruction

Gray, John - Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

Groom, Winston - Forrest Gump

Gruen, Sarah - Water for Elephants

Hannah, Kristin - The Great Alone

                          - The Nightingale

Harvey, Stephanie and Anne Goudvis - Strategies That Work

Hawkins, Paula - The Girl on the Train

Hedges, Chris - Empire of Illusion

Hellman, Lillian - Maybe

                         - Pentimento

Hemingway - Ernest - A Moveable Feast

Hendrix, Harville - Getting the Love You Want

Hesse, Hermann - Demian

                            - Narcissus and Goldmund

                            - Peter Camenzind

                            - Siddhartha

                            - Steppenwolf

Hilderbrand, Elin - The Beach Club

Hitchens, Christopher - God is Not Great

Hoffman, Abbie - Soon to be a Major Motion Picture 

                          - Steal This Book

Holt, John - How Children Fail

                  - How Children Learn

                 - Learning All the Time

                 - Never Too Late

Hopkins, Joseph - The American Transcendentalist

Horney, Karen - Feminine Psychology

                        - Neurosis and Human Growth

                        - The Neurotic Personality of Our Time

                        - New Ways in Psychoanalysis

                        - Our Inner Conflicts

                        - Self Analysis

Hosseini, Khaled - The Kite Runner

Hoover, John J, Leonard M. Baca, Janette K. Klingner - Why Do English Learners Struggle with Reading?

Janouch, Gustav - Conversations with Kafka

Jefferson, Thomas - Crusade Against Ignorance

Jong, Erica - Fear of Dying

Joyce, Rachel - The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

                       - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Kafka, Franz - Amerika

                      - Metamophosis

                      - The Trial     

Kallos, Stephanie - Broken For You  

Kazantzakis, Nikos - Zorba the Greek

Keaton, Diane - Then Again

Kelly, Martha Hall - The Lilac Girls

Keyes, Daniel - Flowers for Algernon

King, Steven - On Writing

Kornfield, Jack - Bringing Home the Dharma

Kraft, Herbert - The Indians of Lenapehoking - The Lenape or Delaware Indians: The Original People of NJ, Southeastern New York State, Eastern Pennsylvania, Northern Delaware and Parts of Western Connecticut

Kundera, Milan - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Lacayo, Richard - Native Son

Lamott, Anne - Bird by Bird

                         Word by Word

L’Engle, Madeleine - A Wrinkle in Time

Lahiri, Jhumpa - The Namesake

Lappe, Frances Moore - Diet for a Small Planet

Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird

Lems, Kristin et al  - Building Literacy with English Language Learners

Lewis, Sinclair - Main Street

London, Jack - The Call of the Wild

Lowry, Lois - The Giver

Mander, Jerry - Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

Marks, John D. - The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind         Control

Martel, Yann - Life of Pi

Maslow, Abraham - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

                              - Motivation and Personality

                              - Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences

                             - Toward a Psychology of Being                            

Maugham. W. Somerset - Of Human Bondage

                                        - Christmas Holiday

Maurier, Daphne du - Rebecca

Mayes, Frances - Under the Tuscan Sun

Mayle, Peter - A Year in Provence

McCourt, Frank - Angela’s Ashes

                          - Teacher man

McCullough, David - 1776

                                - Brave Companions

McEwan, Ian - Atonement

                      - Saturday

McLaughlin, Emma - The Nanny Diaries

McLuhan, Marshall - Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Meissner, Susan - The Fall of Marigolds

Millman, Dan - Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Moehringer, J.R. - The Tender Bar

Moon, Elizabeth - The Speed of Dark

Moriarty, Liane - The Husband’s Sister

                         - The Last Anniversary

                         - What Alice Forgot

Mortenson, Greg - Three Cups of Tea

Moyes, Jo Jo - One Plus One

                       - Me Before You 

Ng, Celeste - Little Fires Everywhere

Neill, A.S. - Summerhill

Noah, Trevor - Born a Crime

O’Dell, Scott - Island of the Blue Dolphins

Offerman, Nick - Gumption

O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey Into Night

                            A Touch of the Poet

Orwell, George - Animal Farm

Owens, Delia - Where the Crawdads Sing

Paulus, Trina - Hope for the Flowers

Pausch, Randy - The Last Lecture

Patchett, Ann - The Dutch House

Peck, Scott M. - The Road Less Traveled

                         - The Road Less Traveled and Beyond

Paterson, Katherine - Bridge to Teribithia

Picoult, Jodi - My Sister’s Keeper

Pirsig, Robert - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Puzo, Mario - The Godfather

Quindlen, Anna - Black and Blue

Radish, Kris - Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral

Redfield, James - The Celestine Prophecy

Rickert, Mary - The Memory Garden

Rogers, Carl - On Becoming a Person

Ruiz, Miguel - The Fifth Agreement

                     - The Four Agreements

                     - The Mastery of Love

Rum, Etaf - A Woman is No Man

Saint-Exupery, Antoine de - The Little Prince

Salinger, J.D. - Catcher in the Rye

Schumacher, E.F. - Small is Beautiful

Sebold, Alice - The Almost Moon

                       - The Lovely Bones

Shaffer, Mary Ann and Anne Barrows - The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Shakespeare, William - Alls Well That Ends Well

                                   - Much Ado About Nothing

                                   - Romeo and Juliet

                                   - The Sonnets

                                   - The Taming of the Shrew

                                   - Twelfth Night

                                   - Two Gentlemen of Verona

Sides, Hampton - Hellhound on his Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin

Silverstein, Shel - The Giving Tree

Skinner, B.F. - About Behaviorism

Smith, Betty - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Snyder, Zilpha Keatley - The Velvet Room

Spinelli, Jerry - Loser

Spolin, Viola - Improvisation for the Theater

Stanislavski, Constantin - An Actor Prepares

Stedman, M.L. - The Light Between Oceans

Steinbeck, John - Travels with Charley

Steiner, Peter - The Terrorist

Stockett, Kathryn - The Help

Strayer, Cheryl - Wild

Streatfeild, Dominic - Brainwash

Strout, Elizabeth - My Name is Lucy Barton

Tartt, Donna - The Goldfinch

Taylor, Kathleen - Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

Thomas, Matthew - We Are Not Ourselves

Thoreau, Henry David - Walden

Tolle, Eckhart - A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

                      - The Power of Now

Towles, Amor - A Gentleman in Moscow

                       - Rules of Civility

Tracey, Diane and Lesley Morrow - Lenses on Reading

Traub, Nina - Recipe for Reading

Tzu, Lao - Tao Te Ching

United States Congress - Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research in behavioral modification: Joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the ... Congress, first session, August 3, 1977

Van Allsburg, Chris - Just a Dream

                                - Polar Express

                                - Sweet Dreams

                                - Stranger

                                - Two Bad Ants

Walker, Alice - The Color Purple

Waller, Robert James - Bridges of Madison County

Warren, Elizabeth - A Fighting Chance

Waugh, Evelyn - Brideshead Revisited

Weir, Andy - The Martian

Weinstein, Harvey M. - Father, Son and CIA

Welles, Rebecca - The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood

Westover, Tara - Educated

White, E.B. - Charlotte’s Web

Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorien Gray

Wolfe, Tom - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Wolitzer, Meg - The Female Persuasion

Woolf, Virginia - Mrs. Dalloway

Zevin, Gabrielle - The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Zusak, Marcus - The Book Thief

[darlingvita]

Hi Kate ! First, happy belated birthday to our Pisces queen ;) Second, I have to make a presentation on Virginia Woolf (with my crush huhuhu) and since you know way more about her than me : what do you think are the most important aspects in her work ?? especially relating to her loves with women ??? most of what I find mostly glosses over these parts and it's annoying me so much. thank you anyway no matter what and again, happy belated birthday !! 💕💕💕

Thank you! 💕☺️

Firstly, doing a presentation on Virginia with your crush…legends only! But unfortunately I would be here all day if I tried to tackle that question and I’m not entirely sure how to give this answer justice in a succinct way. But what I will say is that her relationships with women shaped many of her works quite literally in her fictionalised portrayals of them (the most obvious ones being Orlando/Vita and Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse being a fictionalised version of her mother, but there are many others, including portrayals of her sister Vanessa, and the other important women in her life. There is a lot written about this though, which I’m sure you can find through research). To me, one of the most important aspects of, really, every single one of her works is her love of, and relationships with, women (romantically, and otherwise). Vanessa Curtis’ Virginia Woolf’s Women was a great analysis of this influence the main female relationships had in her life and work. There are the more obvious examples, like the kiss scene between Clarissa and Sally in Mrs Dalloway and of course the entirety of Orlando, but there’s a lot of lesbian subtext in To the Lighthouse and, because it’s me, and I love it more than anything, I’m gonna mention (yet again; I mention it every time) her “nice little story about Sapphism”, as she put it, Slater’s Pins Have No Points. I love that short story so much and it’s probably not going to be particularly relevant to your presentation but she did! that!

I also think her social commentary about marriage (and the inequality between men and women in relationships more generally) is fascinating and present in so much of her work i.e. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Voyage Out, her short stories like Lappin and Lapinova, and this is mentioned too in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas and basically….everything she’s ever written, and I would urge you to look into that if you can. I won’t go into more detail about that here, mostly because if I get started on that topic I really will never shut up.

It is particularly frustrating while researching her, I feel that, but there is a lot of information out there about the way women influenced her life and work if you search far enough (and wade through the terrible opinions you may stumble upon). I have read quite a good few JSTOR articles that have been wonderful. I unfortunately didn’t take note of which ones were the best but searching keywords should bring them up. And I have only read excerpts but Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer goes into all of this.

This is extremely vague because there’s a lotttt I could say, and I don’t have all the sources that I’ve read handy right now, but I hope you have fun researching and I hope your presentation goes well 💕

#but also as a disclaimer: #i did not study literature and my interest in virginia is mostly personal and more so from a historical and social perspective #rather than a literary one #so as much as i absolutely adore her work and it's incredibly important to me analysis of it isn't my speciality #but also thank u for the ask i always love an excuse to rant sldkfjgh #anonymous #answered

[queermediastudies]

Intertwined Stories on Homosexual Issues

The Hours is a drama film directed by Stephen Daldry. The movie was released in United States on December 18, 2002, and won Oscar Award in the same year. It tells the inextricable connection between three women in different eras. To be honest, it is a deeply depressing and shocked Montage movie, which shows the different reaction made by three heroines, Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughan, when facing same social and psychology pressure brought by gay and lesbian issues. By showing those stories, The Hours shows audiences how different people make their choice when facing death problems on homosexual issues: Escaping through death, meekly accepting, or getting rid of the pass. Although The Hours’s major concerns do not maintain colored gays or lesbian groups, it is a good movie which using Montage structure to guide its audiences to a broader real-life concept.

Virginia Woolf is a talented author, lived in a countryside in Britain in 1920s. She used to live in London, but finally settled down in the countryside in order to cure her illness. Virginia herself cannot stand for such a quiet life; she is eager for living in a busy city. This repressed country life made Virginia breathless, and her homosexual identity gradually revealed: she kissed her sister in her house. Being gay or lesbian was actually illegal in England at that time (Caitlin, 2015). I consider this kiss as the way Virginia recognizes and expresses herself in her repressed daily life, which is similar with the “coming out” process in homophile movement throughout the 1950 and into the 1960, when “the individual realization that one was homosexual, and the acknowledgment of this sexual identity to other gay people.”(Gross, 2002) Virginia’s self-conscious also start the plot that she persuaded her husband to move back to London latter in the movie. A plot at the beginning of Virginia’s story shows her fight ended in failure: She drowned herself into the river in the countryside. Perhaps Virginia’s homosexual identity isn’t recognized by the society, in the following years, she went back to the quiet countryside and suicide in despair.

Laura is a typical housewife with a lovely son. She lived in the Los Angeles in 1950s, shortly after the end of World War II, when men returned to ordinary life with the honor in battlefield. Unlike others, Laura seems to be laden with anxiety; she was trapped in her dully life. It was Virginia’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, resonated her to yearn for a new life style. When Laura’s friend came to visit her, she imitated Virginia and kiss her female friend. Her friend avoided contact with Laura latter on since homophobia, which makes Laura totally disappointed. She threw the unfinished birthday cake she made for her husband into the garbage can and wanted to give up her life as well. Laura wanted to suicide just like the story in Mrs. Dalloway. But in the end, she gave up and returned to her normal life. Laura has an intersectionality identity, not only as a white middle class lesbian, but also as a tender mother and a virtuous wife. In the heteronormativity concept in the society, Laura cannot only live for herself, she needs to be responsible for her family and fix into the family role, although they are contrary to her sexual orientation and personal willingness. Warner once stated how heterosexuality social mainstream shapes personal living way, “Het culture thinks of itself as the elemental form of human association, as the very model of intergender relations, as the indivisible basis of all community, and as the means of reproduction without which society wouldn't exist”, “Materialist thinking about society has in many cases reinforced these tendencies, inherent in heterosexual ideology, toward a totalized view of the social.” (Warner, 1993) Laura cannot ignore her child and husband’s expectation for her. Finally, Laura remade the birthday cake, celebrated birthday night with her husband, and continued her dully and hopeless life.

Relatively speaking, Clarissa Vaughan’s story is the best among three heroines. Clarissa is an editor who felt in love with Richard Brown, a gay writer with AIDS. Clarissa took good care of Richard every day, and considered that her life is meaningful only by staying around Richard. Richard, on the other hand, suffered from AIDS, disliked and scared by all his friends except Clarissa due to his disease. The only reason for him to keep alive is Clarissa. This type of living style is not what Clarissa and Relatively wanted, they just created cages for each other. The audiences can see how Clarissa wanted to get rid of it and started a new life, from the plot she cried alone in the kitchen. Finally, Richard jumped out of the window to stop Clarissa spending more time on him, and force Clarissa to start her new life. Although Clarissa was in heartbreaking sadness, she finally got rid of the past and started her new life.

Besides of the story, there are a lot of details and metaphors among the movie in order to make the it more lively and real to audiences. For example, Virginia’s sustained anxiety state and her unconscious action of biting the bottom of the pen when writing; Laura’s confused and unconfident mental state as well as the birthday ceremony cake she made twice; Clarissa’s messy hairstyle and her anger when Richard giving up himself. Although The Hours organized in Montage way, which lenses frequently switch form plots to plots, it brings a smooth viewing experience since the emotion between plots are identical and well organized. Those stories focused on the life of heroines, rather than any specific queer issues, which also claimed by Goltz et al, “‘To come out as me and not to highlight his sexuality, preferring to ‘talk about me, about my life, not about my queer life” (Goltz et al, 2016).

Although The Hours tells a great story of the death problems that queer people are facing among different period of time, it seems that its major concerns are all white people. The Hours failed to represent any living situation of black gay and lesbian people. While according to the report of UCLA, African-American take up about 12% of LGBTQ group nowadays. (The Williams Institute, 2019). The public’s losing attracted on colored skin people may cause them faced misrepresentative and misunderstanding. According to Ludmila Leiva’s words, “As a queer person who is also a person of color, watching television is a fraught experience for me. Constantly, I find myself searching for characters whose stories mirror my own and, repeatedly, I come up empty-handed. I am forced to accept the few, tiny fragments reflecting my own lived experiences that I can find scattered across today’s TV offerings, but I am tired. I long desperately for television writers, producers, and networks to prioritize the centering of human experiences beyond the conventional, and I know I am not alone.” (Ludmila, 2017)

Obviously, the experience of queer people in color is different than the white, but only a few people notice it in TV and film industry. Existing media works cannot represent them in the correct way, which will create unfair treatment toward those minority groups. The phenomenon of lacking colored queer concepts in The Hours and other media projects still need time to improve.

As a Chinese citizen, I must say that this movie shocked me a lot. CPC is harmonizing Chinese online environment, concepts like LGBTQ rarely appeared in Chinese public view. It is scary how many Chinese male and female actually living their daily life just like Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, or Clarissa Vaughan. From my personal perspective, the most desperate story in The Hours is Laura’s one, she cannot ignore her child and husband’s expectation for her, thus she needs to keep living along with dull and hopeless life in the rest of her life. Happened to know that from Chinese perspective, Confucianism create a great heteronormativity for both man and woman to obey their role.

In general, I think The Hours is a great film to appreciation and analysis. Montage itself is a great way to guide the audience's mood and enlighten them to think more. By using Montage, the director maximizing the tension while guaranteed the integrity of his film. Moreover, the juxtaposition and intersection of Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughan’s stories cause tension suspense throughout the entire film, and shows the relationship between each character in different places and different time period when facing the similar problem. In the end of the film when all three stories come to the end, the sense of shock comes continuously to force me think more outside the movie’s concept into the reality.

  Works Cited

Gallagher, C. (2019). Was It Illegal to Be Gay In 1920s England Or Is Thomas Barrow's Struggle On 'Downton' Just About Cultural Pressure?. [online] Bustle. Available at: https://www.bustle.com/articles/62849-was-it-illegal-to-be-gay-in-1920s-england-or-is-thomas-barrows-struggle-on-downton [Accessed 27 Oct. 2019].

Gross, L. P. (2002). Up from invisibility: lesbians, gay men, and the media in America. New York: Columbia University Press.

Goltz, D. B., Zingsheim, J., Mastin, T., & Murphy, A. G. (2016). Discursive negotiations of Kenyan LGBTI identities: Cautions in cultural humility. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 9(2).

Leiva, L. (2019). TV Is Getting More Progressive, But It's Still Failing Queer People of Color. [online] Bustle. Available at: https://www.bustle.com/p/tv-is-getting-more-progressive-but-its-still-failing-queer-people-of-color-64520 [Accessed 25 Oct. 2019].

Warner, M. (Ed.). (1993). Fear of a queer planet: Queer politics and social theory (Vol. 6). U of Minnesota Press.

Williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu. (2019). The Williams Institute. [online] Available at: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/visualization/lgbt-stats/?topic=SS#demographic [Accessed 30 Oct. 2019].

#QueerMedia #The Hours #coming out #heteronormativity #intersectionality identity #AIDS #Virginia Woolf #Laura Brown #Clarissa Vaughan #social mainstream

[liliesofpur-i-ty]

what i read in 2017

not for school:

Nelly Sachs, Glowing Enigmas

Gerard de Nerval, Aurélia & Other Writings

     Selected Writings

Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

     Machiavelli and Us

Stefan Zweig, The Chess Story

Pascal Quignard, The Hatred of Music

Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Dora

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz

     Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

     The Open: Man and Animal

     Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm

Jacques Derrida, Aporias

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

     Complete Stories

     The Spider’s House

Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child

     Liquidation

     Fiasco

     Fatelessness

Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits

João Gilberto Noll, Quiet Creature on the Corner

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

Stephane Mallarmé, Tomb for Anatole

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

John Berger, Selected Essays

     Ways of Seeing

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

Nelly Sachs, The Seeker and Other Poems

     O the Chimneys: Selected Poems Including the Verse Play Eli

Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Correspondence

Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Endnotes 1: Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the 20th CEntury

Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

     Diving into the Wreck

     A Wild Patience Has Taken Me this Far: Poems 1978-1981

Giacomo Leopardi, Canti

Rosmarie Waldrop, Gap Gardening

Pascal Quignard, Abysses

Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils

Edmond Jabès, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arm a Tiny Book

Louis Zukovsky, “A”

John Williams, Stoner

Gabriela Mistral, Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations

H. D., Collected Poems: 1912-1944

Georges Bernanos, Mouchette

Georg Büchner, Lenz

Paul Celan, Collected Prose

Pascal Quignard, Silent Crossing

David Graber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Liu Yichang, Intersection

Ursula K LeGuin, 

– A Wizard of Earthsea

– The Tombs of Atuan

– The Farthest Shore

– Tehanu

– The Other Wind

– The Lathe of Heaven

Emannuel Levinas, Existence and Existent

– On Escape

Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities

Anna Banti, Artemesia

Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship

for school:

seminar:

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

     Gay Science

Mann, Death in Venice

Jung Contra Freud

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

James Joyce, Dubliners

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Lincoln, Dred Scott, Speeches, other constitution stuff

DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

Melville, Bartleby

James, The Europeans

Flannery O’Connor stories

Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche, God is Dead

Hans Jonas, essays

math:

Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

    The Origin of Geometry

Derrida, Husserl’s Origin of Geometry

language:

A. L. Kennedy, Original Bliss

Stanley Elkin

William H. Gass

Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass

Robin Robertson

Wallace Stevens

Poe

#personal

[irontinystar]

Do you have any book recommendations?

I DO actually but you’ll find out I’m a pretty boring person who only reads very angsty and sad books,,

anyway!!! here we go!!!!

Artemisia by Anna Banti

(This one is actually one of my favorite books)

“Artemisia is a book about the process of artistic creation.Much in Gentileschi’s life marked her out as a victim – rape at the age of 18, a forced marriage to a man she did not love and, a powerful, patriarchal father,  Orazio Gentileschi, who failed to value her artistic genius.  But Gentileschi did not accept the status of victim, in the years between 1610 and 1650,  she produced over 50 paintings that have established her as one of the great painters of all time.She gave up everything – “all tenderness, all claim to feminine virtues” to dedicate herself solely to painting. Sacrifices that Anna Banti, herself an artist, fully understands and captures in this amazing novel.”

Letter to a Child Never Born by Oriana Fallaci

(Big tears over this one)

“It is written as a letter by a young professional woman (presumably Fallaci herself) to the fetus she carries in utero; it details the woman's struggle to choose between a career she loves and an unexpected pregnancy, explaining how life works with examples of her childhood, and warning him/her about the unfairness of the world.”

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoj

(I’m a slut for Russian literature :/ )

“One of the finest novellas ever written[2], The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia and his sufferings and death from a terminal illness.”

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoj

(A slut, as I said)

“The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the "animal excesses" and "swinish connection" governing the relation between the sexes.”

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

(tbh it is a little boring, unless you’re already bored more than the book itself if that makes any sense)

“The novel addresses Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host that evening. With an interior perspective, the story travels forward and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.”

These are the ‘Books I had to read for my academic preparation but that actually turned out to be compelling’.

If you actually wanted to read something a little happier or at least not so angsty you asked the wrong person because I’m a masochist this is all I can think at the moment:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

(Yes, I know, but the book is actually so good I couldn’t stop reading!!)

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

(Actually, this will make you cry too, but it’s oh so good)

“Set in Greece, tells the story of a love affair between Achilles and Patroclus.[4] Miller was inspired by the account of the two men from Homer's Iliad and said she wanted to explore who Patroclus was and what he meant to Achilles.”

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuinston

(This is all fluff and happy things and you’ll fall in love with every scene I swear)

“Red, White & Royal Blue follows Alex, a fictionalized First Son who finds himself in a fight with Henry, an English prince, and is forced to befriend him for PR reasons, developing romantic feelings for him along the way.”

Thank you for the ask, anon!!! Hope you’ll find something you enjoy<3

#this ask made me realise i only read depressing books oh my god that explains a LOT about my mental health rn :/ #im so sorry anon for real #i was SO excited about this ask and then was like.. i only read sad books #replies #me #artemisia gentileschi #leo tolstoy #virginia woolf #mrs dalloway #pride and prejudice #jane austen #the song of achilles #red white and royal blue #books recommendations

[stand-up-and-fight-daleks]

I was tagged by  @onbanksofanamelessriver. Thank you!

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

I have no idea. Probably some children’s book that’s falling/fallen apart... Pelle Svanslös maybe, or something by Richard Scarry? 

If we’re talking my current shelf, I think it’d be Harry Potter.

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?

My current reads are Viipurin Kaunotar (the Beauty of Vyborg) by Kaari Utrio, which is a historical romance I read when I’m outside with my cat, and Iso suomen kielioppi (Big book of Finnish grammar) which I’m reading for an exam.

My last read was poetry collection by Wisława Szymborska. I read it for uni poetry analysis course, but I really liked it and I can recommend it.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to read next, but possibly Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf or All the Light We Cannot see by Anthony Doerr. Or I could start my Wheel of Time re-read. Idk.

3. Which book does everyone like and you hated?

The Wind in the Willows is irritating drivel. Also I have never been able to force myself through more that two Narnia books, and even that was a struggle.

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?

Shakespeare’s plays. I really should (and I think I’m going to have to read Hamlet for my literature course) but I also well and truly hate reading anything in play format, so...

5. Which book are you saving for “retirement?”

I don’t understand the concept of planning that far ahead.

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

I usually wait till the end, but sometimes I get impatient and take a quick glance and hope that I see nothing too spoilery.

7. Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

Usually waste of ink and paper, but if I ever help anyone with their book I’ll sure as hell demand to be acknowledged .

8. Which book character would you switch places with?

I read way too much fantasy/historical fiction for this question, I’m not planning on giving up modern medicine or running water any day soon. It would be nice to visit Middle Earth though, especially Second Age Khazad-dûm and Rivendell.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

Well, the Order of the Phoenix reminds me of trying no to cry - and failing that, trying not to cry noticeably - while sitting in a car with my dad and little sister on a family holiday in Denmark.

Also the general concept of Jack and the Beanstalk reminds me of the agony I put my grandfather and great aunt through, because I demanded that the story be read to me, twice a day or more if possible, every time I was visiting when I was little. I knew the story by heart, so they couldn’t get away with trying to skip even a single word, and I didn’t care for suggestions that we might choose a different book every once in a while. 

I think they were both very happy when I learned to read.

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

I got a cookbook printed in 1943 from my grandma when I asked her for a slightly older gingerbread recipe (which would have all the spices listed separately, as opposed to just ‘gingerbread spice mix’). That was slightly older, all right.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

I gave my copy of the Philosopher’s Stone to my cousin so that she could practice reading English. Also I threw out my copy of the Hobbit because my cat peed on it and I decided I don’t like it that much. Do those count?

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?

I don’t carry around a lot of books these days, and definitely not the same book, so I think we are talking something of a Nummelan Ponitalli variety. (It’s a series of Finnish horse-y books with about a million parts that I used to read when I was younger.)

13. Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?

Nope. Häräntappoase (’an Ox-killing weapon’, a youth novel by Anna-Leena Härkönen) and Pojat (’Boys’, a WWII story featuring teen boys by Paavo Rintala) are still utter garbage. Also it’s ten years later for me now and Coetzee’s Boyhood is still virtually unreadable. What he got his Nobel prize for I’ll never understand.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

Shop receipts older than I am.

15. Used or brand new?

Whichever is cheaper.

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

Can’t he be both?

I haven’t read much King though, I don’t really care for horror. (Read = I’m a wimp.) But I still have the Dark Tower-series on my list of future reading. I’ve read the first two and I liked them, but somehow I never got around to finishing the series.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

Agatha Christie’s works as a rule are better as a play/TV-series/movie, and same goes for Sherlock Holmes. Though it should probably be mentioned that I have negative interest in reading any detective stuff, and that might influence my opinion somewhat.

Also the Hobbit book and the Hobbit movies both have some glaring flaws, but on balance, I think I might prefer the movies.

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

They never ever ever should’ve made the 2007 Beowulf. I can’t even remember what happened in it, I just remember the terrifying uncanny valley Polar Express from hell -style it was shot with. Unwatchable. Also Eragon the book was a horrifying mistake, and Eragon the movie was even worse.

And it’s not that they shouldn’t have been filmed, but unfortunately the Harry Potter movies were grossly underwhelming at best. Same goes for the film adaptations of Täällä Pohjantähden alla (Under the North Star) by Väinö Linna.

19. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

Even thinking about Enid Blyton’s the Famous Five still makes me crave tomatoes. Otherwise, not really.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?

I rarely get book advice, and tend to forget about it almost immediately if I do.

Tagging @heartoferebor @cestpasfaux24601 @mainecoon76 @miseryrun @alkonjonossa if you feel like doing this

#about me

[areadersuncertaintyprinciple]

Does the narrator of Mrs. Dalloway take sides?

The narrator of Mrs. Dalloway is a third-person omniscient narrator who can access the thoughts and memories of different characters, such as Clarissa, Septimus, Peter, and others. However, the narrator does not always remain neutral or objective. 

Sometimes, the narrator expresses opinions or judgments that reflect the perspective of a particular character, such as Clarissa’s admiration for Sir William Bradshaw or her resentment of Miss Kilman. Other times, the narrator seems to have a distinct voice and attitude that is not aligned with any of the characters, such as when the narrator criticizes Sir William Bradshaw’s arrogance or Miss Kilman’s self-righteousness.

The narrator of "Mrs. Dalloway" does not explicitly take sides between Clarissa and Septimus, but rather shows the different aspects of the human condition in the post-war society. The narrator's ability to shift seamlessly between Clarissa's stream of consciousness and Septimus's fragmented thoughts without judgment allows readers to immerse themselves in the inner worlds of both characters. It's this compassionate portrayal that brings out the shared struggles and isolation they experience, despite their differing approaches to dealing with their trauma.  

While the narrator presents Clarissa's life as one of privilege and societal acceptance, it also reveals the underlying emptiness and dissatisfaction she feels. Her fixation on social appearances and her suppression of her true desires are portrayed with empathy, rather than judgment. 

Similarly, the narrator's portrayal of Septimus's mental breakdown is one of compassion and understanding. His hallucinations and paranoia are not dismissed as mere delusions, but rather presented as the consequences of war trauma and societal neglect. The narrator's sensitivity to Septimus's inner world allows the reader to connect with his character, despite the challenges of comprehending his mental state. 

In conclusion, Woolf's narrative technique, using stream-of-consciousness and alternating perspectives, serves not to take sides but to offer a multifaceted exploration of human experiences. This approach enriches the novel by inviting readers to empathize with both Clarissa and Septimus, fostering a deeper understanding of their inner conflicts and the broader societal issues at play. 

#tumbler of misc whisperings #areadersuncertaintyprinciple #mrs dalloway #virginia woolf #woolf works #septimus warren smith #clarissa dalloway #novel analysis

[mamondae-blog]

Shannon Gitte Diaz

Bibliography Entry:

Publication date: 1999

Publisher: ST MARTINS PRESS

Author: Michael Cunningham

Genre: Literary Fiction

Retrieved from http://www.powells.com/book/the-hours-9780312243029/18-0

Introduction:

Michael Cunningham was raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York City. He is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World (Picador) and Flesh and Blood. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories, and he is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award. The Hours was a New York Times Bestseller, and was chosen as a Best Book of 1998 by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 movie of the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore.

Summary:

After opening on a melancholy note with Virginia Woolf's willful death by drowning, The Hours branches out into three interconnected plotlines.

In one plotline, Clarissa Vaughan—a middle-aged book editor living in 1990s New York—gets ready to throw a party. A beloved friend of hers is about to be awarded a distinguished literary prize, and Clarissa is arranging a private celebration where he'll be congratulated by supporters and close personal friends. Clarissa's friend Richard Brown is dying from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses, and when Clarissa checks in on him in the late morning, she can tell that he's having one of his bad days. When she comes back later to help him get dressed for the party, things take a tragic turn: Richard slides himself out of a fifth-story window and is killed. Rather than throwing a party for Richard, Clarissa now finds herself making arrangements for his funeral. In the last hours of the evening, she collects Richard's elderly mother, Laura Brown, and offers her a late-night meal.

In another plotline, that same Laura Brown is still a young woman living in a sunny, pristine suburb of Los Angeles. She wakes on the morning of her husband's birthday and eventually musters up the energy to get out of bed and face the day. Throughout the morning, Laura and her three-year-old son, Richie, make a birthday cake together. It doesn't turn out as Laura hoped, and after receiving an unexpected visit from a neighbor, Laura dumps the cake in the garbage and starts again. In the afternoon, Laura leaves Richie with a neighbor for a few hours so that she can "run some errands," by which we mean she steals away for a few hours so that she can enjoy some rare time alone. Laura checks herself into a hotel, then curls up to read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Back at home that evening; Laura presides over her husband's birthday dinner. Later, once Richie is asleep, she and her husband get ready to head to bed. As Laura fiddles around in the bathroom, she thinks about how easy it would be to swallow a fatal number of sleeping pills and slip away from her life.

In the novel's third plotline, Virginia Woolf wakes up with an idea for the first line of a novel. After getting some coffee and checking in with her husband, she spends the morning drafting the first pages of the book that will eventually become Mrs. Dalloway. In the afternoon, Virginia takes a walk and ponders her heroine's fate. Back at home, she lends a hand in the printing room, where her husband, Leonard, is preparing another book for publication. Virginia is expecting a visit from her sister, niece, and nephews, and soon the clan arrives. The children have found an injured bird in the yard, and before they all come inside, Virginia helps them to make a little deathbed for the creature. In the early evening, after her extended family members are gone, Virginia slips outside for another walk. She heads toward the train station with a half-baked plan to run off to London for a few hours. She buys a ticket, and then decides to walk around the block while she waits for the next train to arrive. As she does, she sees Leonard coming toward her. Playing it cool, she keeps her plans to herself and walks home. Back at home, as bedtime approaches, Virginia makes a final decision about her novel. Instead of killing off her heroine, Mrs. Dalloway, she decides that "a deranged poet, a visionary" will die instead.

Critical Analysis:

It was indeed that this novel was a great novel of all time as it was a recipient of a lot of award. After reading the summary of the said novel, the curiosity of mine upon how this novel was considered as the novel of all time and how this novel was a recipient of a lot of award in America has been answered as the technicality of the author, how great the interconnection was presented in every plotline. One story with three interconnected plotlines is quite a tricky thing to use considering the great outcome and sacrificing your name in one novel is an enormous thing to be noted. The story gives a lot of moral lessons as it tackles a lot of social issue such as the LGBT and also the HIV/AIDS victim. The story had this moral lesson to those writers who didn’t have this chance to be a productive in their field of expertise because of lack of confidence. The novel is very technical in a way that the author used a plot twist and a surprise thingy to his reader. This story will tell how great Michael Cunningman is and how talented he is in the field of literary writing.

[rottenappleusach]

Psychoanalytic Dualism of Mrs. Dalloway´s characters

José Garrido Geraldine Lara Virginia Woolf’s ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway’’ portrays an interesting post World War I society in which characters are being constantly influenced by the consequences of this historical event. Not only are the changes imposed by governments shaping our characters’ minds and personalities, but also the development of their own internal world. How they metabolize the direct or indirect exposition to death of that period is going to be an important process to the self of the beings. As we have to deal with these factors of the conscious and unconscious of the mind, it results wise to psychoanalyze the characters’ behaviour in order to comprehend and illustrate more profoundly certain interpretations. Through Freud’s ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’’ we are going to understand the instinctive drives manifested in Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren, which represent a relationship of dualism that clarifies the Freudian notions of Thanatos and Eros....

Through years, different types of criticism has been created in order to analyse literature in an effective way, this is to say, avoiding fallacies. One important school is Psychoanalysis that maintains the main characteristics that Freud has studied. Psychoanalytic literary criticism is understood as a tool that helps us discover and understand the reflection of the author’s most hidden desires and anxieties that are repressed by the conscious mind, inside a particular text. Freud, at first, bonded all human behaviour to the sexual instinct (‘‘Eros’’), but he realised that there was also another human natural instinct as a counterpart of the previous: the death drive (‘‘Thanatos’’). This way, the dichotomy between self-preservation and self-destruction is proposed as a constant identity struggle that, in literature, commonly ends with one of the two sides triumphing.

Jacques Lacan also refers to this idea that postulated Freud, but he centres the idea of psychoanalysis in four different perspectives: The Drive, the Unconscious, Repetition Compulsion and Transference. For our essay, the different conceptions of drive are important, thus are necessary to clarify. The notion of drive differs from Freud’s, in that Lacan’s drive is not a mean to accomplish satisfaction but to circle round the object, creating a repetitive enjoyable movement. Furthermore, Lacan’s drive presents a dual bond between the symbolic and the imaginary and not in opposition, both belonging to the same type of drive. As to Lacan drive is excessive and repetitive, all drives are destructive, so part of the Thanatos.

The death drive (Thanatos) pursues the self returning to an inorganic state, and as Julia Kristeva implies in her work ‘‘Black Sun’’, ‘‘he [Freud] considers the death drive as an intrapsychic manifestation of a phylogenetic going back to inorganic matter. Nevertheless… it is possible to note… the strength of the disintegration of bonds within several psychic structures and manifestations. Furthermore, the presence of masochism, the presence of negative therapeutic reaction… prompt one to accept the idea of a death drive that, … would destroy movements and bonds’’ (Kristeva 16-17). Here we notice that this perception indicates that there are two different death drives, one in the psyche manifested to the outside as a violent instinct, and the other manifested to the inner self, self-destructive. This last one can result in an accumulation and cultivation of death drive, and Kristeva questions if this process could be erotized by the self, being implicitly part of the pleasure principle and leading to a constant change of the satisfaction object.

Freud’s concepts of Thanatos and Eros are present in the characters of ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway’’ since they behave according to inner forces that propel them to do so. In the case of Septimus Warren Smith, it is important to say that he is a veteran soldier that is shell-shocked by the impact of World War I because one friend of his, Evans, was killed there and Septimus saw it. Before the war, he was a normal person and he liked poetry. But after that he became a numb person. Moreover he is becoming mad and has different kinds of hallucinations. At the time of the story, Septimus and his wife Lucrezia are waiting for a doctor in an apartment, who is going to treat Septimus’ problems. They both pass through a very lovely moment but then Septimus throws himself out the window and dies.

First, Freud’s Thanatos is highly related to the death instinct and to the self-destruction of the person. This is explicitly clear at the end of the work with Septimus death. Second, this sudden personality change after war is related to the Unconscious mind, proposed by Lacan, in which the repressed feelings change the way in which a person behaves. Also this is shown in the form of automatic thoughts that are the ones that appear without any apparent cause, which are represented by the desire of death at the end of the story. Moreover, the Lacan’s Repetition Compulsion concept is also present since, as the name says, Septimus repeated in his mind several things that happened in the war that made him feel distressed to the point he turns mad and suffers hallucinations which are also an important behavioural characteristic of this kind of phenomenon. This character present an extreme case of cultivation of death drive, and Kristeva’s notion of erotization of it seems possible as Septimus is always looking for the pleasure and liberation of death, re-encountering with his dead friend.

In the case of Clarissa Dalloway, Freud’s Eros is dominant. She had a strong relation with the life instinct. It has to do with solidarity and true love. Also she tries to relate people with each other because it is a pleasure for her, and this can be seen in the fact that she is giving a party to a high number of people.

“Every time she gave a party she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that everyone was unreal in one way; much more real in another. It was, she thought, partly their clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary ways, partly the background, it was possible to say things you couldn't say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to go much deeper” (Virginia Woolf, 134).

However, Clarissa is also affected by the World War I since she saw her sister being killed, so two of the Four fundamental principles of Lacan are present: Transference and the Drive Theory. The first is related to the reproduction of emotions related to past events since she constantly sees the changes that the war brings to society, and more importantly, she every now and then thinks about her sister. The second one is related to a negative state of tension created when some psychological needs are not satisfied. This is shown in the work through the Clarissa’s pessimistic way of seeing things because she is mostly interested in her own social gratification.

To contrast the ideas of different literary analytic schools, we want to talk about the Marxist criticism. The relation between this with Psychoanalysis is that both look for information inside the text but the difference is that Marxism tries to see things that exist outside the text represented in it, whereas Psychoanalysis tries to look for inner things that happen inside individuals represented in the work. Then, “Mrs. Dalloway” can also be analysed from a Marxist point of view: Clarissa Dalloway is disinterested with the “Eros” conception, but she behave in that specific way because of the individuals’ roles inside the society in which she is immersed where she is somehow obligated to do certain things. On the other hand, Septimus is mentally different to the rest of the society and he cannot comply with the personal established roles inside it, so he cannot find a viable alternative for the curse of his life because he has been rejected by his peers.

These ideas can be exemplified in Eagleton’s chapter “Form and Content”. Special attention is put to the form, meaning, and style of the work where context is important since it determines the way in which the story is understood. It is important to notice the society in which this story takes place has an established ideology, defined as “forms of social consciousness” (Eagleton 3), about the social roles of people. As context determines form, which is understood as “a complex unity of at least three elements: . . . literary history of forms, . . . certain dominant ideological structures, and . . . relations between author and audience” (Eagleton 12); both characters can be analysed from this perspective. Clarissa is a woman that behaves according to the dominant ideology of the period of time in which she is living, that the reader will understand if he/she is aware of the context. Although she feels the oppression of society, she is still part of the world she constantly critiques. Besides, Septimus is obviously affected by the World War I and it triggered a behavioural change in him. When the reader knows that, he/she can understand why he behaves in the way he does, because it contradicts the dominant ideology of that time since he is labelled as a mad man.

To conclude, it is important to understand that Psychoanalysis covers different areas of the conscious and unconscious of the mind, taking always beings and their internal worlds as the main object of study. The human instinctive deciphers a major part of characters when we need to analyse them. When a narration does not present tangible characters, we have to notice that the interpretation will focus on the author, who, despite its unwillingness, would reflect its own drive and satisfaction. If the focus of the analysis is not centred in any being but rather epoch, community or social environment, Marxist perspective is always useful to comprehend the outside elements that influence a literary work. Despite we do not mention equilibrium between the Eros and Thanatos in this work, it is always possible. Indeed, a ‘‘normal’’ person would be someone that has reached the equilibrium between these two instinctive desires. In literature, flat (simple) characters are often found with one of both sides more dominant than the other, but it is important to understand that the real world does not work as if it was black or white, nor does round (complex) characters.

Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary criticism. London: Routledge, 2006.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

1961.

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1989.

Lacan, Jacques. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. W.W. Norton, 1998

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. South Australia: University of Adelaide, 2015

#USACH #TheRottenApple #essays

[thepaigeguide-blog]

I did it! I got accepted into the University of Sheffield to study Law. I am so excited to read Law and get back into academia. I got an A* in English Literature, I never expected that. I was hoping for a B in Lit so that really surprised. Honestly, I really enjoyed writing in my English exams. We had a poetry, drama and unseen prose and poetry paper. For the poetry, the Paradise Lost extract was lovely but the part B question was not phrased great. It was something about Milton's presentation of a fallen world. I discussed Adam and Eve's fall as well as Satan's thirst for power. I think the context and analysis went well because I linked it to the English Civil War! The 60 mark question I picked for Phillip Larkin and Carol Ann Duffy was the theme of time!! What a lovely question. I compared Larkin's 'First Sight' to Duffy's 'Stafford Afternoons' and argued about the teenagers journey into adulthood. Then I compared Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb' to Duffy's 'Disgrace', which made a lovely contrast for similarities and differences for the theme of time. For the drama paper, we studied Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and compared Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus' and Prebble's Enron. The Tempest was a nice question. It was on relationships but it was a statement which was easy to argue for and against. I talked about Caliban's relationship with the island and the supernatural. Especially the part "Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not". That is my favourite quote from the play, it is so magical. Then I talked about Miranda and Prospero's typical father-daughter relationship in Jacobean England. The Faustus and Enron question was on the theme of greed! WJEC couldn't have picked a better theme. So I did the greed for wealth and greed for knowledge. I said that greed for wealth is worse than greed for knowledge. The unseen prose was Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway' or 'To the Lighthouse' and then there was Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. Of course I picked Dorian Gray. The extract from Dorian Gray was amazing. So much beautiful imagery and good for context on the Aesthetic Movement. The unseen poem I chose was 'Spring' by Thomas Carew, which was a dream poem. It was good for biblical, natural and wintry imagery and excellent for evaluation and didactic messages. I will miss English Literature but it will always be my hobby. I got an A* in Philosophy and Ethics, which I am thrilled about because it is my favourite subject of all time! I was really panicking about Philosophy and Ethics. The Religious Language question was an absolute dream. The basis of the question was on analogy but it was an argumentative statement and I love getting a debatable question on a paper because you can write more and argue both ways. It was lovely like 'religious language only makes sense through analogy'. I talked about analogy, symbol, Wittgenstein's language games (fave theory), empiricism, verification principle and eschatological verification! So you could say that it does make sense through analogy but for others it makes sense through analogy. Then I also used the Vienna Circle's verification principle that it doesn't make sense at all because it cannot be empirically verified. There was a 35 mark question on reincarnation on the Philosophy paper and it really knocked my confidence. I put everything I knew and luckily it was alright. I've learned with exams you have to take a risk and put something down even if you are unsure. This reincarnation question was not worded well. I would have loved it more if it was a debate question because it only said something like 'assess the philosophical problems of reincarnation'. The Ethics wasn't too brill either but there was James Lovelock's approach on the environment was a lovely question! However, I also did the conscience question on Erich Fromm, which I really didn't like. And I got a B in Media Studies, which was amazing too! Strange but I thought I failed English Lit and Philosophy and Ethics and was relying on Media to get an A. So didn't get my grade for that but I think it's still great! So doing all that work for my A Levels was so worth it! Warmest wishes, Paige :)

#alevels #resultsday #university #sheffield #law #studying #determination #philosophy #ethics #english literature #Media #fun

[rathertoofondofbooks]

  Today I’m thrilled to be kicking off the blog tour for Kay Landale’s The Comfort of Others and am very excited to be sharing an interview I’ve done with Kay.

Please tell my readers a little bit about yourself and your novel

The Comfort Of Others is my sixth novel. It tells the story of the friendship between an elderly woman, Minnie, and an eleven year old boy, Max. Both have issues that they need to come to terms with, and the novel is about how they approach that.

I live in Oxfordshire, am married and have four fledged children between the ages of nineteen and twenty four. When I’m not writing or reading I’m mostly walking or running, and my labradoodle Rocco is with me for all of the above – his favourite spot is beneath my writing desk.

I’m reading The Comfort of Others at the moment and am finding it very moving – in particular the way you show the loneliness of Max and Minnie, and the way it’s possible to find friends in the places you’d least expect. What inspired you to write it?

I’m so pleased that you are finding it moving – thank you.

Minnie was the character I started with. I was interested in portraying someone who has not lived the life she wanted to life, and who has been stigmatised by shame and secrecy. I wanted to explore how someone who was basically vulnerable and sinned against can manoeuvre themselves into a position where they see themselves as wholly at fault. I also wanted to think about how time can change the perspective by which something is viewed, and Rosemount was a means of ‘fastening’ Minnie into the period in which it all happened.

I was very conscious that Minnie wouldn’t open up to an adult and so I wanted to explore how a child – with a child’s unerring accuracy for truth – might be able to win her trust. Max is watchful; he is frequently just on the outside of things, and it was this shared quality which became the premise for their friendship.

I’m finding myself getting quite emotional at some of the things Max says but clearly doesn’t understand yet, but as an adult I see the bigger picture. I’m getting similar emotions coming up whilst reading Minnie’s story – from the way she’s looking back on her life and seeing things anew. Both characters feel like real people to me and I know I’m going to miss them when I finish reading. How did you find writing from the perspective of a young boy, and of an older lady?

I loved writing Max and Minnie.

Minnie came to me almost fully formed. I had such a strong sense of her girlhood – her exuberance, her zest for life – and of how her mother found that so very difficult. The emotional truth of her adult life also felt very immediate to me; her total withdrawal, her bruised reflections and her sadness that she has been so effectively snuffed out by her experiences.

I really enjoy writing from a child’s perspective. Most of my books contain this as a feature. What I loved about Max from the start was his desire to please; whether it’s his mother with her startling hair colours, the old man who gives him the dahlias, or Mrs Philips with her budgie and her buttered brazils. He is constantly trying to piece together the implications of his mother’s actions – which is the same as Minnie when she was a girl – and that kind of watchfulness was a very immersive writing experience.

How did you first come to be a writer?

When I was a child I always wanted to be a writer, and upon leaving university, I refined that into working with words, which I thought made a bit more (necessary) financial sense. I worked as a copywriter for a brand development consultancy, and then began having my children (four of them in five years).

I was totally rubbish at anything resembling controlled crying, and so when my children woke in the night, I would go and sit with them and just pat their backs or stroke their hair but not talk, as we all know how quickly that becomes a game of  i-spy. Sitting beside them in the darkness I began to think about the central character of my first novel – Martha – and basically began telling myself a story. I was working part-time at this point and realised that Martha was developing a hold on me when I would drive to work and be thinking about the plot rather than the meeting I was headed to. When my youngest child started nursery school, we realised we could just about make the numbers work as I could write without the cost of childcare, and so I resigned and began writing the book that became Redemption. For years I fitted my writing around school hours and term times, with lapses for example when they all got chicken pox in perfect sequence. Now that they have all fledged, my timetable is much more flexible. It was very disciplined in the early years!

It depends what stage of a book I’m at. If I’m mulling on the beginnings of an idea I don’t spend much time at my desk. I walk miles and I think, and have my notepad with me, and I tidy cupboards and wardrobes. I’m a big believer that if the mechanical, logical part of your brain is engaged, your creative thinking somehow is liberated.

When I’m writing a first draft, I’m very disciplined. I work most days and aim to have about three to four thousand useful words. That’s not always the case, especially if the plot takes a different turn and I need to pause to recalibrate. I’m very fond of a French phrase – Reculer per mieux sauter – which basically means to pause in order to jump better. I think it’s important to know when to do that.

When I reach the end of a book – the last 20,000 words – I get really obsessive and work much longer days and find it hard to think about anything else.

When I have a complete draft, I put it aside for a couple of weeks and catch up on everything I’ve neglected, and then return to it with fresh eyes and start editing and refining.

It never feels finished – I mostly get to a point where I can’t bear to look at it anymore!

What has your journey to publication been like?

I’ve been hugely lucky. My first book was published by a small indie publisher, Transita. My second book – which was very dark – did not get an English publisher but went to a three way auction in Germany and then Poland, which was pleasing. I learned some lessons from why that hadn’t worked for a UK audience, and then my third book was signed by Hodder and Stoughton, and they have remained my publishers ever since. I’m working on my eight book now and am hugely proud and thrilled to be part of Hodder’s team of writers. They have a wonderful mural at Carmelite House called the River of Authors which streams around the lifts at each floor. My name is next to John Lennon’s, which is when a school register alphabetised strategy really pays off!

What are you reading at the moment?

I’ve just finished Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, Polly Clark’s Larchfield, and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. I re-read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and now I’m reading Sarah Dunnant’s In the Name of the Family. I’ve got the new Elizabeth Strout on pre-order on Amazon and can’t wait for it to arrive!

If you were to be stranded on a desert island and could choose just one author’s books to read, who would you pick and why?

Virginia Woolf, no question. To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway are two of my favourite books ever. Every sentence she is writes it so beautifully balanced, so loaded with psychological insight and with such an awareness of what it is to be alive; she would be sustaining company on a desert island.

Is there a question that you wish an interviewer would ask that you’ve never been asked? What’s your answer to that question?

That’s a very clever, very tricky question! I think it would probably need some analysis to answer correctly! I write obsessively about mothers, about mothering, about the ties that bind us. To be totally truthful I don’t know why this is such a preoccupation. I have the objective, lit-crit ability to see how much it features in my work – I found Minnie’s account of her mother’s death very moving to write and I hope it holds a truth about what we need to feel and hear as adult children – but I can’t subjectively tell you why that is the case.

How can people connect with you on social media?

Twitter @kaylangdale. I’m constantly vowing to be become better at it although am also mindful how it can suck up time. I always answer back, and really enjoy hearing from readers.

    The Comfort of Others is out now and available from all good bookshops or online at BookDepository.

The blog tour continues all this week and you can find the other stops here:

Interview with author @KayLangdale about The Comfort of Others #BlogTour @HodderBooks Today I'm thrilled to be kicking off the blog tour for Kay Landale's The Comfort of Others…

#Author Interview #Author Q&amp;A #Books #Hodder &amp; Stoughton #Kay Langdale #The Comfort of Others