VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941)

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-l941)

Denied education in University because of Victorian prejudices. Love for the house near the sea. Mother's death reveals her psychological frailty (many mental collapse and attempted suicides). 1941: she committed suicide.

Features: balance: the character's speculation and the realistic situations and events, their inner mental activity and the outer facts. Traditional features: she maintained a certain essential structure, this avoided the danger of leading the novel towards dissolution. Innovative technique: it took second place, no traditional plot and direct dialogue but the interior monologue, no interest in the character's external life but in the life of their mind. Moments of being, like Joyce's epiphanies, are moment of high intensity and perception, the mind itself.

Characters: he innermost working of their minds offers the modern novelist the means to describe and reveal the experience of life.

Time: Compression of time and of mental processes: to shift back and forth in time and intermingle past, present and future; the subject remains fixed in space and his consciousness moves; time remains fixed and it is the spatial element that changes.

Experimental novel: Stream of consciousness: Woolf (indirect method: indirect interior monologue, which introduces mental activity with verbal clauses), Joyce (direct method: direct interior monologue reported faithfully from the very mind of the character (Mr Bloom), without any verbal clause or conjunction, often avoiding punctuation.

Mrs Dalloway: The entire actions are centred on Mrs Dalloway and her minds. It is trough her thoughts, her feelings and recollections, presented no longer in linear progression, but in alternation of flashbacks and present actions, that the action effectively develops. Out for flowers: moment of being: the strike of Big Ben makes her thinking about time, about life and her instinctive love for it.

To the lighthouse: Plot: A very complex novel about a journey to the lighthouse, delayed for years. It is also her most successful experiment. Structure: 1)The window, 1 day; 2)time passes, 10 years; 3)to the lighthouse, 1 day. Themes: The quest, the alternation of light and darkness in life (like the typical beams of the lighthouse). Symbols: the sea is both the symbol of life itself and the symbol of the inexorable flowing of time; the lighthouse and the journey are two important unifying symbols between the initial and the final scenes in the novel.

The brown stocking: external event: the characters are making the stockings, there is an alternation of direct and indirect speech, internal event: in the second part there is a long mental parenthesis in which the time is compressed, there are described her thoughts. Association if ideas, like psycoanalisis.

Father and Children reach the lighthouse: The Ramsays are finally reaching the lighthouse, on the boat with mr Ramsay there are two of his children, James and Cam, and old mr Macalister. In the first part there is a description of Mr Ramsay, then the reaching of the lighthouse, but there is no longer enthusiasm in the journey.

Shakespeare's sister: about women's emancipation, Virginia Woolf imagines the sister of S., with his same gift and education, during the Elizabethan reign. She criticizes trough irony the Bishop's affirmation: "Cats do not go to heaven, women cannot write the plays of shakespeare.". She would probably be discriminated and obliged to mend the stockings.