Dermatobia revisited or tickling cows with feather dusters (original) (raw)
"One Must Be Scientific": Natural History and Ecology in Mrs. Dalloway
Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Second Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, 2013
M rs. Dalloway models an ecological understanding of human life and the nonhuman world, thus o ering a corrective to harmful and outmoded scienti c perspectives. e kind of science Woolf critiques is represented not only by the cold and imperialistic attitudes of Drs. Holmes and Bradshaw, but also by the attitudes of a Victorian botanist: Miss Helena Parry, Clarissa Dalloway's aunt. Troubling, damaging, inadequate approaches to understanding the natural world correspond with similar failures to understand, appreciate, or connect with the human world in a positive way. Opposing and surpassing these constrained and destructive versions of science are visionary understandings of human interconnection with the organic world, which are experienced primarily by Septimus Smith, and to a lesser degree by Clarissa Dalloway, and which point to the radical possibilities of scienti c inquiry.
Ladies Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush
On the death of her beloved dog, Nero, Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote to her friend, Lady Louisa Ashburton, that her famous husband, Thomas Carlyle was 'quite unexpectedly and distractedly torn to pieces'. She says that 'to some people' this may have seemed 'a fall from his philosophical heights' but for herself 'I liked him for it more than for all the philosophy than ever came out of his head'. 1 Jane Carlyle draws attention to the gendered expectations surrounding affective relations with companion species, implying that Thomas shedding tears for a 'sentimental' pet may not be perceived by his friends and admirers to be behaviour befitting a man of reason. She was not alone among Victorian women in her assertion of the primacy of feeling with respect to dogs. The epistolary writing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning provides a valuable historical record of intense affective canine/human relationships in the nature-culture borderlands of the intimate domestic sphere, where dogs occupied a precarious and ambiguous status at best. 2 This essay contends that Barrett Browning's writing about her dog, Flush, complicates dominant theories of pet keeping, revealing that positive as well as negative affect is an important mechanism by which the boundaries that organise the species divide are questioned and transgressed. Central to this investigation is a reconsideration of Victorian constructions of sentiment and sentimentality, the pejorative connotations of which have ensured that both pet keeping, and women's relationships to pets, have been excluded from serious scholarly attention. 3
Of the Irritable Genus: The Role of Susanna Moodie in the Publishing of Roughing It in the Bush
Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en …, 2000
HEN ROUGHING IT IN THE BUSH was first published in 1852, it was advertised as a "glowing narrative of personal incident and suffering," which would "no doubt attract general attention" (CEECT 669). 1 While publisher Richard Bentley's announcement portrayed Susanna Moodie as a strong woman whose "warmth of feeling … beams through every line," many other versions of the author's relationship to her work have since been constructed. Most recently, in The Work of Words: The Writings of Susanna Strickland Moodie, John Thurston argues that "Moodie is one hand among many involved in the production of this text" (134). This essay discusses how Roughing It in the Bush was transformed through successive editions as new collaborators, through excisions and additions, recreated the text to meet their needs and those of their audience. Before considering the book's complex publishing history, however, I need to reconstruct the relationship between the author and her publisher that underscores Moodie's profile as Canada's foremost author of the 1850s. In the mid-nineteenth century a restructuring of the publishing industry led to conflict between publishers and authors over their respective positions regarding publication. As Norm Feltes, in Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel, argues, "authors and publishers were deeply divided over whether 'property' or 'process' was the dominant feature of literary production. The publishers obviously tended to recognize book production as an extended process over which they alone should have control" (15). Whereas authors believed they created, "publishers simply acted as administrators, or distributors and collectors, as agents, in short" (13). In 1851, Susanna Moodie sent a manuscript to an acquaintance in London, part-time literary agent John Bruce, and instructed him to find a publisher for Canadian Life, which would later, after extensive textual changes, be retitled Roughing It in the Bush. 2 John Bruce then engaged
PSYCHOLOGICAL ILLNESSES IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S MRS. DALLOWAY
PURANA, 2022
Virginia Woolf's (1882-1941) diaries, correspondence, and life provide sufficient proof that she was afflicted with a psychological condition. Modern studies in medicine have defined bipolar disorder, sometimes called manic-depressive disease, as a condition that affects the brain and manifests itself in erratic changes in mood, energy, and activity levels. This study, written from the perspective of Thomas C. Caramango (1946-), examines the specific manifestation of Woolf's psychological problem from Caramango's point of view, tracks its development, and demonstrates how her creative output was profoundly impacted by her mental illness. The primary focus should be on how accurately she portrays her bipolar condition and the difficulties she had when writing Mrs. Dalloway to accommodate that disease. In this article, I will argue that the patriarchal culture of England likely contributed to the development of her mental illness, as well as the mental health issues experienced by her characters, most notably Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. Analyzing how Woolf's bipolar disease influenced her writing output might provide light on her character from both a literary and a psychological perspective. Mrs. Dalloway is a vehicle through which Woolf expresses her inside experience by creating fictitious characters who suffer from mental illness and bipolar disorder. By using stream of consciousness and indirect internal monologue, she depicts not just her own hallucinatory world, but also the worlds of her characters, who also live in a distorted reality.
Hors d'oeuvres: some footnotes on Dorothy Cross's Spurs
On Dorothy Cross's spurs, animal and sexual differences. As I've been saying in several classes since writing this - I have a more considered reading of the 'carrier bag theory of fiction' now after remembering to go back to Donna Haraway!