Virginia Woolf tesina

Marcel Proust, Italo Svevo e Virginia Woolf

Stream of consciousness

Virginia Woolf

Una scrittrice nel XX secolo

Il gruppo di Bloomsbury

La malattia

La cuestión femenina

Disturbo bipolare

Roger Fry

Victoria Ocampo

Romeo Alice, V°D

A.S. 2013/2013

Virginia Woolf

(1882 – 1941)

“This afternoon I came to the idea for a new form of a new novel.

My doubt is the extent to which it will embody the human heart.

I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist.”

A Writer’s Diary, 26/01/1920

La vita

Virginia Adeline Stephen was born on 25 January 1882, in London. She’s the third of the four sons of Leslie Stephen (famous literary critic and essayist) and Julia Duckworth. Soon her life is marked by pain: in 1895, she lost her mother, in 1897 her half-sister Stella, in 1904 her father and in 1906 her beloved brother Thoby. In addition to that, shortly after the death of her mother, when she was about thirteen, she began suffering sexual abuses by her half-brother George. It was about in this period, probably because of the traumatic experiences she suffered, that the first events of those crisis, which will accompany her for the rest of her life, began to appear like “horrible voices”, as she called them, together with a painful excitement and then a sudden, deep depression. In 1904, haunted by the “voices”, which pushed her to commit acts of madness, and by the grief for the death of her father, she tries for the first time to commit suicide.

After the death of her father she moved to 46 of Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, together with her brothers Thoby and Adrian and her sister Vanessa. It is there that it was formed the first nucleus of what will be known as the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf began writing professionally in 1905 for the Times Literary Supplement as an essayist. In 1912 her marriage with Leonard Woolf gives her a certain serenity, interrupted by another attempt of suicide in 1913. For a certain period she has also been actively involved in the battles to win the right to vote for women. In 1915 she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, after many years of revisions. In 1917, Leonard and Virginia founded the Hogarth Press, the publishing house that will release all Virginia’s works and other important works of contemporary British and foreign writers. In 1919 she published Night and Day and in 1922 Jacob’s Room. In 1925 she wrote her masterpiece Mrs Dalloway, followed in 1927 by To the Lighthouse and Orlando in 1928. In 1929 she published the essay A Room Of One’s Own, where she deals with female issues and claims. The theme of the unjust subordinate position of women was strongly felt by Virginia since her adolescence: she will always consider herself a bad educated person compared to her brothers, since she had been forced to an individual study while they had been able to attend the University. In 1931 she wrote The Waves, The Years in 1937 and in 1938 Three Guineas, another feminist essay where she also condemns fascist regime.

The anxieties due to the outbreak of World War II aggravated her health: her mental condition became critical and on 28th of March 1941, few days after having finished her last novel, Between the Acts, Virginia committed suicide drowning herself in the river Ouse.

La tecnica narrativa

She is seen as one of the major twentieth century novelists and one of the foremost modernists. As well as Joyce, Proust and Svevo, Woolf leaves the traditional narrative technique and experiments the “stream of consciousness”: she enters directly in the characters’ inner world through the technique of the indirect interior monologue. There is not a linear chronology because she is interested in the subjectivity of her characters, above all females, and in their impressions of the surrounding environment. She directly shows us their thoughts, feelings and sensations, even if there is still the occasional presence of an invisible narrator which arranges the characters’ thoughts in a logical way.

Mrs Dalloway

In all of Mrs Dalloway the action takes place on a day in June: every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf freely alternates omniscient description, indirect interior monologue and soliloquy throughout the novel. The narration follows at least twenty characters in this way but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.

To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse begins on a September afternoon, before the war, in which the Ramsay family plans a trip to the lighthouse: the trip will be realised by the survivors only a decade later. Ten years of facts are so compressed into a few pages. The first part of the novel is the longest in the book, yet it describes only one day: the plot unfolds through the shifting perspectives of each character’s stream of consciousness. Shifts can occur even mid-sentence and in some sense they resemble the rotating beam of the lighthouse itself.

Marcel Proust

(1871 – 1922)

“Je me demande si cette fois j’ai réalisé quelque chose. Bien, rien, cependant, par rapport à Proust, dans lequel je suis plongée. La qualité de Proust est l’union de l’extrême sensibilité avec une extrême ténacité. Il examine les nuances d’un papillon jusqu’au dernier grain. Et j’imagine qu’il me influencera et me rendra furieuse avec chacune de mes phrases”. Virginia Woolf, 8 Avril 1925

“Mais qu’un bruit, une odeur, déjà entendu ou respirée jadis, le soient de nouveau, à la fois dans le présent et dans le passé, réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits, aussitôt l’essence permanente et habituellement cachée des choses se trouve libérée et notre vrai moi, qui, parfois depuis longtemps, semblait mort, mais ne l’était pas entièrement, s’éveille, s’anime en recevant la céleste nourriture qui lui est apportée.”

Le Temps Retrouvé, 1922

Indéniable c’est l’influence que Virginia Woolf aurait dû recevoir de la lecture de “À la Recherche du temps perdu” de Marcel Proust.