When WWI was over, many people questioned the brutality that carried on over the four years that the war was happening. The Europeans trust in authority and in their country began to collapse, and Modernism was a way they could respond to the damage of those beliefs. It was obvious that the old world was gone and a new one had started to arise. In this new world, while other aspects of Europe were advancing, improvement in the psychiatric treatment of mental conditions, for example shell-shock, fell short. Most of British society remained unaware and uninterested in the problems that these illnesses forced on the veterans. This insensitive attitude toward the soldiers inspired Virginia Woolf to write Mrs. Dalloway. In this novel she shows us society’s attitude towards mental illness by featuring a post war veteran named Septimus Smith. The author uses Septimus’s struggles with post traumatic stress disorder as a symbol to illustrate the problems of a modern society that doesn’t understand how deeply the damage of World War One has affected people.
An example of the difference between Septimus and the modern world as a whole is when the airplane flies above the people in the city as it spells out the word toffee. Most of the people watching were amazed by this new technology. “‘Glaxo,’ said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awestricken voice…’Kreemo,’ murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleepwalker…as they looked the whole world because perfectly still…(and the car went in the gates and nobody looked at it)” (20-21). The people were so enthralled with the plane; they didn’t even care about the royal car coming in to the palace. Septimus on the other hand is completely lost in his own thoughts and interprets the plane differently. “So, t...
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...g to grasp the legitimacy and severity of the disease. From this unfortunate reality emerged a Modernist novel in which Virginia Woolf sets out to juxtapose the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane’ in an attempt to express her disgust of society’s lack of sympathy and blindness towards those who suffer with mental illness.
Work Cited
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Korte, Barbara, and Ralf Schneider. War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Print.
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Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Print.
Dozier, Richard. "Adultry and Disappointment in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?" Modern Drama Vol11. No 4, (Feb 1969): 432-436.
I have chosen to write about Virginia Woolf, a British novelist who wrote A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, to name a few of her pieces of work. Virginia Woolf was my first introduction to feminist type books. I chose Woolf because she is a fantastic writer and one of my favorites as well. Her unique style of writing, which came to be known as stream-of-consciousness, was influenced by the symptoms she experienced through her bipolar disorder. Many people have heard the word "bipolar," but do not realize its full implications. People who know someone with this disorder might understand their irregular behavior as a character flaw, not realizing that people with bipolar mental illness do not have control over their moods. Virginia Woolf’s illness was not understood in her lifetime. She committed suicide in 1941.
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.
*"(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
Rose, Sonya O. Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Woolf, Virginia. "The Continuing Appeal of Jane Eyre." Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987. 455--457. Print.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. "Un-Utterable Longing: The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in The Awakening." Studies in American Fiction 24.1 (Spring 1996): 3-23. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 127. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 May 2014.
It is easy to accept one character’s version of reality as true and Woolf periodically warns us, through the confusion of her characters...
3 Woolf, Virginia: A sketch of the past , Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol.2 , sixth edition
In Virginia Woolf’s book, Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith grow up under the same social institutions although social classes are drawn upon wealth; it can be conceived that two people may have very similar opinions of the society that created them. The English society which Woolf presents individuals that are uncannily similar.
Work Cited Woolf, Virginia. A. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2005.
Woolf views society as a center for conflict for the characters in her novel. They struggle with the internal dilemma of whether they should be who they want to be or what everyone else wants them to be. In the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses stream of consciousness to demonstrate the pressures and effects of society on different characters in the 1920’s. Using both Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, Woolf reveals how two different realms of society, the upper class and the middle class, can place very similar pressures and produce very similar effects on the people who dwell within each.
Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style of narration is essential to her method of providing social criticism. Instead of forcing extreme physical situations or conflicts into her text, Woolf instead offers nuanced observations through her characters’ patterns and trains of thought. Virginia Woolf said of Mrs. Dalloway, “I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense” (Zwerdling), a statement that may surprise some readers. However, allowing the reader to witness each individual thought of the characters as they are linked together helps provide insight into how the social system influences their thoughts, memories, and ultimately their identities. The strength of Woolf’s social criticism comes from her ability to infer judgment in this fashion and presents interesting perspectives on class conflict, socialization self-restraint, regret, and coming to terms (or rejecting) with the conditions ...
feminism is in actuality quite limited in tha t she only applies it to British, upper middleclass women writers. Virginia Woolf’s essay-which to Bennett seemed non- feminist and to Daiches seemed feminist- universalist-is, by our modern definition, feminist; however, the borders of culture, class, and profession that composed her frame of reference drastically limit the scope of Woolf’s feminism.
In the Broadview Anthropology of Expository Prose, Buzzard et al. describe Virginia Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” as a “lecture to a society of professional women” (100). As a queer writer, Woolf’s voice during the 1930’s received much attention, along with praise and criticism. Woolf’s fight for women’s empowerment and gender equality are evident throughout her essay, and as of now, in the 21st century, it is unequivocal that Woolf saw herself as a feminist. However, as Woolf writes her “Professions for women” she makes use of the blanket terms “the woman” and “herself” to refer to a general professional woman. It leads us to question who the woman really is: which kinds of individuals are included in and excluded from Woolf’s filtered view of women. How does