Mrs Dalloway and Modernism Flashcards
Free indirect style of narrator
- Speech is presented in reported form: In the third person past tense.
- The lexis and grammer distinctive of the speaker is retained: “had her work cut out for her” – note the very natural conversational simplicity of the transitive phrasal verb “cut out” – People do not over complicate their thoughts.
- The narrator reports the speech or thought of a character from inside the character’s consciousness, adopting their tone of voice and personality; the narrator becomes that character. When stating “A little job at Court!”, we know it is Clarissa’s voice rather than the narrators due to the word “little” holding elements of personality: We see Clarissa’s criticizing elements.
- The narrator does not dictate whether a character is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but uses the characters interior monologues to help the reader judge depending on their personality. For example, Bradshaw’s internal monologue states: “a doctor loses his sense of proportion, as a doctor he fails. Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ… you invoke proportion; order rest in bed… until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve” – this is dramatic irony because Bradshaw has condemned himself through revealing his thoughts.
- Conveys Mrs Dalloway’s reflections without a reporting clause such as “she thought” E.G “For Lucy had her work cut out for her” (p.1) Who is Lucy? Where is the narrator in relation to the subject being described?.
Stream of Consciousness/ internal monologue
attempts to give the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes
coined by William James in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology
Fully developed by modernists in the 20th century
Woolf uses the stream of consciousness as a tunneling device: though repetition, she makes certain characters echo each other (such as Clarissa and Septimus with “fear no more”), which enables the reader to see a connection between the two. Furthermore, the stream of consciousness gives the reader a closer connection with the character as you are able to experience their internal anxieties and vulnerabilities – they are further exposed to the reader.
Cubism
The Cubist cultural movement focused on depicting objects from more than one viewpoint, as seen in Picasso’s paintings.
• Mrs. Dalloway also demonstrates this technique of seeing things from different angles. For example, the plane advertisement in the sky: As the plane writes in the sky, the reader experiences the city of London attempt to interpret the message being written out.
• Woolf tries to show her reader the emotion and the intellect of her characters in her novel, just as the Post-impressionists do with their paintings.
• Like the Cubist artists, Woolf wanted to reflect the fragments of the mind through her characters, thereby creating a “stream of consciousness” truer to real life than that created by the “materialist” authors.
• By showing various diverse angles of a painting, Picasso could give the viewer a different kind of visual experience. Similarly, Woolf could give the reader a different kind of written experience by combining “myriad impressions” rather than just a linear train of thought.
• Their aim was to develop a new way of seeing which reflected the modern age and moved away from the traditional renascence. From 1870-1910, western society was increasing in technological production. Inventions such as photography, cinematography, sound recording, the telephone, the motor car and the airplane were the beginning of a new era.
• With the narrative style of the novel, Virginia Woolf rejects the artificial structures of Victorian fiction and writes aptly for the Modernist era. Woolf succeeds in conveying, with realism, multiple subjective perspectives on grand themes including oppression and death.
shellshock
- Shell shock was considered by many in the military as cowardice - an imagined/exaggerated illness. Some doctors, however, were enlightened and saw how industrialised/mechanised war meant that soldiers, distant form a faceless enemy, were for most of the time immobile, anxious, expectant – and had no way to express/expel their anxiety.
- “Emotions that had to be expressed during combat came to the surface with renewed ferocity after the war, including the anxiety of survivors’ guilt” (Showalter, 1992)
- Woolf – suffered mental breakdowns for which the cure was isolation, six months of bed rest, lack of intellectual stimulation and weight gain. Septimus was ordered same treatment to recover his “sense of proportion”
repressing grief after the war
“This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows, courage and endurance, a perfectly upright and stoical bearing” (p.10)
Lady Bexborough opening the bazaar (p.5) “with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed”
“but it was over; thank Heaven – over!” (p.3)
Are the images of England returning to normality after the war actually positive, or being criticised by Woolf? Is this an image of the higher social classes being able to resume an order in their lives – one denied the lower classes OR is it implying that these social/sporting events present the illusion of a return to normality while the emotional/psychological reality is ignored, or repressed.
Clarissa’s illness
Clarissa – intimations of mortality. Her heart weak after influenza. Clarissa associates her heart beat (Irregular?) with the moment of suspense before Big Ben strikes (p.4). She also notes waking in the night which might be linked to her heart. This sense of anxiety seems occur when Clarissa feels apart from/cut off the world she observes, not immersed.
Is this anxiety linked to deep rooted fears of not having lived properly – of failing Richard and Elizabeth; her inability to immerse herself in an important public role such as Richard, or intellectual pursuit as Peter can.
Clarissa often reflects on how she seems to others. she is very self aware. Septimus lacks self-awareness.
theme of oppression and repression
- “until they, too, shared his sense of proportion” – Sir William Bradshaw wants to oppress anyone who challenges his concept of the world and does not follow his sense of proportion.
- “her notion of the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives…all the same, you behave like a lady.” “to see your own sister killed by a falling tree” – Clarissa feels oppressed by religion, however despite the trauma, she suppresses her feelings to behave in a proper social manner. She is oppressed by society to act bravely and fulfill the duties expected of her.
- “(sally) her eyes not aglow…voice wrung of its old ravishing richness” – Sally has been oppressed by society. Now that she is Lady Rossetta, she must behave in a way expected of her from society. However Peter states that Sally “was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of twenty” revealing that age has allowed her to repress society and draw into her true self – she has begun to resuscitate her soul.
Disillusionment with the British Empire
- “Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed” – feeling the failure of the British Empire due to destruction of the war. Clarissa admires her bravery for continuing despite of this devastation.
- “He had heard of her (aunt Helena), from Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so fitting — one of nature’s masterpieces — that old Miss Parry should turn to glass” - her glass eye could symblise her inability to see the disintergration of the Empire
1919-22 was a period of imperial crisis for Britain, witnessing the accretion of a number of serious nationalist challenges to imperial rule. Although Britain had emerged victorious from the First World War, its empire was far from secure. Indeed, given the nationalist forces the war had unleashed, especially those in Ireland and Turkey, it appeared to be facing well-armed and popular opponents whom it was unable to defeat. By 1923 Britain had been forced to pull back from most of its military commitments around the fringes of the former Tsarist Empire, withdraw from Turkey, concede the creation of the Irish Free State and agree to a new constitutional settlement in Egypt which reduced its political control.
