Virginia WOOLF
Virginia
Woolf wan born in London
in 1882. She came from an aristocratic family, therefore from a highly educated
and intellectual family environment which greatly influence her in her
approaching to writing and art in general. Her mother's and two years later her
step-sister's deaths caused her mental instability. She used to hear voices in
her head and have migraine attacks. After her father died, she moved to Bloomsbury where she founded a circle of intellectuals
and where she met her husband Leonard Woolf. Later he founded the Hogart Press to publish her works. After she published many
important writings she died drowning herself in a river in 1941.
It
always feels like the reader is entering in the characters' inner world. Time
is often dilated and a single moment can last for a very long time. She uses
the indirect interior monologue to represent the gap between chronological and
interior time. Woolf wants to impress the characters who experience these
events in their subjectivity and this made her a heroine for many feminist. She
does not use the tradition narration voice, but she takes different points of
view from her characters and she "speaks" with their minds, showing their
thoughts and feeling as the occur. A narrator sometime gives to this thought a
logical order and grammatical sequence.
MOMENTS OF BEING are the moments of intensity, perception or vision
which illuminate our lives.
Mrs. Dalloway - one day in the central London. Clarissa Dalloway organizes a party
for her husband, a politician, and during the day she experiences many changes
of moods and memories. We see her also through the other character's eyes and
thoughts like the man she once loved who suddenly comes back from India,
her friend, and her daughter. At the same time, like a parallel life, there is Septimus Smith who had a nervous disorder because of the
bad experiences in war, and he goes to two famous doctors who don't understand
his disease though so they can't help him. At the end of the day he kills
himself, and Clarissa gets the new at her party where one of the doctors was
invited. She understands Septimus and she feels like
him and somehow she is glad that he committed suicide because thanks to him she
could truly understand life.
