Virginia Woolf 1882 1941

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Virginia Woolf  1882 1941

          Biography

One of the two major modernist figures who experiments in an extreme way. She was born in 1882 and died in 1941 when she drowned herself.

From her earliest childhood she had been surrounded by intellectuals. She suffered several personal losses, her mother died when she was very young, which was followed by a series of family tragedies, which made her prone to depression.

Her husband Leonard and Virginia Woolf established the Hogarth Press.

Virginia Woolf was one of the first feminists.

            The Narrow Bridge of Art

Throughout the essay, Virginia Woolf compares the three oldest literary genres, poetry, drama and modernist novel. She says that drama reached its peak in Elizabethan period. The novel has come into a crisis, and we the Modernists are on a mission to save the novel by making it a fusion of narrative, poetic and dramatic elements.

What modernists called life or reality is no longer seen as something objective, stable, having the same quality at all times. So the reality is a different kind of reality to that perceived by the Realists. The reality becomes a highly subjective category, which indicates a slight turn towards relativism. Everybody perceives a reality in different way, as it strikes hers or his five senses, so we have a combination of external reality and how the data is processed and received in the human mind. So what we call personality, is no longer an objective entity, it is in a state of constant flux, moreover, it is a mix of moods, dreams, aspirations, perceptions etc, instead of order, the personality is really in disorder.

            Mrs. Dalloway

According to Virginia Woolf, the modern writer cannot make a world, cannot generalise, he can only present a small section of reality as he sees it. It is very ridiculous to pretend to be an omniscient narrator.

The duty of the writer is to deal with ordinary things, to examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day, which means to write books which have no ordinary plot.

Modernists are not interested in the fact-recording business. That is why Mrs. Dalloway focuses on a single day, which is all that takes for the reader to get to know the inner mind, thoughts, ideas, associations and memories that fill the content of the mind of Mrs. Dalloway on that particular day that the novel captures.

The literary critics of the time, who were not accustomed to modern literature, accused Virginia Woolf of writing plotless novels in which nothing ever happens.

The main protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway is 52 years old respectable wife, who is experiencing a middle age crisis. In the course of these 17 hours that the novel covers, we are exposed to the depth of Clarissa Dalloway’s mind.

The writer has created an impression for the reader of being able to watch the procession of the protagonist’s ideas, associations, aspirations etc. as the sequence of images.

We cannot even speak of the narrator. Omniscient narrator was typical for realist novels. Now, modernists say it is ridiculous to write novels in such a way.

Clarissa is both the protagonist and the narrator, entering her mind, we are both informed of events and we witness them at the same time.

As Mrs. Dalloway is preparing for her party in the evening, she reflects on a number of issues:

l such as not being invited for lunch that only her husband was invited to;

l the best friend of her daughter Elizabeth, Doris Kilman; her ex-lover Peter Walsh;

l the issue of lesbianism, and her superficial lesbian experience with her girlhood friend; 

l her own marriage and her dissatisfaction with it…

That is the contrast between the external image of a person and her true inner self. When we look at her outside, as perceived by her husband, she is a shallow woman who only thinks of her parties.

For that reason, Clarissa feels frustrated, because she feels she is not understood. That is the point that the modernists are trying to make, that we should not take people at face value, we should not try to value them on the basis of their external mask that they wear on social occasions, but also in their relationships which we believe to be the most intimate.

This is a theme that constantly recurs throughout the modern literature, this sense of not being understood.

Clarissa Dalloway feels she is misunderstood by her husband, as if there is always some kind of gap between them. When we go into her mind, we realise she is much more then the superficial lady she seems to be externally.

She is even judging the political system, though she only does that internally. That becomes evident as she reflects on seeing a car with tinted windows passing by. Externally, she is a wife of a politician.

In the second part of the novel,  the focus in on Septimus Warren Smith. He is a person suffering from the mental breakdown. There is no apparent connection between Septimus and Clarissa. In London, he is just another voice, next to Clarissa Dalloway. She is an upper class woman; he is deranged war veteran who commits suicide at the end of the novel. The only explicit connection between them occurs during her party, when she hears from the doctor invited to her party of his suicide.t. She thinks of him as a rebel who dared to do something she does not dare to do. That is why she in a way envies Septimus, who suffered from the mental breakdown which resulted in his suicide.

She feels imprisoned by her social standing. There is a slight feminist moment, where she compares herself to Peter Walsh, She feels it is unjust that Peter Walsh can get away with acting as a boy, which is not a privilege women have.

He is having constant affairs with women half his age, and he is not judged for it, so Mrs. Dalloway is disturbed by these gender roles. That view is what made Virginia Woolf one of the early feminists. The theme of feminism is only hinted at. Even the title suggests the feminist issue, it is Mrs. Dalloway, not Clarissa Dalloway and so it is even as if she, being a woman, is deprived of personality.

She also reflects on her previous relationship with Sally Setton, who was the one who was a non-conformist, the one who dared, while Clarissa was a conformist. However, she meets Sally at her party and finds her married to a rich husband, which to Clarissa means that even Sally succumbed to the social norm.

           

In interior monologue, Virginia Woolf chooses to use ‘she’ rather then ‘I’, to avoid confusion. So whenever ‘she’ is used, it is a reference to ‘I’ of Clarissa Dalloway. That makes it easier on reader. When Clarissa Dalloway thinks to herself: “Lord! He didn’t like it; but these things pass over if you let them”, it really suggests that she is concerned with how Richard might react to her suggestion that Elizabeth locked herself up with Doris Kilman. She then expresses her hope that whatever it is that is going on between them might pass with time, if they just let them be, which is a testimony of Clarissa’s reluctance to confront.

In the above passage, interior monologue of Richard Dalloway is presented as well. He clearly thinks it strange that Clarissa minds so much about her parties, which reveals how superficially he knows her. The fact that she thought of Peter in the middle of her conversation with her husband, suggests that she is dissatisfied with her marriage. She seems to have found herself in a boring, monotonous marriage, because she knows what he is to do, before he does it.

Later on, it becomes clear that Clarissa feels there is a gap in every relationship, as if she feels alone, though she is not single. Later in the same paragraph, she reflects on loss of freedom and independence.

She then shows irritation with her husband’s abiding with doctor’s orders from long ago. That shows Richard as a person who would not break the law; he is a perfectly conventional individual, much like Clarissa on the surface, though deep down, she is still a rebel, who became reluctant to rebel, that is why she envies Septimus.

In internal monologue, everything is allowed. All of the sudden, it occurs to Clarissa that she is very unhappy. She thinks of whether it is that her friend said her husband was stupid, or perhaps that her daughter might be a lesbian. A very poetic image is given here of Clarissa searching for the reason for her discomfort as if splitting the blades of grass looking for a lost pearl.

She finally realizes that she is upset and unhappy that everyone, namely both her husband and her ex lover, seems to think that all that matters to her are her parties.