The Light in A Sketch of the Past and Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf's method to writing fiction was always to "dig out beautiful caves1" behind, within, and around her characters - to tunnel through their consciousness in order to tell their story as artfully as one tells his or her own. It is her "tunneling" process that makes her style so distinctive: her sentences layered with multiple meanings, her paragraphs rich with stream-of-consciousness internal monologue, and her dialogue sparse. Clearly, she had few qualms about taking the modern novel's all-too-common, linear form of storytelling and turning it upside down in order to dig through to its core - its very essence - and fill it in with her own art. The resultant caves are denser, more detailed and, consequently, often darker than the literary creations of other women writers of her time. To craft them, Woolf manipulates both the direction and span of time, includes literary allusions, and crafts her sentences so as to better develop her characters' relationships to her themes and each other.
In A Sketch of the Past, Virginia Woolf describes the circumstances under which memories evince themselves: "the past," she says, "comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding of a deep river." This view of time - of the past's reemergence during controlled moments in the present - resonates throughout Woolf's characters' stream-of-consciousness narrative. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf manipulates time in order to show her characters' relationships to each other as well as how their pasts govern their present lifestyles.
Indeed, the novel's central plot lines - Clarissa Dalloway's party preparations, Septimus Smi...
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...ruth" that she so often sought in other authors' works2 - that light her readers way to the end of her novel's dense, winding tunnels.
Works Cited
Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
Woolf, Virginia. "A Sketch of the Past." Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc, 1925.
Notes
1. Elizabeth Abel ,"Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis," Women in Culture and Society, Catharine R. Stimpson, ed., (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), xvi.
2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981)
Tojo Hideki lived from 1884-1948 and he was a Japanese political and military leader. The premier who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he personified Japanese militarism.
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. 348-350. Print.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which Is Not One." Feminism: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndle. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991.
“The thing is, you can scrub Walter Cunningham till he shines, you can put him in shoes and a new suit, but he’ll never be like Jem. Besides there’s a drinking streak in that family a mile wide. Finch women aren’t interested in that sort of people. [Aunty Alexandra]
Baym, Nina. “The Norton Anthology of American Literature.” Rev. 6 ed W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2003.
Zakin, E. "Psychoanalytic Feminism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), Retrieved from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/feminism-psychoanalysis/
3 Woolf, Virginia: A sketch of the past , Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol.2 , sixth edition
Dalloway’s character development. When Mrs. Dalloway finds out that Septimus, her foil in the book, committed suicide, she came to the realization that “She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun” (186). Because Mrs. Dalloway is not separated into chapters or sections, the book is mainly divided by the striking of the clock. Every time the clock strikes, it interrupts the thoughts of the characters and lends to a moment of epiphany or a shift in the book. Because the clock is a symbol for the everlasting progression of time, it waits for nobody. The clock continuously ticks, which Mrs. Dalloway was originally concerned about as the inevitable marching of time would eventually lead to her death. However, after learning about Septimus’s death, she realizes how beautiful life is. Although she has never met him, Mrs. Dalloway identifies with Septimus, and through his death, she learns to appreciate life and to accept death. The clock strikes to signify not only the progression of time, but also Mrs. Dalloway’s revelation. Woolf’s ability to relate the striking of the clock to the characters reveals her multi-faceted sophisticated
In her passage she imagines what it may have been like had William Shakespeare had a sister. She notices how difficult it would be even given the same talents as Shakespeare himself, to follow throughout and utilize them in her life. It is clear after reading further into Woolf's passage that obviously she lived in a different time period, only about fifty years apart though. The way she relates and tells a very similar story with an entirely different setting shows without the reader even knowing that she wa... ... middle of paper ... ...
The most famous work in the epic fantasy genre is The Lord of the Rings, written by J. R. R. Tolkien over the course of ten years and published in 1954. Over the last few decades, there has been a lot of controversy over whether or not a story in this genre could be considered a valuable literary work. It was suggested that fantasy was clichéd and too unrealistic to be in touch with the daily life. However, when one reads between the lines, one can find a different interpretation within the same story; an interpretation that might not be as clichéd and farfetched as one might think. While it is often claimed that literary works in the genre fantasy cannot have any literary value, the The Lord of the Rings-trilogy contains the beautiful, the true and the good (Flood) and therefore is original, is historical or ethical relevant and has human truth value, which are necessary qualities for a literary work to be valuable.
Work Cited Woolf, Virginia. A. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2005.
Urang, Gunnar. "J. R. R. Tolkien: Fantasy and the Phenomenology of Hope" Fantasy in the Writing of J. R. R. Tolkien. United Press, 1971
Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and fiction, what they think of; Woolf tried to answer this question through the discovery of the female within literature in her writing. Virginia Woolf Throughout her life Virginia Woolf became increasingly interested in the topic of women and fiction, which is highly reflected in her writing. To understand her piece, A Room of One’s Own Room, her reader must understand her.