"The Widow and the Parrot”, written by Virginia Woolf, is a tale that speaks of the power of wisdom along with the origin of true rewards. Written for her two grandnephews, Julian and Quentin Bell, the short story resonates with those in such a way that changes ones perspective on their livelihood. "The Widow and the Parrot" is based on a true story, showing Woolf's true intentions in creating a lighthearted, "improving story" with a moral (Mills 304). Julian Bell illustrated the story; however, Quentin Bell who then created an afterword explaining the true origins of the tale published it sixty years after its origin. Virginia Woolf, considered one of the best modernist writers, vividly depicts in her short stories that feminist writing can prevail despite her troublesome family history and mental illness, in the early nineteenth century, as shown in, "The Widow and the Parrot."
Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882 in Kensington, England. The daughter of a critic Leslie Stephen, Woolf was constantly under great pressure to make something of herself as, "Woolf's parents were extremely connected both socially and artistically" (Lazzari 300). Woolf made many great strides to begin her career as an aspiring writer including the creating of the "Hyde Park Gate News," a newspaper that documented her family's numerous activities. It was her fate to become "the daughter of educated men" as Woolf danced between literary expression and personal desolation in her writing works, intriguing her community with her innovating style (Mills 300). Growing up in a time where the feminist movement was at the helm of educational reforms, Woolf’s writing reflected much of the culture and political movements around her (Brackett 22). Moreover, ...
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...he Widow and the Parrot" would include the demonstration of the power of the widow, whom society considers defunct (Carter 308). The theme can be seen in the characterization of Mrs. Gage for, "in spite of her poverty she was devoted to animals and often went short herself rather than stint her dog of his bone" (Woolf 1). Although such a chipper story is strange for Woolf considering her mental state, it is clear that the drive was her love for her grandnephews and the morals presented are of great importance. During the time this short story originated, it is greatly unappreciated until its rediscovery sixty years later. All in all, "The Widow and the Parrot" written by Virginia Woolf, is a tale that shows the true rewards that kindness will bring, in addition to the power of wisdom to those who seem helpless, that still resonates with people in modern day society.
Both Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are extremely gifted writers. Virginia Woolf in 1942 wrote an essay called The Death of the Moth. Annie Dillard later on in 1976 wrote an essay that was similar in the name called The Death of a Moth and even had similar context. The two authors wrote powerful texts expressing their perspectives on the topic of life and death. They both had similar techniques but used them to develop completely different views. Each of the two authors incorporate in their text a unique way of adding their personal experience in their essay as they describe a specific occasion, time, and memory of their lives. Woolf’s personal experience begins with “it was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months” (Woolf, 1). Annie Dillard personal experience begins with “two summers ago, I was camping alone in the blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” (Dillard, 1). Including personal experience allowed Virginia Woolf to give her own enjoyable, fulfilling and understandable perception of life and death. Likewise, Annie Dillard used the personal narrative to focus on life but specifically on the life of death. To explore the power of life and death Virginia Woolf uses literary tools such as metaphors and imagery, along with a specific style and structure of writing in a conversational way to create an emotional tone and connect with her reader the value of life, but ultimately accepting death through the relationship of a moth and a human. While Annie Dillard on the other hand uses the same exact literary tools along with a specific style and similar structure to create a completely different perspective on just death, expressing that death is how it comes. ...
*"(Adeline) Virginia Woolf." Feminist Writers. St. James Press, 1996.Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRCć
Throughout Virginia Woolf’s writings, she describes two different dinners: one at a men’s college, and another at a women’s college. Using multiple devices, Woolf expresses her opinion of the inequality between men and women within these two passages. She also uses a narrative style to express her opinions even more throughout the passages.
The subject of death is one that many have trouble talking about, but Virginia Woolf provides her ideas in her narration The Death of the Moth. The moth is used as a metaphor to depict the constant battle between life and death, as well as Woolf’s struggle with chronic depression. Her use of pathos and personification of the moth helps readers develop an emotional connection and twists them to feel a certain way. Her intentional use of often awkward punctuation forces readers to take a step back and think about what they just read. Overall, Woolf uses these techniques to give her opinion on existence in general, and reminds readers that death is a part of life.
The opening scene of To The Lighthouse between Mr Ramsay and Mrs Ramsay displays the gender division that flows throughout this passage highlighting Woolf’s own perspective on society and sexuality between genders. Woolf supports the belief in a complete change to society resulting in a non – hierarchical society. Woolf felt for this to happen aside from the practical changes, that a radical redefinition of sexuality was also needed. The novel focuses on sexual issues of the twentieth century central to feminist campaigns, such as marriage being a form of institutionalized slavery . She brings to attention one of Freud’s most well-known theory, the oedipal conflict. The author draws upon the story of Oedipus who kills his father and marries his mother. Freud states that the daughter demands the attention of the father and the son the attention of her father. In doing so this monopolizes the love the son has for the mother at the risk of jealousy from the father, due to the dominating attention the child wants from the mother. Similarly, this oedipal triangle is formed between James and his parents. Woolf gives reference to Freud and his views on male development and family dynamics by sharing his views on the unconscious whilst talking about them in her own way. She “absorbs many of Freud’s insights about male and female gender identity, yet at the same time infected them in a manner now known as feminist.” The dialogue between the Ramsay’s and James is seen by the reader to express feelings equating to sexual intensity in the way he loves his mother and hates his father, simply by his reaction to Mr Ramsay’s comment about the foul weather. His preference for his mother over his father is clear when he states she is “ten thousa...
Mrs. Marian Forrester strikes readers as an appealing character with the way she shifts as a person from the start of the novel, A Lost Lady, to the end of it. She signifies just more than a women that is married to an old man who has worked in the train business. She innovated a new type of women that has transitioned from the old world to new world. She is sought out to be a caring, vibrant, graceful, and kind young lady but then shifts into a gold-digging, adulterous, deceitful lady from the way she is interpreted throughout the book through the eyes of Niel Herbert. The way that the reader is able to construe the Willa Cather on how Mr. and Mrs. Forrester fell in love is a concept that leads the reader to believe that it is merely psychological based. As Mrs. Forrester goes through her experiences such as the death of her husband, the affairs that she took part in with Frank Ellinger, and so on, the reader witnesses a shift in her mentally and internally. Mrs. Forrester becomes a much more complicated women to the extent in which she struggles to find who really is and that is a women that wants to find love and be fructuous in wealth. A women of a multitude of blemishes, as a leading character it can be argued that Mrs. Forrester signifies a lady that is ultimately lost in her path of personal transitioning. She becomes lost because she cannot withstand herself unless she is treated well by a wealthy male in which causes her to act unalike the person she truly is.
Woolf shifts from describing the process of writing to describing an obstacle. Woolf encapsulates the essence of female expectations by citing the Angel in the House. The Angel in the House references a narrative poem written in the nineteenth century to describe the ideal Victorian woman. Woolf illustrates the Angel in the House “as shortly as [she] can” in order to acknowledge her audience and to make her speech brief and comprehensible for the listening women. Through employing anaphora, Woolf explains, “she was intensely sympathetic...intensely charming...utterly unselfish…” These descriptions are standards for women which the Angel in the House embodied. Woolf expands the audience’s understanding of the Angel in the House by providing concrete examples of her self-sacrificing nature. This is juxtaposed with Woolf’s behavior; Woolf purchased a Persian cat instead of using her earnings to purchase something more practical. Her impractical tendencies are contrasted with the selflessness of the Angel in the House, outwardly depicting that Woolf challenged her expectations as a woman. Woolf employs profound imagery to describe her haunting by the Angel in the House, “The shadows of her wings fell on my page; I heard the wrestling of her skirts in the room.” Through appealing to both visual and auditory senses, Woolf develops the Angel in the House from a creation of her subconscious into a concrete being, which is how she viewed it. Woolf finds the Angel in the House so intolerable she kills it in an act of “self-defence,” claiming that the Angel in the House would have killed her if she had not killed her first. Woolf definitively states, “She died hard,” which is emphatic
Blackstone, Bernard. Virginia Woolf: A Commentary. London: Hogarth Press, 1949. (An older but excellent essay.)
Woolf uses the rhetorical triangle in an effective way to argue for her reasoning that women must overcome obstacles in order to be successful. Throughout her essay she uses various appeals to ethos and pathos in order to make her argument as effective as possible. During her speech she refers to “Angels in the House” being the phantoms or angels, as she prefers to call them, hindering her effectiveness in her writing of literature. Woolf discusses how when she would write a review on the male sex, this pure, sympathetic, sweet angel of a woman was a significant voice inside her head. Woolf states to her audience that the angel
Virginia Woolf, one of the pioneers of modern feminism, found it appalling that throughout most of history, women did not have a voice. She observed that the patriarchal culture of the world at large made it impossible for a woman to create works of genius. Until recently, women were pigeonholed into roles they did not necessarily enjoy and had no way of
Virginia Woolf, a founder of Modernism, is one of the most important woman writers. Her essays and novels provide an insight into her life experiences and those of women of the 20th century. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), and A Room of One's Own (1929) (Roseman 11).
The narrative of Mrs. Dalloway may be viewed by some as random congealing of various character experience. Although it appears to be a fragmented assortment of images and thought, there is a psychological coherence to the deeply layered novel. Part of this coherence can be found in Mrs. Dalloway's psychological tone which is tragic in nature. In her forward to Mrs. Dalloway, Maureen Howard informs us that Woolf was reading both Sophocles and Euripides for her essays in The Common Reader while writing Mrs. Dalloway (viii). According to Pamela Transue, "Woolf appears to have envisioned Mrs. Dalloway as a kind of modern tragedy based on the classic Greek model" (92). Mrs. Dalloway can be conceived of as a modern transformation of Aristotelian tragedy when one examines the following: 1) structural unity; 2) catharsis; 3) recognition, reversal, and catastrophe; 4) handling of time and overall sense of desperation.
Throughout history, women writers used pen names and pseudonyms to avoid the eyes of the patriarchal society. The female writers were no strangers to harsh criticism from the gender-biased readers regarding their artistic works. However such emphasis on gender discrimination coined the words, feminism and sexism, which now reflect on the past and the present conflicts. In the book A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf tracks down the history of women and fiction to find the answer. She argues, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. She chants on and on about the topic of “women and fiction”, contemplating the role of women in the traditional domain and the virtues of women writers. Although, Woolf may have contemplated over such awareness that a woman needs an atmosphere of her own in which nobody can intrude, the modern world has prevailed over such hindrances throughout technological innovations that offer freedom of speech. Also, economical affluence is not a necessity for women to engage in the fictional world but rather a sufficient condition in the modern world. Thus Virginia Woolf’s predictions failed to represent the current vantage point revolving around women and fiction.
During the gap between the years these stories were released, women were fighting a war for the cause of equality between all genders in regards to voting, equal pay, and fair treatment. Woolf shows in her writing that regardless of the social progress that was made during that time, it was far from over in regards to the way women lived their lives. Woolf’s story sheds light from the point of view of a woman who wants to stray away from the duties of being a stay at home housewife and focus on the life of an artist, or in this case, a writer. Woolf explains in the beginning paragraph of “Killing the Angel in the House” that there have been women to make significant impacts on the world of literature, but so few in comparison to those who were
Whatever the problematic implications, Woolf called for a new era where "[women] have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what [they] think" (Woolf 113). She closed her treatise on a comment pointed at the female writers of her age: "I maintain that she [Shakespeare's sister] would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while" (114).