Knitting against the war: Virginia Woolf’s building-up of forms (original) (raw)
Related papers
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
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.
“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.
The First World War and Women as the Victims of War Trauma in Virginia Woolf's Novels
For more than the obvious reasons, the First World War was a devastating experience for Europe. As the first war in history in which the death toll would be immense – due to the extensive use of weapons of mass destruction – it was a traumatic experience even for those who were not directly involved in the armed conflict. The dehumanization introduced by the war caused disillusionment regarding the ideals of enlightenment and the progress myth of the Modernity Project. One of the preeminent writers of the period, Virginia Woolf was among those writers who were deeply traumatized and disillusioned by the experience, even though she was not an active participant in the conflict. In her novels Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse she offers a depiction of gender polarization and women as traumatized victims of the war. This paper, thus, aims to evaluate the First World War and the trauma and disillusionment caused by it as experienced by women through the novels of Virginia Woolf.
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 ...
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.
Unity and fragmentation in four novels by Virginia Woolf
2010
Waves and Between the Acts-for the purposes of, firstly, establishing the specificity of literary language and, secondly, showing that such specificity is a form of access to basic structures of the human condition. I propose a reading of these novels on the basis of a theory of literary language articulated onto a fundamental anthropology. My starting point is a discussion of the tension between a force of unification and one of disintegration in the four novels, because such a tension is a theme of these novels; it is also seen as the spring of the literary experience by theorists such as Paul Ricoeur and Wolfgang Iser, who are the sources of inspiration of this thesis; and most importantly, such a tension is an avatar of aporia, which I consider one of the characteristics of literary language. I define literary language both negatively, along the lines of its demarcation from ordinary communicative language, and positively, in terms of performativity, figurality, fictionality and aporia: language in literature, rather than being a tool of communication, elicits a drift towards performativity of which the symptoms are figures of speech, referential irrelevance and contradictions. Such a theory of literary language is present in Woolf's four novels, thematically, as a reflection, rudimentary and fragmentary, on artistic practice; it is also present on a formal level, as the active principle of her literary practice. To those strictly literary concerns, I add an existential depth: the specificity of literary language is seen as a mode of access to a fundamental dimension of our human condition. I discuss such a dimension, philosophically, under the name of 'fundamental anthropology' with the help of Emmanuel Lévinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I conclude my thesis by showing how, in the context of Woolf's work, theory of literary language and fundamental anthropology are articulated onto each other.
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume 3, Number 3, 2019
The present paper attempts to reawaken the avant-gardism of the literary Stream of Consciousness; a twentieth-century psychological concept that has been accommodated into fictional exertion through the Interior Monologue. The first practitioners of this technique and mode of narrative reportedness are Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and James Joyce, all of whom are modernist fictional writers who engaged with what previous novelists of the nineteenth century failed to engage with. Woolf observed-in a lecture given to the Cambridge Heretics Society in May 1924-that: "no generation since the world began has known quite so much about character as our generation". Woolf's fiction tends to be psychological, for she experiments with the working of the psyche of her characters and the permanence of the past in the present beyond the reach of realism. Her fiction treats the complex networks of emotions and memories of which the character is the center of the narrative. This paper accordingly, addresses the philosophical background of the Stream of Consciousness and its use within fictional exertion and how the latter is deployed in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to show and uncover the anxieties vis-à-vis her thanatophobia, not only this, but also to express the anxieties of the Great War and the disillusionment towards the modern enterprise.