(B)ut how grow flowers [...] if one kept hens?": the transgressing role of bird imagery in Virginia Woolf's "The Years (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
This paper aims to study Three Guineas as an example of pacifist propaganda. Challenging the image of Woolf as an elitist aesthete and highbrow artist, this essay is centred on how she used her literature to have an influence on public concerns. By analysing the relations between war and masculinity, and relating different forms of sexist exclusion to the politics of fascist states, this research will demonstrate that Woolf’s pacifism should not be conceived as women’s legitimacy. Instead, she vindicated pacifism as the best weapon that society as a whole could use to fight the menace of Fascism on the outbreak of the Second World War. Finally, this essay will explore the foundations of the ‘society of outsiders’ that Woolf proposed in order to preserve the ideals of European civilisation.
Virginia Woolf and her world: unmasking the presence of carnival in the novels of Virginia Woolf
2006
The connection between foolery and the figure of the carnival king is patently revealing of this reverse side of official truth. Certainly, the mock monarch of the festivity is often identified as a real buffoon, who rather than honoured, is scorned, insulted, and beaten by his people. Moreover, as Bakhtin has noted, this episode constitutes a most authentic expression of ambivalence and ambiguity insofar as it entails the simultaneous presence of two carnival kings-the debunked, old monarch, whom Bakhtin describes as showing the clown's red face, representative of all that is removed and despised, and the young one, symbolical of renewal and the prospect of regeneration and change. Volviendo al quisquilloso de la jeta roja, apaleado y satisfecho "como un rey o dos", ¿no es este en el fondo un rey de carnaval? [...] mientras todos piensan 6 All emphasis as in the original que el quisquilloso (el rey viejo) ha sido molido a palos, éste brinca vivito y coleando (rey nuevo) (ibid: 180). Indeed, as Bakhtin insistently remarks, far from constituting exclusively an instrument of derision and ridiculization, carnival laughter entails deeper implications, insofar as it encapsulates the deep ambivalence that is inherent to carnival celebrations. Hence, while it evidently mocks and debases any form of superiority, it simultaneously buttresses regeneration, insofar as it contains both poles of crisis and change. Bakhtin explains this fact by reference to ancient ritual forms of laughter and their connection with reproduction and rebirth after death. All forms of ritual laughter were linked with death and rebirth, with the reproductive act, with symbols of the reproductive force. Ritual laughter was a reaction to crises 7 in the life of the sun [...], crises in the life of a deity, in the life of the world and of man [....] In it, ridicule was fused with rejoicing. [....] Carnivalistic laughter likewise is directed toward something higher [....] Laughter embraces both poles of change, [...] with crisis itself. Combined in the act of carnival laughter are death and rebirth, negation (a smirk) and affirmation (rejoicing laughter) (1929: 127). The process of regeneration effected by laughter is achieved by the negation of imposed patterns and restrictions, as well as by asserting the body's earthliness and corporeality. Accordingly, during carnival, a blunt opposition against classical conceptions of the higher stratum is accomplished through the enhancement and validation of its counterpart, the most patently material and low, purely representative of the earth as a powerfully regenerating force, as well as of the inexhaustible potential people. Under the carnival perspective, as Bakhtin has signalled, this material and corporeal principle becomes the center of the new vision of the world (1984: 364). On the basis of these organizing parameters, Bakhtin observes the emergence of grotesque realism as a representational aesthetic axis of carnival. Indeed, within the pattern of the grotesque, the major constitutive principles of carnival are encapsulated. Hence, the grotesque body, with hyperbole, exaggeration, and excess as its defining features, becomes the most radical opposition against completion, definition, and closure as governing patterns. In this sense, whereas the classical conception of the body was linked to the idea of achievement and perfection, the grotesque body exhibits the purest essence of indefinition and incompletion in its most exaggerated expression: En la base de las imágenes grotescas encontramos una concepción particular del todo corporal y de sus límites 8. Las fronteras entre el cuerpo y el mundo, y entre los diferentes cuerpos, están trazados de manera muy diferente a la de las imágenes clásicas y naturalistas (1984: 284).
Knitting against the war: Virginia Woolf’s building-up of forms
AOFL (Università degli Studi di Ferrara - Annali online), 2017
Both World Wars play a crucial role in Virginia Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional writings. Her macrotext variously testifies to the war on the level of content, by thematizing it, and on the formal level by mimicking the phenomenological bursting caused by the conflict. In this paper I intend to illustrate how Woolf’s formal strategies convey the effects of war and how, at the same time, they are also intended as a remedial alternative to the destruction they narrate and epitomize. My analytical focus will be on Woolf’s second experimental novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925), in which she creates an even balance between narrated annihilation and narrating restoration, i.e. between content and form. The latter compensates for the former’s destruction: the formal level contrasts with the thematized deadly experience by exploiting the novel’s fecund dichotomy based on polar opposites, such as life vs death, part vs whole, light vs darkness, health vs madness, surface vs depth, high/up vs low...
Virginia Woolf’s early novels: Finding a voice
The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf's writing has generated passion and controversy for the best part of a century. Her novels-challenging, moving, and always deeply intelligentremain as popular with readers as they are with students and academics. This highly successful Cambridge Companion has been fully revised to take account of new departures in scholarship since it first appeared. The second edition includes new chapter on race, nation and empire, sexuality, aesthetics, visual culture and the public sphere. The remaining chapters, as well as the guide to further reading, have all been fully updated. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf remains the first port of call for students new to Woolf's work, with its informative, readable style, chronology and authoritative information about secondary sources. s u AN s ELLERS is Professor of Engli hand Related Literature at the University of St Andrews. With Jane Goldman, she is General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf; he is also the author of Vanessa and Virginia (2008), a novel about Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
A Far Cry from Within: Virginia Woolf’s Poethics of Commitment
Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines 45, 2013
In Virginia Woolf’s work outrage does not manifest itself bluntly and is never assimilated to sharp animosity. Anger is a feeling she deems insincere in fiction and which eventually leads to the loss of ‘perfect integrity’. Woolf argues in favour of a subtle balance, a need to ‘attempt to alter the current scale of values’ through a different vision. A need to assert oneself as Other through the subversive power of words, to resist the prevailing order of things. The aim of this paper is to see how socio-political concerns arise in Woolf’s essays and seep through her works of fiction to eventually be connected with literary aesthetics that engage the reader. I focus on the novel she wrote after the Great War, Night and Day (1919), to see in what ways the major themes of the novel (marriage and the status of women) strongly link public and private spheres and come to question both society and politics at the beginning of the 20th century. Following Meschonnic’s ideas in Modernité modernité, I argue that literature becomes the place of a textual crisis that witnesses the birth of the modern Subject. In the article, I analyse the ways in which Woolf focuses on the figure of the New Woman, the embodiment of her rebellion against patriarchy, to tie up two contrasting sets of images—that of the idealised Victorian Angel in the House (Night and Day and photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron) and proliferating images that represent the triumph of patriarchy (Three Guineas and newspaper cuttings)—to overcome, question and redefine socio-political concerns linked to femininity and discourse.