The First World War and Women as the Victims of War Trauma in Virginia Woolf's Novels (original) (raw)
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“Virginia Woolf’s Women Characters, the First World War, and the Elegiac Novel”
Virginia Woolf and Social Justice, 2019
Simon Featherstone argues that Great War-writers like Siegfried Sassoon developed a “politics and poetics of exclusive knowledge” founded upon war-experience (446). Excluded from front line participation—and thus from anthologies centred upon combat-experience—Virginia Woolf’s women characters nevertheless also perform the work of mourning necessitated by war. If the war is “over” for Clarissa Dalloway, it is not so for Mrs Foxcroft or Lady Bexborough, whose “nice boy[s]” were killed (4). Meanwhile, Septimus Smith’s suicide brings war back to Clarissa and his widow Lucrezia, and war-death informs the women focalizing Jacob Flanders in Jacob’s Room and Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. Whether to spouse, son, or near-stranger, Woolf’s women repeatedly turn their thoughts to the war’s dead, attempting to make sense of their losses. Recent scholarship has incorporated women’s war-experiences through their commemorative-poetry (Featherstone 445), and Erin Penner has briefly posited Woolf’s transformation of the elegy by “rewrit[ing]” it “into prose” (25). Building upon these innovations, I examine Woolf’s depiction of women’s mourning in the aforementioned novels. Although Woolf felt it “impossible to overlook” Sassoon’s soldier’s perspective—one closed to her and her women characters—her women nevertheless commemorate loss as Sassoon does in his war-poetry: by repeatedly and involuntarily remembering their deceased objects as they attempt to go about their lives (qtd. in Das 9). They maintain thereby an individual connection with the dead that traditional elegiac consolation would foreclose. Soldier-poets thus “founded” an elegiac canon of perpetually-delayed consolation, constituting a new form of commemorative writing. Via their subversion of traditional elegiac form, I contend, Woolf’s novels perform a similar operation via prose fiction, expanding thereby the category of individual war-mourner to include women on the Homefront.
Virginia Woolf and the Representation of War
Lo scopo di questo saggio sarà di considerare i modi in cui Virginia Woolf affrontò e decise di rappresentare la guerra in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse e The Years, seguendo patterns diversi e perseguendo diversi obiettivi.
Death and contentment in Virginia Woolf's war novels
Revista e-scrita: Revista do Curso de Letras da …, 2010
Resumo One of the most striking characteristics of Virginia Woolfs war novelsMrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927)is the confrontation of death and mortality in the fabric of everyday life (and of the narrative). Death and destructionset forth historically ...
The Albatross, 2018
The author compares Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier’(1918) for their respective juxtapositions of shell shock, splintering families, and homoeroticism and argues that these juxtapositions are used by the writers not to condemn the characters themselves but rather to condemn the society that brought on this trauma and destruction, thereby forming a critique of preand post-WWI British attitudes toward masculinity and gendered expectations. Shell shock renders soldiers incapable of returning home and fulfilling their heteronormative duties, while patriarchal ideals prevent even the possibility of homosexuality, leaving the British public in a state of limbo. While neither novel takes place on the battlefields or in the trenches of World War I, both Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) allow the effects of war to invade the text and the stability of their respective characters’ lives....
War Within Uncanny Cotton Wool: Anxiety of War in Virginia Woolf’s Writing
Abstract: Whenever war is spoken of I find The war that was called Great invades the mind.’ 1 Virginia Woolf’s writing manifest that war profoundly invaded her mind and it gave hammering effect on her psyche. Anxiety of war had pierced and occupied every inch and every corner of her mind. She affirmed through her writing the bloodshed at the front lesser excruciating than fretfulness of human mind caused by the spirited war. She opposed the inadvertent involvement of the innocent civilians who became the gross dupe of this political propaganda in the name of nationalist pride. But her criticism of war yields nothing to heal her anguish instead it kept alive
A Feminist Perspective of Virginia Woolf's Selected Novels 'Mrs Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse
2005
The aim of this study is to examine Virginia Woolf’s contribution to the feminist question in her selected novels: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). The study shows how Mrs. Woolf employed her novels to show women the way to obtain meaning in life and realize their identities. Virginia Woolf established herself as a distinguished feminist woman writer in her treatment of women’s helpless situation. She unveiled the causes of women’s oppression and provided us with a comprehensive answer for the women’s question.
A Crowd in The Voice: First World War Diaries of Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf
1996
In this thesis I examine the sections of Vera Brittain's diary and Virginia Woolfs diary that were written during the First World War. My study identifies the extent to which each diarist succeeds in expressing herself within a culture which is dominated by masculine values of patriarchy and militarism. An initial premise from which the study arises is that men and women may respond differently within a given context and that women's responses to war have often been suppressed or overlooked within a male-dominated context. To analyze the wartime diaries I have divided the research into three areas: the diarist's relationship to social structures, the diarist's interpretation and use of the dominant language, and the diarist's relationship to the diary as a vehicle for self-expression. Brittain's and Woolfs backgrounds and literary ambitions are factors which determine each woman's attempt to find her own voice. From the analyses I conclude that Vera Brittain is the less able to understand and write honestly about her war experience as she is drawn into the masculine perspective and becomes dependent upon it in her grief. Virginia Woolf attempts to define her individuality and her writing by removing herself from the war and masculine ideology. However, in so doing she writes self-consciously and constructs voices which mayor may not be authentic, because they define themselves in opposition to the prevailing values and literary traditions. Each diary reveals the tension between the diarist and the dominant culture, and exposes the existence of a feminine voice. lU I am grateful to the William Ready Division of Archives, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, for assisting me with my research of the diaries in the Vera Brittain Papers. Most importantly, I thank Jeff, for the time and patience he devoted to my studies.