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.
The paper will begin with a look at the life of Tolkien. This will serve the purpose of providing some context for the novel. Looking into the life of Tolkien will also serve to give the reader some insight into the mind that gave birth to such a rich land and why the novel may have some importance for sufferers of mental illness. Next will likely be a short summation of the
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]
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) gained a reputation during the 1960’s and 1970’s as a cult figure among youths disillusioned with war and the technological age. His continuing popularity evidences his ability to evoke the oppressive realities of modern life while drawing audiences into a fantasy world.
3 Woolf, Virginia: A sketch of the past , Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol.2 , sixth edition
Tolkien, J. R. R., and Douglas A. Anderson. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
Baym, Nina. “The Norton Anthology of American Literature.” Rev. 6 ed W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2003.
Evelyn Cunningham once said, “Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their oppressors.” For thousands of years women have been oppressed, not in the bondage of slavery but in the bondage that comes from a lack of education and a dependence on men for their livelihood. Women have been subjected to scrutiny and ostracization, belittling and disparaging comments, and even at times they have been feared by men. Women themselves have even taken on the beliefs that they require a man in their life to be taken care of and have a satisfying life although some women and even some men have seen that the differences between the sexes is purely physical. This oppression, as well as the enlightenment of some, is well noted in many literary works. Literature has often been an arena for the examination of the “woman question,” as it was termed in the Victorian age. Four works that examine the role or view of women in society are John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Carol Ann Duffy’s “Medusa.” Although each work examines a side of the woman question in its own way with a variety of views on the question, all of the works examine the fear that women incite in men, the idea that women are dependent on men, and the idea that women are separate from men in some way and each piece works to show that there is actually an interdependence between men and women that is often not expressed.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
It is likely for one to assume that a classic piece of literature set in a fantasy oriented stage will have no merits to the youths of today. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, however, with its crafty of usage symbolism, displays its relevance to issues that often trouble teens. As the story progresses from a children’s tale to an epic, the main character Bilbo undergoes a series of development, his experiences often overlapping with ordinary people. Reading the Hobbit will provide teens with opportunities of exploring the importance of several common but serious topics. People may encounter many of the themes presented in the book elsewhere repeatedly, but it’s possible that they never appreciated the applications it might have on themselves. When teens read the Hobbit, they perceive it as a simple fiction of adventure. Under proper guiding, they will be able to recognize and utilize the lessons of the Hobbit, and improve their attitudes and ideas about life.
Woolf’s pathos to begin the story paints a picture in readers minds of what the
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. 10th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2013. Print.