Virginia Woolf tesina

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

Virginia Adeline Stephen was born on 25 January 1882, in London. She’s the

th

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

Times Literary

Group. Woolf began writing professionally in 1905 for the

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

The Voyage Out,

to vote for women. In 1915 she published her first novel, 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

Night and Day Jacob’s Room.

published and in 1922 In 1925 she wrote her

Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse Orlando

masterpiece followed in 1927 by and

A Room Of One’s Own,

in 1928. In 1929 she published the essay 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 Waves, The Years

the University. In 1931 she wrote 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 28 of March 1941, few days after

th

Between the Acts,

having finished her last novel, Virginia committed suicide

drowning herself in the river Ouse.

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 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 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. Virginia en lisant l'auteur

Recherche

de la se sent étourdie par la similitude avec ceux qui sont ses sujets

et son idée de la littérature: aborder ensemble l'intime et le banal, le rapport

avec le soi et la relation avec l'autre, l'immersion dans les profondeurs de l'âme

inextricablement liée à l'émersion de relations sociales et affectives. Il suit

l'admiration, mais aussi le découragement de ne pas se sentir à la hauteur.

Recherche

Proust commence la en 1908, quelques années après la mort de son

père et puis de sa mère, dans une période où l'asthme, maladie qui l'a

accompagné toute sa vie, retourne cruellement à se faire sentir. Proust écrit

toujours parce que la maladie l’oblige à se retrancher du monde.

La Recherche sera publiée entre 1913 et 1927: en 1913 il publie le premier

Du Côté de chez Swann;

volume, au printemps de 1922, il termine le sixième et

Le Temps Retrouvé,

dernier volume, et, son projet désormais achevé, Proust

meurt épuisé en Novembre de la même année, emporté par une bronchite mal

soignée.

Il y a sans doute beaucoup de similitudes entre la vie de Marcel Proust,

Recherche,

l’auteur, et la vie de Marcel, le narrateur de la même si l'œuvre ne

je

peut être considéré comme entièrement autobiographique: le narrateur c’est

un personnage intermédiaire, un point de vue, un regard sur le monde, qui

pourrait être aussi celui du lecteur. Ainsi le lecteur se trouve-t-il par

je

intermédiaire de ce encore plus impliqué dans l’histoire et cela est nouveau

dans l’histoire du roman.

Cette œuvre retrace l’itinéraire d’une conscience en quête de son identité.

Le

C’est seulement dans le dernier livre, menant le titre emblématique de

Temps Retrouvé, que le narrateur découvre enfin la vérité: la vie trouve sa

signification grâce à l’Art et à l’écriture, qui fixe le passé, sinon voué à la

destruction: le narrateur Marcel, en fait, décide d’écrire ce que l’écrivain Marcel

Proust a déjà écrit, l’histoire de sa vie.

Pour rappeler le passé, selon Proust, il faut utiliser la mémoire involontaire. En

fait, à traves des émotions éprouvées grâce à un odeur, un goût, une vision,

nous pouvons rappeler les mêmes émotions éprouvées dans le passé : c’est la

théorie du souvenir ou de la mémoire affective.

Pour ce qui concerne le style et le traitement du temps, nous pouvons trouver

les correspondances susmentionnées avec Woolf: les sensations des

personnages occupent plus d'espace dans le récit que les événements

externes et un évènement, en apparence banale, mais très important pour la

sensibilité du narrateur peut occuper plusieurs pages et être analysé dans ses

moindres aspects. Proust, en plus, choisit des phrases longues, avec de

nombreuses subordonnées et des incises, qui semblent imiter les sinuosités de

la pensée. Italo Svevo

(1861 – 1928)

“T he Nice Old Man

a nd the Pretty Girl”

(Hogarth Press, 1930)

Uno dei pochi scrittori

italiani in grado di reggere

il confronto con la nuova

narrativa europea è Italo

Svevo, di cui la Hogarth

(“La novella del buon vecchio e della

Press pubblicherà una raccolta di racconti

fanciulla e altri scritti”, 1930), che però in Inghilterra non riscossero il successo

desiderato. Questi racconti si collocano nell’ultimo periodo di Svevo, tra il 1919

e il 1928, e possono essere considerati tra i più significativi della sua

produzione poiché sono tutti in qualche modo legati alle tematiche della

Coscienza di Zeno: la malattia, la vecchiaia e la gioventù, la soddisfazione del

desiderio attraverso il sogno, gli impulsi segreti dell’inconscio, le ambivalenze e

i sensi di colpa, il bisogno di stabilire ad ogni costo la propria “innocenza”, e

sono percorsi da un sottile umorismo che li lega strettamente al capolavoro.

La Coscienza di Zeno

Svevo scrive nel 1923. Anche egli abbandona il modulo

ottocentesco del romanzo narrato da una voce anonima ed esterna al piano

della vicenda: per gran parte il romanzo è costituito da un memoriale che il

protagonista Zeno Cosini scrive su invito del suo psicanalista, il dottor S., a

scopo terapeutico, come preludio alla cura vera e propria.

Nuovo ed originale è anche il particolare trattamento del tempo, che Svevo

chiama “tempo misto”. Il racconto, nonostante l’impostazione autobiografica,

non presenta gli eventi nella loro successione cronologica lineare, inseriti in un

tempo oggettivo, ma in un tempo tutto soggettivo, in cui il passato, il tempo

del vissuto, riaffiora continuamente e si intreccia con il presente, il tempo del

racconto. La struttura del racconto non è quindi lineare ma spezzettata in tanti

momenti distinti poiché la ricostruzione del proprio passato operata da Zeno si

raggruppa intorno ad alcuni temi fondamentali, a ciascuno dei quali è dedicato

un capitolo: il vizio del fumo e i vani sforzi per liberarsene, la morte del padre, il

proprio matrimonio, il rapporto con la moglie e la giovane amante,

l’associazione commerciale con il cognato, la sua presunta guarigione finale.

Eventi contemporanei possono così essere distribuiti in più capitoli successivi,

poiché si riferiscono a nuclei tematici diversi e viceversa: la narrazione va

continuamente avanti ed indietro nel tempo seguendo la memoria del

protagonista.

Coscienza di Zeno,

Nella però, il protagonista, attraverso il suo “monologo”,

ricostruisce sequenze narrative ordinate e consequenziali. Non si ha il semplice

germinare dei suoi pensieri, il “flusso” nel suo scorrere casuale e disordinato: il

narratore costruisce logicamente il discorso, gli da un ordine e seleziona i

materiali che espone secondo la loro pertinenza.

Victoria Ocampo

(1890 – 1979)

“Y mi amistad con Virginia (tan unilateral, pues

yo la conocía y ella no a mí; pues ella existía

inmensamente

para mí y yo para ella fui

una

sombra lejana en un país

exótico

creado por su fantasía)...”

Virginia Woolf en su diario, 1954

“Yo creo que una mujer no puede

desahogarse de sus

pensamientos y sentimientos en

el estilo de un hombre,

del mismo modo que no puede

hablar con la voz de un hombre”.

Carta a Virginia Woolf, 1935

Victoria Ocampo es una figura dominante en la sociedad

literaria argentina. Fundó, publicó y dirigió la revista

“Sur”,