Issues in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway revolves around several of the issues that preoccupied the Bloomsbury writers and thinkers as a group. Issues of androgyny, class, madness, and mythology run throughout the novel. While that is hardly an exhaustive list, these notions seem to form the core of the structure of the novel. Woolf herself, when envisioning the project, sought to produce “a study of insanity and suicide, the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side.” This issue of madness, in particular, gives the novel its form as we follow the twinned lives of Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. These preoccupations, occuring in the biographical and intellectual lives of the disparate members of Bloomsbury, revolved around Virginia framing the preoccupations and concerns of the text.
In terms of the ambiguous gender identities running throughout the text (Clarissa’s frigidity towards her husband, her sexual view of women, and Septimus’s effeminite nature), there is a tendency towards the asexual or the androgynous in the...
In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway undergoes an internal struggle between her love for society and life and a combined affinity for and fear of death. Her practical marriage to Richard serves its purpose of providing her with an involved social life of gatherings and parties that others may find frivolous but Clarissa sees as “an offering” to the life she loves so well. Throughout the novel she grapples with the prospect of growing old and approaching death, which after the joys of her life seems “unbelievable… that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant…” At the same time, she is drawn to the very idea of dying, a theme which is most obviously exposed through her reaction to the news of Septimus Smith’s suicide. However, this crucial scene r...
Rheumatoid Arthritis: A common form of inflammatory arthritis. It is a chronic disease that causes inflammation of joints, pain and loss of function in the joints, as well as inflammation to other body organs. It is an autoimmune condition of unknown origin, where the antibodies are formed against the synovium8.
As mentioned earlier, immune system attack on the joints is one of the major psoriatic arthritis causes. It causes overproduction of the skin cells resulting to reddening and inflammation at both the joints and the skin. There is no clear reason why the immune system would turn against the joints. However, research on the disease shows that it is genetic since it has been found to affect those people who have a family history of the condition. Some other causes may be environmental factors such as viral or bacterial infection and trauma.
Over the course of time, the roles of men and women have changed dramatically. As women have increasingly gained more social recognition, they have also earned more significant roles in society. This change is clearly reflected in many works of literature, one of the most representative of which is Plautus's 191 B.C. drama Pseudolus, in which we meet the prostitute Phoenicium. Although the motivation behind nearly every action in the play, she is glimpsed only briefly, never speaks directly, and earns little respect from the male characters surrounding her, a situation that roughly parallels a woman's role in Roman society of that period. Women of the time, in other words, were to be seen and not heard. Their sole purpose was to please or to benefit men. As time passed, though, women earned more responsibility, allowing them to become stronger and hold more influence. The women who inspired Lope de Vega's early seventeenth-century drama Fuente Ovejuna, for instance, rose up against not only the male officials of their tiny village, but the cruel (male) dictator busy oppressing so much of Spain as a whole. The roles women play in literature have evolved correspondingly, and, by comparing The Epic of Gilgamesh, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Wife of Bath's Prologue, we can see that fictional women have just as increasingly as their real-word counterparts used gender differences as weapons against men.
For the human body to move swiftly with deliberate and smooth actions, it makes use of synovial fluid within joints. However, rheumatoid arthritis hinders the movement of the body and cause several other debilitating factors such as pain and (near) permanent disability. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is primarily a persistent autoimmune disease which affects synovial joints of the human body. According to Emery (2006), he finds that this is a “long term . . . chronic disease that spreads from joint to joint” (p. 152). Furthermore, it is a disease which primarily assaults the body's immune system by inflaming the synovial joints. The joint tissue is damaged by inflammation of the joint lining causing pain to the patient. Aletaha et
In the novel, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, a royal wife, shares almost similar views of the world with Septimus Warren Smith, a former soldier who fought in the World War I and now suffering from hallucination. These two characters share many things in common albeit the fact that they are not known to each other and they have not shared anything in their lifetimes. The novel is an in-depth “day-in-the-life” view of Mrs. Dalloway featuring what she thinks about her life, other people’s lives, her real feelings and the feelings of other people. She is told the story of a former World War I soldier and she takes her time to reflect in the man’s life and experiences. His life appears more like hers not in how they both live but their feelings, which is why I hold the view tha...
Philosophy according to the Encyclopedia Britannica is “the critical examination of the grounds for fundamental beliefs and an analysis of the basic concepts employed in the expression of such beliefs.” (Britannica) With the different values people may have, their beliefs, and their understanding of certain ideas, comes different perspective as well. Some people may not agree with the beliefs of another. Throughout the readings within this summer course I saw different aspects of philosophy present within each text and the arguments and conflicts that arise from such differences. The different forms of philosophical reasoning and beliefs presents within the tales read include theology, ethics, as well as scientific principles. One philosophical theme that I saw present within most of these stories was equality.
In the plays female sexuality is not expressed variously through courtship, pregnancy, childbearing, and remarriage, as it is in the period. Instead it is narrowly defined and contained by the conventions of Petrarchan love and cuckoldry. The first idealizes women as a catalyst to male virtue, insisting on their absolute purity. The second fears and mistrusts them for their (usually fantasized) infidelity, an infidelity that requires their actual or temporary elimination from the world of men, which then re-forms [sic] itself around the certainty of men’s shared victimization (Neely 127).
Outwardly, Clarissa Dalloway is an ideal image of the nineteenth century English social elite, part of a constantly shrinking upper class whose affluent lifestyle was touched in ways both subtle and terrible by the war raging outside their superfluous, manicured existence. Clarissa’s world revolves around parties, trifling errands, social visits, and an endless array of petty trivialities which are fundamentally meaningless, yet serve as Clarissa’s only avenue to stave off the emotional disease and disconnect she feels with the society in which she exists. Clarissa’s experience of England’s politically humbled, economically devastated postwar state is deeply resonant in her subconscious and emotional identity, despite seeming untraceable in her highly affected publ...
Throughout Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, the reader encountered many different people living in post-WWI London. These characters that Woolf created have different backgrounds, points of view, concerns, and mental states. Through these variances she clearly showed the many intricacies of life in the city. One of the most intriguing of all the characters she crafted is Septimus Warren Smith. Through intertwining story lines, from all the different points of view including his own, it becomes obvious that Septimus was very unique. The relationship between him and the rest of the city had an interesting dynamic as well. Septimus was wrought with the overwhelming feeling of isolation because of the other character’s lack of understanding
Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge University Press. fsfdfsdgg2001. Print.
Hovercrafts that are balanced typically float only about a few centimeters above the ground due to the weight distribution, and the amount of force needed to make the hovercraft hover. To make a hovercraft hover, the amount of force pushing off the ground needs to be only slightly more than the weight of the hovercraft in order to prevent flying.
In order to understand the effects that ideas of femininity have on literary texts, we must first acknowledge what the term means. Clearly both terms derive from the original sex of the being, whether male or female, and can be similarly tied in with notions of gender, either masculine or feminine, which are said to be constructs, or labels, created by society. However `masculinity' and `femininity' become, on some levels, dislodged from the idea of the biological makeup and gender constructs, and instead tend to be described in terms of discourse. It is not just the sex and gender of a being that determines their actions, but instead their thoughts and opinions.
William Blake’s 1793 poem “The Tyger” has many interpretations, but its main purpose is to question God as a creator. Its poetic techniques generate a vivid picture that encourages the reader to see the Tyger as a horrifying and terrible being. The speaker addresses the question of whether or not the same God who made the lamb, a gentle creature, could have also formed the Tyger and all its darkness. This issue is addressed through many poetic devices including rhyme, repetition, allusion, and symbolism, all of which show up throughout the poem and are combined to create a strong image of the Tyger and a less than thorough interpretation of its maker.
In recent literature we frequently see a negative view of women from male characters. These writings are a direct reflection of society’s views today; but what needs to be recognized is since the dawn of the world’s first authors the negative view of women has consistently been prominent in literature. The view of women as undesirable lovers was an extremely important view in ancient Greece. In Plato’s Symposium the idea that male-male relations were much more beloved and genuine than female relations, and that a woman’s existence was important solely for the element of reproduction, which would allow for humanity to continue on. In Plato’s book, the characters spend ...