Riassunto esame Cultura e Letteratura inglese, libro consigliato To the Lighthouse, Woolf

He was once a poet, and now he has been visited by a famous psychiatrist, who has

prescribed him a period of isolation and rest. But in a fit of madness he kills himself. The

acknowledge of his death prompts Clarissa into a moment of being. As a victim of the war,

Septimius is unable to overcome his hallucinations. Clarissa has experienced the horror of

seeing her sister’s death. On the one hand, characters try to recompose themselves, on the

other, Woolf tries to recompose reality.

Mrs Dalloway. Through her prose style and the musicality of words she conveys the

rhythm of life. The use of a highly figurative language, the delicacy of her imagery, her

symbolism, the richness in metaphors and similes, tinge her prose with poetry.

Mrs Dalloway is a mosaic of reminiscences, considerations about past and present

situations, a sort of plunge into the continuous fluidity of time. The action develops through

the characters’ minds, their thoughts, feelings, and recollections in an alternation of

flashbacks.

Septimius Warren Smith is an anomalous character, he has no links with Clarissa and her

world, nevertheless, he becomes the second focal point of the novel and the protagonist of

what can be defined the subplot of the book. Once a poet, back from the WWI he has had a

nervous breakdown. He embodies isolation, loneliness, inability to establish contact. He is

Clarissa’s other self: her irrational and tormented side. Woolf sees lack of communication as

the serious ailments of society, it’s universal, it does not affect a single individual but the

whole society. The news of his death casually reported to Clarissa plunges her in her

moment of being: she has her private vision of death.

The passage from page 122 to 129 represents a key point of the text towards the end of the

novel. The protagonist is Septimius’s death. The couple is at home and Rezia is working on

a hat for the little girl of their neighbours. While she’s working Septimius looks at her and

says that, according to him, the hat is too small for the girl. Rezia is completely shocked

because it’s the first time in weeks that he speaks logically. So, she thinks he’s back to

normal and they start joking as they used to do. Rezia thinks they are a perfect couple now.

According to her, now she can say whatever she likes, and he can understand anything.

The line “that was almost the first thing she had felt about him […]” is a flashback and

refers to the time when Rezia met Septimius in a café. She now refers her first impressions.

“She had felt” and “now remember” are clues to indicate the flashbacks. We are inside her

mind and what she says refers to the past.

The idea conveyed by the word hawk is that of violence, force, but Septimius on the

contrary is described as a very peaceful man. There’s a strong contrast between what he is

and what he appears. This means that Rezia was able to go beyond appearances and see the

true man inside Septimius. They were playing dominos inside the café.

The war destroys his mind, his heart, his soul, and his body. Now Septimius considers the

world hostile. He is lost. He is a victim of the war and knows the absurdity of the war. For

him, life in post-war is a nightmare, from which he’s not able to recover. The expression “he

could help her and she, too, could help him” is a reference to the fact that before the war

there was a perfect harmony between them. All her thoughts were read by Septimius, who

was able to read her soul and mind.

He loves reading Shakespeare and he wants her to read Shakespeare for him. Woolf wants to

give us this piece of information, clarifying that Septimius and Clarissa are readers. In the

text, characters can be divided into readers and non-readers. Among those who don’t love

reading there is Septimius’s doctor, dr. Bradshaw, who is hostile to those who love reading,

and finds this hobby stupid. As reader, Septimius is able to read not books and reality,

beings able to give things their right meaning, penetrating surfaces. Reader characters are

deeper, they have got emotions, feelings.

The expression “but this hat now” states that we are back in the present. Now we have a

very poetic scene. It’s like inside her mind Septimius is a bird, who flies from branch to

branch. He knows all of her secrets and feelings and precedes her thoughts even before she

formulates them. The expression “but he remembered” symbolises the fact we are inside

Septimius’s mind. The reference of the expression “the people we are most fond of are not

good for us when we are ill” is to the fact the doctor wants to separate the couple. This idea

of separation has been imposed on them, because doctors control them. Doctors have

already planned their destinies, abusing of their power. Septimius distrusts doctors, and

Bradshaw in particular is unable to see and understand Septimius’s illness. There’s a strong

irony because Bradshaw is a very famous psychiatrist and said that Septimius suffers from a

strong illness. He was able to discover this through a couple of questions in a couple of

minutes, which is of course a key feature of irony.

Bradshaw prescribes him a long period of rest and isolation in one of his houses. So, he

wants to separate the couple and once again there is irony, instead of speaking of madness

he says that there is a lack of proportion, which according to him are social norms. So,

basically, he wants Septimius to conform to social rules.

There is the repetition of the word must, which resounds like a tragedy, like Woolf is

reminding her readers that something painful is going to happen.

Over him/to me: Woolf is entering and exiting the mind of the character.

From the line “she brought him his papers” we are inside his mind and after describing the

doctor he’s thinking about his own papers. He draws images and writes nonsense,

sometimes with the help of his wife. The problem with this paper is that no one is able to

understand it. He wants to burn them because he doesn’t want Bradshaw to read them.

From “diagrams, designs” to “the map of the world”, all these strange things are inside his

insane mind and Rezia wants to protect them. She puts the paper away and this is sort of a

declaration of love (no one should get at them. She would put them away.).

From the line “then she got up to pack their things […]”, we are able to understand that she

wants to leave with him, but she hears voices downstairs and thinks doctor Holmes has

arrived. Holmes tries to be kind because he knows she doesn’t trust him. The repetition of

the name Holmes creates a sombre atmosphere. He is getting upstairs but at the same time

something is happening inside Septimius’s mind. He’s thinking about his suicide and he is

looking for a good instrument. At first, he thinks about a knife, but there’s irony because he

says that he doesn’t want to spoil it, then about the gas, then about the razors, and finally

about the window. Now he is doing what others want him to do, he is performing a scene,

even though he doesn’t want to die. Dr Holmes has understood what has happened and says

“coward”, meaning that he doesn’t understand Septimius’s turmoil even now.

From the lie “she must be brave and drink something […]” we are inside Rezia’s mind and

she starts thinking of her past, she has private visions of happy moments she was living with

him.

Contenuti e strategie narrative dei brani analizzati più a fondo.

Domande oggettive + vedere come si è mossi all’interno dell’analisi del testo. Woolf messa

in relazione al modernismo, poetica, in che cosa è moderna, a livello di contenuti e strategie

all’interno dei testi. Riferimento ai due essays, che sono da leggere. Nella presentazione del

testo Mrs Dalloway le caratteristiche modernistiche.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf was published in 1927, and it’s her fifth novel,

where the centre of consciousness shifts from one character to another, and from their

perceptions of the external world to their inner life, their associations and memories. As

Woolf wrote in her 1921 essay ‘Modern Fiction’, she wanted to show how ‘an ordinary

mind on an ordinary day receives and organises ‘a myriad of impressions’. She abandons

the neat ordering of life into fictional chapters, and puts aside the usual elements, such as

marriage plots, death bed scenes, coincidences and suspense. The perspective is intimate,

because of the stream of consciousness’s technique, catching thoughts and feelings,

immediate perceptions of individual experience, but the issues go beyond the personal, to

concerns of philosophy, psychology and gender.

So, what is To The Lighthouse about? The family with their guests is a representation of

humanity and a vehicle of consciousness. Life, death, and Mrs Ramsay are the central

issues, while the lighthouse is a powerful image. The author starts by narrating the life of

the whole family, but then goes on toward a concern so unprecedented that it has no name,

“this impersonal thing”. This shift is what signals the modernism of the book. The

revolutionary aim of the novel is to anticipate the moment of being, to catch at experience

before it can be defined. However, the persona is caught up in a larger cultural shift from

one era and code of values, to a new range of possibilities, which requires new forms,

rhythms and modes of expression.

The life of Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, daughter of a Victorian man of letter, Leslie Stephen, and

his second wife Julia Duckworth. He personally suffered change and loss, his first wife

had died, and the Stephen and Duckworth half-siblings shared intense, many incestuous,

relationships; their family was a site of desperate desire and of competition for affection and

security. It was a stressful legacy, a psychological and cultural burden that only personal

achievement could alleviate. So, her parents provided the models for Mr and Mrs Ramsay:

both figures of power, but fallible too.

Woolf was a writer too, but very different from her father. While he was centred in

Victorianism, she was the axis of Modernism, an innovative intellectual and artistic

challenge. She was married to Leonard Woolf, and surrounded herself with a circle of

remarkable friends from Cambridge and London, the so-called Bloomsbury Group, which

constituted a very different basis from the one of the family: a professional, critical,

philosophical, artistic group, addressing experience as the raw material of life, interested in

problems of consciousness and form, self-awareness in crisis. To the Lighthouse

impersonated this kind of modernism, bringing an analytical sense of form to the urgent

chaos of personality.

Although the book is not autobiographical, the Hebridean house, with its view of a

lighthouse in the bay, is a disgui