One of the principal themes in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway is the English people’s collective loss of confidence in the state of the British Empire after the First World War. Set in London in the June of 1923, the novel opens at the close of a global war that lasted only four years but cost the United Kingdom more than 100,000 lives and permanently shifted the political boundaries and social world order of its people. Each of the novel’s many characters represent a different aspect of the English citizens’ disenchantment with established, presupposed cultural values and worldview brought about by the unexpected lack of glory in victory or dignity in the dead and wounded multitudes. The world Woolf creates in Mrs. Dalloway is both a historical reflection and a social commentary, portraying how the atrocities of war trickle down through the many layers of experience and separation to become deeply ingrained in the country’s collective social consciousness. 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... ... middle of paper ... ... of Europe’s young men and women. As Winston Churchill observed in a retrospective on World War One, “A cruel disillusionment was at hand... All were looking forward to some great expansion, and there lay before them but a sharp contraction; a contraction in the material conditions for the masses" (Churchill, 13). The characters in Mrs. Dalloway compose a devastatingly specific narrative of human isolation and suffering in a postwar climate, and the means by which they come to terms with a vast and unparalleled cultural disenchantment. Works Cited 1. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Harcourt, Inc, 1925. Print. 2. Shakespeare, William. "Cymbeline." Great Literature Online. 1997-2009 (1 Nov, 2009). 3. Churchill, Winston S. The Aftermath - being a Sequel to The World Crisis. Macmillan, London, 1944
Bard, Mitchell G. The Complete Idiot's Guide to world War II, Macmillan Publishing, New York, New York, 1999
World War I is quite possibly the most influential event of the 20th century world-wide. Britain was no exception. The global powerhouse had seen copious amounts of loss in the forms of death, destruction, and economics to name only a few. In the rubble of aftermath, the people of the world’s greatest empire were starving for explanation, solace, and hope. In a response to the trauma of the Great War, the people of Britain created new cultures that utilized the new idea of modernism to push forward and forge a new path into the future. From the phenomenon of the radio and BBC, to the London Underground, Commonwealth, and recreation of the youth, it is clear that the interwar period in Britain was something different entirely.
Artists of all mediums offer the public different perspectives of reality and within the multitudinous amount of works, a truth is brought to the attention of the viewer. The truth brings awareness to the masses and changes the means of thinking of the public. Virginia Woolf’s novel, To The Lighthouse, represents a cultural shift in thought from the 19th to the 20th century state of mind by being inspired by the situation of the world at the time and the changes turn of the century brought to humanity by creating a novel that alludes to major revolutions of the time, such as the social, physiological and philosophical, and social revolutions. Woolf does this by creating a new way of expressing thought in writing, and creating characters with
In a time of war when people were dying, one women was worried about keeping the thing she loved the most alive, literature. During the World War I literature was starting to die off, and something had to be done, literature needed to evolve and change with the time. The tragedy caused grief, but Virginia Woolf wanted to break the old customs of people, and make them more open minded. As a woman doing a job that didn’t involve being a housewife or cleaning was not easy, so for Virginia to pursue a career in literature it took bravery. She opened an immense door for future writers who did not follow the old mentality of their predecessors, who wanted to change literature so that it could fit for the time they were living in. Literature was morphing
The physical and social setting in "Mrs. Dalloway" sets the mood for the novel's principal theme: the theme of social oppression. Social oppression was shown in two ways: the oppression of women as English society returned to its traditional norms and customs after the war, and the oppression of the hard realities of life, "concealing" these realities with the elegance of English society. This paper discusses the purpose of the city in mirroring the theme of social oppression, focusing on issues of gender oppression, particularly against women, and the oppression of poverty and class discrimination between London's peasants and the elite class.
As a 32-year-old man, emotionally tortured playwright Edward Albee, set out to create Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A controversial play that is hailed as one of the greatest in American history. Born in Virginia, he was adopted by a group of wealthy New York socialites and was forced to accommodate to their set of ethics and beliefs, following this sudden distortion Albee began a youthful revolt. He was expelled from two schools and dismissed from Valley Forge Military Academy; he later attended two final colleges; The Choate School and Trinity College, before being expelled again for not attending. Without a care for possible outcomes, Albee left his home for good by the end of his teenage years stating, “I never felt comfortable with the adoptive parents. I don't think they knew how to be parents. I probably didn't know how to be a son, either.” Possibly using the un-wanted past as reference, he created his characters George and Martha; a jilted wed couple that share in each-others fountains of youth and Dionysian fantasies, the pinnacle of a reckless household. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Is Albee’s depiction of the antithetical reality of a modern American Family; a subliminal story told throughout occult symbolism, uncomfortable wit and ramped mysticism.
Clarissa Dalloway as a character in the novel is upper-class and conventional. She knows her life is shallow; her former lover Peter Walsh had called her the perfect hostess. She feels that her only gift in life is in knowing a person through instinct.
The extensive descriptions of Mrs. Dalloway’s inner thoughts and observations reveals Woolf’s “stream of consciousness” writing style, which emphasizes the complexity of Clarissa’s existential crisis. She also alludes to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, further revealing her preoccupation with death as she quotes lines from a funeral song. She reads these lines while shopping in the commotion and joy of the streets of London, which juxtaposes with her internal conflicts regarding death. Shakespeare, a motif in the book, represents hope and solace for Mrs. Dalloway, as his lines form Cymbeline talk about the comforts found in death. From the beginning of the book, Mrs. Dalloway has shown a fear for death and experiences multiple existential crises, so her connection with Shakespeare is her way of dealing with the horrors of death. The multiple layers to this passage, including the irony, juxtaposition, and allusion, reveal Woolf’s complex writing style, which demonstrates that death is constantly present in people’s minds, affecting their everyday
Austen was a recondite writer with a new inside perspective with an outside view on life in the early 19th century. Born on December 16, 1775, Austen was a curious child given the unseal luxury of an education. Her father was a part of the gentry class and raised a family of ten, but was not well off by any means (Grochowski). Sense and Sensibility, written by Jane Austen, tells a dramatic story of three sisters and their emotional journey where they encounter love and betrayal. Because Jane Austen was raised in a liberal family and received a comprehensive education, her dramatic analysis of societal behavior in Sense and Sensibility was comparable to the hidden truths of social and class distinctions in 18th and 19th century Europe.
Work Cited Woolf, Virginia. A. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2005.
“I meant to write about death only life came breaking in as usual.” Virginia Woolf was a popular modernist back in the twentieth century. She wrote various novels, each novel different, but all connecting the same theme. Woolf struggled with a bipolar disorder and a deep depression within her years of living, and showed through her work the struggles she was faced with. Woolf put all her energy into writing what are now the most famous pieces from the twentieth century. Woolf was unlike average writers in her day, Woolf liked to focus on changes in the literature world. Although she was a dark writer, she liked to mix her darkness in with the changes the world was experiencing. Woolf’s famous novels are Mrs. Dalloway, The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, and Orlando.
Jane Austen’s works are characterized by their classic portrayals of love among the gentry of England. Most of Austen’s novels use the lens of romance in order to provide social commentary through both realism and irony. Austen’s first published bookThe central conflicts in both of Jane Austen’s novels Emma and Persuasion are founded on the structure of class systems and the ensuing societal differences between the gentry and the proletariat. Although Emma and Persuasion were written only a year apart, Austen’s treatment of social class systems differs greatly between the two novels, thus allowing us to trace the development of her beliefs regarding the gentry and their role in society through the analysis of Austen’s differing treatment of class systems in the Emma and Persuasion. The society depicted in Emma is based on a far more rigid social structure than that of the naval society of Persuasion, which Austen embodies through her strikingly different female protagonists, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Eliot, and their respective conflicts. In her final novel, Persuasion, Austen explores the emerging idea of a meritocracy through her portrayal of the male protagonist, Captain Wentworth. The evolution from a traditional aristocracy-based society in Emma to that of a contemporary meritocracy-based society in Persuasion embodies Austen’s own development and illustrates her subversion of almost all the social attitudes and institutions that were central to her initial novels.
Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, addresses life during the interwar years and more specifically the impact of shell shock on World War I veterans. Septimus Warren Smith, a survivor of the war, suffers daily through the trauma he endured in the war. Woolf highlights societies lack of understanding when it comes to the condition plaguing so many soldier after the war through characters like Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw. This along with propaganda glorifying the war and instilling the notion of manliness and strength in those that fought led to great misconceptions on the societies ignorance on soldiers suffering from shell shock. Septimus, who is constantly tortured by flashbacks of his officer Evans being killed, has become an outsider to the rest of the world who have shut out the somber images of the past (56). Woolf utilizes his character to express her dissatisfaction with society during the interwar years and also to show the divide between those who fought and the upper class who saw little of the true nature of the war.
We live in a consumer society consuming time. We use time to function smoothly but also to channel the direction of our lives. As a college student, I am constantly aware of time. I have a time frame for finishing my college career, as well as constant deadlines to meet. Daily, I divide my hours between my job, my studies, and my friends. In the midst of following external time, I strive for a balance with my internal time. My personal sense of time allows me to live in the present moment. However, I struggle to not be pressured by external time. I resent the tension it creates. The notion of time in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway particularly interests me. Her original title, The Hours, indicates the importance of time as one of the novel's themes (Lee 92). By looking at Woolf's writing style, critiquing her use of clocks, and analyzing Clarissa's thoughts, the reader finds a philosophical message about time, powerfully expressed.
I. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, was published on May 14, 1925 in London, England. The novel follows Clarissa Dalloway and a variety of other characters throughout the span of one day in their lives in 1923 London. Woolf utilizes a narrative method of writing. With the novel’s structure, the narrator possesses the ability to move inside of a character’s mind and compose her thoughts and emotions immediately as events occur throughout the day. The novel’s main character, Clarissa, is a middle-aged woman who belongs to the upper-middle class in society and is well-married to a Member of Parliament—Richard Dalloway. Clarissa’s day is full of arrangements for a dinner party she plans to host that evening. During the novel, numerous other characters such as Peter Walsh, Septimus Smith, Miss Kilman, Sally Seton, and Hugh Whitbread are introduced and characterized by their inner thoughts and dialogue. Not all the characters maintain a social connection, but all remain attached through time and events that each has uniquely witnessed. Woolf included her purpose for writing the novel in her journal, stating she wanted to “show the despicableness of people like Ott (Wilson 10).” (Lady Ottoline Morrell, an English aristocrat and hostess, was a rival to Woolf in the Bloomsbury Group.) Many critics often compare Mrs. Dalloway to Joyce’s Ulysses. The novel was read by Woolf in 1922, prior to beginning her own novel, at the request of T.S. Eliot. The similarity lies within the walk through London by Clarissa Dalloway with Leopold Bloom’s walk through Dublin. However, the commonalities remain due to parallel characteristics, rather than a direct influence (10). The character of Septimus Smith allowed Woolf to include stories of her own mental...