One of my favorite things about Mrs. Dalloway is that it doesn’t have the sense of coming together at the end- that is to say, I don’t feel like characters were intentionally placed and constructed so that everyone reaches a happy equilibrium at the end. While each character does eventually find a way to confront their own problems, they do not necessarily find an answer to them. It is almost as if the entire novel is suspended between emotions, because no one character is supposed to represent one idea or emotion; instead all of the characters appear to be at the point in their lives when they are currently unstable and seeking balance.
Clarissa is the most prominent and developed of all the characters, as she is the cornerstone for most of the other relationships we see. Hers is a life that has lost its edge some time ago, and now Clarissa spends her time thinking about countless what-if scenarios and reminiscing in her younger days. Her relationship with Richard is becoming tired, and she even ponders the gap that has formed between them at one point, but overall Clarissa is not one who is tethered by her relationship. Instead she leads a very solitary, introverted life. Most of the main characters who are invited to the party are people Clarissa hasn’t seen in years, or may not know very well, and it gives us a setting that allows Clarissa to explore these what-ifs as she compares her current and former relationships with the other characters.
Septimus is particularly important because throughout the novel he fears he is losing his soul, being psychologically scarred by war. His meeting with Sir William Bradshaw confirms this in his eyes, as Sir William wishes that he be sent away to live in a psychological ward. Fearing the permanent loss of his sanity, Septimus decides to end his own life instead of succumb to such conditions. This is especially important to Clarissa because it seems to put into perspective the magnitude of her own problems.
Peter is another good example of a character seeking balance. He has returned from India, and while he and Clarissa have led separate lives for some time, it is clear that Peter has not achieved everything he once desired in life. Being in the presence of Clarissa seems to make him happy, but he must remain content in knowing that what could have been will never be- something that Clarissa herself may need reminding.
This unbalanced state of emotion is a great tool that allows Woolf to explore the various aspects of the emotional spectrum without being obligated to deliver any (or at least the majority) of characters to a balanced state. Like much of her work, Mrs. Dalloway is not about the beginning or the end, but about the middle, or any passing moment, in which one would experience these types of thoughts and feelings. This is augmented by the fact that the entire plot takes place within and entire day. While it may be easy to provide background information on any number of characters, what this does, and what Woolf wants to avoid, is build an expectation with the reader that any given character will meet a specific end based on pre-established information. Woolf prefers to enlighten through one fleeting moment, and see how much of reality she can fit into it.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Jacob's Room and the Role of Women
Being only her third novel, I think it’s safe to say that Jacob’s Room shows significant insight into the future career of Virginia Woolf. Like all things with Woolf, the alterations and changes in her writing are not intended to jump out from the page, but it is more accessible with a closer look at Jacob’s Room. Marina Mackay writes in her essay The Lunacy of Men, the Idiocy of Women: Woolf, West, and War about Woolf’s modernist approach to both the first world war and the augmented role of women that followed, and I couldn’t help but see the connections between this particular approach and the fact that almost all of the characters through which we get to know Jacob are women. Perhaps Mackay’s theory about women becoming a greater cultural force in 1920s England has any relation to Woolf’s work on Jacob’s Room simply materializes in retrospect with that idea in mind. After all Rebecca West, with whom Mackay compares Woolf, did not create her own post-war works until after the second world war nearly two decades later, but even if this is the case, to me it simply shows that Woolf’s emphasis on the feminine point of view arrives more from her own life and experiences after World War One.
Within the literary structure of the work Jacob is undeniably the protagonist. However, this does not necessarily mean that we see the world through his eyes. Just like in Kew Gardens and The Mark on the Wall , Jacob is the pivot point where all of these points of view stem from. We do get to see what Jacob is thinking at time, especially when he is alone and Woolf is describing a setting that seems to live halfway between reality and Jacob’s imagination, but all of the key external characters are women. It is this aspect that Mackay would argue makes Jacob’s Room a woman’s reflection of the first World War, and as she boldly compares the works of both Woolf and West, she notes that both feature male characters who are destroyed in the violence that came with the war, and that the female characters symbolically represent the woman’s larger role in society after these events. How women have such a powerful influence within the novel, however, is because the majority of the conversation and development we see in Jacob we hear through them first. Mrs. Flanders is easily the most important woman in the book, especially during Jacob’s childhood. At the beginning she plays her own pivotal role, which includes tying together Jacob and Captain Barefoot, the two main male characters at this time. As the plot progresses, other women take up Betty’s role as she is physically left behind, namely Clara, Sandra, and Florinda, to which Jacob has various degrees of sexual and romantic attractions. This change in the female point of view better reflects Jacob’s growth from a boy into a man, yet by showing his life through the eyes of women, Woolf is strongly associating war with men leaving and never coming back, instead of allowing the reader a look into Jacob’s life while he is away. Perhaps all of this seems almost too obvious given the title of Jacob’s Room, a clear reference to absence, but as she does in most of her writing, Woolf weaves all of these ideas into the unconscious of the reader.
Within the literary structure of the work Jacob is undeniably the protagonist. However, this does not necessarily mean that we see the world through his eyes. Just like in Kew Gardens and The Mark on the Wall , Jacob is the pivot point where all of these points of view stem from. We do get to see what Jacob is thinking at time, especially when he is alone and Woolf is describing a setting that seems to live halfway between reality and Jacob’s imagination, but all of the key external characters are women. It is this aspect that Mackay would argue makes Jacob’s Room a woman’s reflection of the first World War, and as she boldly compares the works of both Woolf and West, she notes that both feature male characters who are destroyed in the violence that came with the war, and that the female characters symbolically represent the woman’s larger role in society after these events. How women have such a powerful influence within the novel, however, is because the majority of the conversation and development we see in Jacob we hear through them first. Mrs. Flanders is easily the most important woman in the book, especially during Jacob’s childhood. At the beginning she plays her own pivotal role, which includes tying together Jacob and Captain Barefoot, the two main male characters at this time. As the plot progresses, other women take up Betty’s role as she is physically left behind, namely Clara, Sandra, and Florinda, to which Jacob has various degrees of sexual and romantic attractions. This change in the female point of view better reflects Jacob’s growth from a boy into a man, yet by showing his life through the eyes of women, Woolf is strongly associating war with men leaving and never coming back, instead of allowing the reader a look into Jacob’s life while he is away. Perhaps all of this seems almost too obvious given the title of Jacob’s Room, a clear reference to absence, but as she does in most of her writing, Woolf weaves all of these ideas into the unconscious of the reader.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Kew Gardens
What I noticed most about "Kew Gardens" was Woolf's eagerness to experiment with a vignette form of writing. By this I mean that the story is tied together by the snail, which has the role of connecting the themes and style of the external action to create more of an ambiance or sensation than an actual contiguous plot. Woolf visually expresses this intention at the beginning of the story when she is describing the bouncing light of the scenery. This light is not simply representative of the detached nature of the vignettes, but it also shows how the story flows. That is to say, visually speaking, these lights combine to create a picture that is more intricate and complex than simply their presence alone. For example, Woolf shows red, blue, and yellow lights passing of the petals of the flower bed as she sets the scene. What is important to realize is that these lights are not independent of each other, because their collective presence with the flowers creates an entirely new image as a whole. Basically this comes down to the "greater than the sum of its parts" theory.
While the external plot development in "Kew Gardens" can feel oddly placed at times, each vignette is in fact a carefully designed piece of the picture. The initial conversation between Simon and Elanor gives me the sense that it is an imitation of the plot as a whole. At first Simon is thinking about an old girlfriend, Lily, who once came to the garden with him. The dragonfly is an interesting part of this conversation. Woolf allows us the image of a dragonfly circling a young couple on their first date, but before we come to the conclusion of this scenario, Elanor abruptly starts speaking of her experience with the kiss as a child. It is as if this visual representation of the dragonfly has jumped to Elanor's find, where instead of simply circling the scene, it makes an attack in the form of a kiss. This kiss is what we were waiting for in Simon's story, but instead it is realized in Elanor's.
With this Woolf implements the idea of things jumping around between the various vignettes. While the snail's three encounters in "Kew Gardens" appear unrelated enough, what is common between the three is how we see them. We are constantly bombarded with imagery that suggests the movement of ideas and bouncing back and forth. This is exemplified in its most extreme form with the two women at the end, whose conversation consists of the spewing of random words that may be taken as the high points of energy in the conversation. What Woolf has done here is not create a tangible plot that allows the reader to reflect, but she creates a sort of visual experience with words, that allows the reader to transcend the physical boundaries of the characters and become a part of the surroundings, much in the way the snail acts.
While the external plot development in "Kew Gardens" can feel oddly placed at times, each vignette is in fact a carefully designed piece of the picture. The initial conversation between Simon and Elanor gives me the sense that it is an imitation of the plot as a whole. At first Simon is thinking about an old girlfriend, Lily, who once came to the garden with him. The dragonfly is an interesting part of this conversation. Woolf allows us the image of a dragonfly circling a young couple on their first date, but before we come to the conclusion of this scenario, Elanor abruptly starts speaking of her experience with the kiss as a child. It is as if this visual representation of the dragonfly has jumped to Elanor's find, where instead of simply circling the scene, it makes an attack in the form of a kiss. This kiss is what we were waiting for in Simon's story, but instead it is realized in Elanor's.
With this Woolf implements the idea of things jumping around between the various vignettes. While the snail's three encounters in "Kew Gardens" appear unrelated enough, what is common between the three is how we see them. We are constantly bombarded with imagery that suggests the movement of ideas and bouncing back and forth. This is exemplified in its most extreme form with the two women at the end, whose conversation consists of the spewing of random words that may be taken as the high points of energy in the conversation. What Woolf has done here is not create a tangible plot that allows the reader to reflect, but she creates a sort of visual experience with words, that allows the reader to transcend the physical boundaries of the characters and become a part of the surroundings, much in the way the snail acts.
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