Queen Victoria's reign

ORLANDO

this in her novel → it’s about the story with the friend and at the same time mistress

and she explores the dimension by which it is impossible to define our identity, through the image

ANDROGYNY

of → the individual doesn’t have an appearance similar to the real sex.

FLUIDITY GENDER

of → she explored the themes of homosexuality and bisexuality in a very

natural way. She had a close friendship with a woman, they were in love but despite this, her

husband respected her a lot.

SEA

The is the symbol of water, life and death:

• LIFE: the body is immersed inside the amniotic liquid before the birth, water is the main

element of our body and our cells

• DEATH: we can drown in the sea, it’s an unknown place

TYRANNY TIME

of → the clock time is in contrast with our intimate perceptions.

FLUX THOUGHTS

of → subjectivity and moments of acute awareness and heightened sensitivity =

revelatory moments of being.

AIM → to give voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory

HUMAN PERSONALITY

The → a continuos shift of impressions and emotions, the events that

make up a story are no longer important, what matters are the impressions they make on the

characters

NARRATOR POINT VIEW

→ the omniscient narrator disappears and the of is inside the

character’s mind through flashbacks, associations of ideas

WOOLF JOYCE

Moments of being → rare moments of insight Ephipahnies → the sudden spiritual

during the characters’ daily life when they can manifestation caused by a trivial gesture,

see reality behind appearances, sudden object where the character is led to a self-

moments of acute awareness and heightened realisation about himself

sensitivity

Stream of consciousness → never lets her Stream of consciousness → characters show

characters’ thoughts flow without control, their thoughts directly through interior

maintains logical and grammatical organisation monologue, sometimes in an incoherent and

syntactically unorthodox way

STYLE

Mix of fluidity and fragmentariness with the use of interior monologues, flashbacks, stream of

consciousness and an impressionistic narrative style.

MRS DALLOWAY

Plot

The events narrated in Mrs Dalloway take place in London in the time frame of one day, a

Wednesday in June 1923. In the morning, Clarissa Dalloway walks up Bond Street to buy flowers

for the party she is giving that evening at her house. Back home, she receives an unexpected visit

from Peter Walsh, whose marriage proposal she had rejected when she was 18 (Clarissa is now

over 50). Later that day, Peter catches a glimpse of a young couple, Septimus Warren Smith and his

Italian wife Lucrezia, as they walk towards Dr Bradshaw's practice. Septimus, is a shell-shocked

veteran of World War I and suffers from mental distress and hallucinations. Given Septimus'

precarious conditions, the psychiatrist suggests he should be admitted to a clinic.

A few hours later, after a seemingly peaceful moment with Lucrezia, Septimus takes his own life by

jumping out of a window. Clarissa learns of his death that evening from Dr Bradshaw's wife, one of

the many guests at her party, because the Doctor arrives later. She is deeply shaken by the news,

even though she did not know him personally. At the party she also sees Peter again and Sally

Seton, with whom she had a close friendship and the potential of a romantic connection in her

youth.

Characters

CLARISSA → she is a middle-aged woman, clearly defined by her marital status, as suggested by

the title 'Mrs' which accompanies her name, and by her condition of mother. She is a complex and

frustrated woman: she lives her being a wife and a mother (she hasn’t a good relation with her

daughter) as a limitation to her freedom, but she is not able to express her feelings spontaneously

and self-imposes strong restrictions on her liberty just because she feels weak and imperfect.

Clarissa's mind is constantly pervaded by her past memories (which the reader can follow thanks

to the stream of consciousness technique used by Woolf).

She is married to Richard Dalloway, an important man in society and she choose him because he

gives her stability, her chance to choose Richard was rational. But clarissa isn’t satisfied, she shoes

a side that doesn’t correspond to her inner self, she often things about her past, she fights with

her insecurities and she takes refuge in memory (=happy corner).

She thinks about what would have happened if she had married Peter: surely she would have lived

an exciting life but without securities because Peter wasn’t reliable. She is still attracted to him,

when she sees him she knows how he is and they she can’t stay with him so she goes on. She has a

secrets garden (→ place with no access, the part that we don’t show to the other)

SEPTIMUS WARREN SMITH → he is 29 and married to Lucrezia, he is a veteran of the First World

War, he is victim of shell shock, he lives with a traumatic condition (→ insomnia, schizophrenia,

nightmares, hallucinations) and for this reason he is under treatment by a psychiatrist, Dr

Bradshaw. Septimus considers suicide as a form of liberation from the weight of life, despite the

treatments he can’t live, he’s persecuted by his past. While Clarissa represent the san part,

Septimus the insane one, he doesn’t want to live in a world that isn’t made for him. She decides to

go on, she accepts old age and the idea of death

In Mrs Dalloway Woolf deliberately chooses to focus on one single character (Clarissa) on one

single day (a Wednesday in June) in one single place (London). By doing so Woolf makes a radical

shift from the tradition of Victorian literature and underlines the idea that even the most ordinary

character on the most ordinary day can be the object of a writer's scrutiny. What interests a

modernist writer like Woolf is thus not the variety of the plot, but the workings of the mind, the

impressions the world arouses in it and the ways in which it is affected by external reality.

Mrs Dalloway abandons the traditionally-structured plot of Victorian novels in favour of a more

experimental approach to writing.

In Mrs Dalloway, on the contrary, actions are fragmented and disconnected → what gives unity to

the novel is not the logical chain of actions of traditional novels, but the coherence of the mind,

which receives a huge quantity of impressions, inputs and stimuli at once.

War Poetry

That’s a period characterised by a huge production of poems written at the front → they are

scared and feel the need to leave something to their love ones. War is the moment in which a man

reflects on the life → we love more the life when the fear to die is stronger. In this period there are

two “different types” of poetry:

1. Representation of conflicts in a positive, heroic and naive way (Brooke, Sassoon, Owen)

2. Brutally realist portrayal of that time

“war poets” does not simply denote the central topic of their production, but is also a reference to

the fact that these authors were themselves soldiers. In sharp contrast to the romanticised

rhetoric of patriotism that originally fuelled the country's military effort, their poetry denounces

the physical and psychological torments that every soldier had to endure. Rather than the

honourable moment in which a man could sacrifice his life to the nation, war was now depicted as

a source of horrors, mutilations, traumas and death. For this reason, these poets' production could

easily be labelled defeatist and initially fell victim to the strict censorship of the time.

Dying for the country was the greatest honor → rhetoric of war, what the government made young

people understand, but the soldiers weren’t heroes, they were victims, war is a lie, war isn’t

heroism (= Septimus is a victim of this system).

RUPERT BROOKE

He died in 1915 at the beginning of the war, when he died he didn’t had the possibility to see the

POISONING)

reality of the war, his death was caused by a disease (BLOOD

• He was a soldier but he didn’t die on a battlefield

• He had a romantic and patriotic vision of war

• His poems were used by the government as an instrument of propaganda → war was clean

and cleansing in his opinion

• The greatest sacrifice was to die for one’s country

THE SOLDIER

The Soldier is the concluding sonnet of Rupert Brooke's 1914 collection. Composed while the poet

was at home on Christmas leave, the poem expresses the patriotic enthusiasm of the early months

of the conflict and offers an idealised view of war as a noble adventure and honourable enterprise,

as well as a means of achieving glory and immortality on the soldiers' part.

In its smooth images and melodious iambic pentameters, the sonnet revolves around England's

personification as a generous mother requiring her sons' sacrifice. In the first stanza, the poet

exorcises the horrors of death by depicting the soldier's decaying corpse as a physical extension of

his homeland enriching the foreign field. In the second stanza, the sonnet celebrates the blissful

state of those who die in battle, whose souls will now become part of a greater, immortal being.

If the soldiers gives his life on the battlefield, it’s symbol of heroism, the soldier who dies will be

remembered and glorified. If he dies far from his country, the blood brings a peace of his country

(Britain) in an other. WILFRED OWEN

He was working as a teacher of English in France when he visited a hospital for the wounded and

decided to return to England and enlist. He was killed in a German machine-gun attack just seven

days before the Armistice. His poems are painful in the accurate accounts of gas casualties, men

who have gone mad, men who are clinically alive although their bodies and mind have been

destroyed. He had the idea of war as a BIG LIE (→ created by the government to convince the

people that it was nice). “War is desperation, death, solitude, victimis no heroism”.

His technical innovation of ‘para-rhymes’ (ex: “loves – lives” “seeds – sides”. Pararhyme is a partial

rhyme between words that have the same pattern of consonants but different vowels), as well as

his extensive use of assonance and alliteration give his lines a haunting quality, a gravity and moral

force which well represent sufferance and death.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI

• = it’s sweet, honourable and appropriate to die for your country

• HORACE

He takes this quote from a Latin poet →

• The title is in contradiction to what he thinks about the war, it’s provocative and ironic

He speaks about his personal experience in the trenches, it’s divided into three stanzas:

PREFIGURATION OF DEATH

1. → description of a group of soldiers coming back to