Virginia Woolf

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Inglese
Voto:	1.5 (2)
Download:	203
Data:	18.01.2007
Numero di pagine:	4
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941)
She marked an important step in the development of the novel: she consciously rejected some of main conventions of the reslistic fiction of the victorian age and developed a new way of expressing a different perception of reality.
She was influenced:
- by her childhood and her family background. →she lived in a highly intellectual atmosphere at home.
- And by the aestheticism of the 1890s which valued form over content.
Her mother died when she was 13 and the loss affected her profoundly. Soon after she had the first of a series of nervous breakdowns which affected her all life.
When her father died in 1904 she moved to a new area of London, Bloomsbury, where she founded a close circle of intellectuals → Bloomsbuty Group.
As a group they saw themselves as sharing common values which emphasised the importance of subjectivity, aesthetic enjoyment, personal ties of affection, and intellectual honesty.
They were hostile to the dominant social values of the period, and also challenged convenctional literary and artistic tastes; they became highly influential in the E. intellectual life over 40 years.
1913 after completing her first novel she attempted suicide.
1917 she and her husband (Leonard Woolf) founded the Hogarth Press which published the best experimental works of the period besides her own works.
Mrs Dalloway (1925) was her first successful Modernist novel (a label for the predominant features of the 20th-century art, which tend to be experimental and formally complex, to underline the notion of artist’s freedom from traditional genre and form, to associate elements of deconstruction as well as creation).
→the event take place in a single day in June 1923, the plot is very poor and develops around mrs Dolloway’s preparation for a party she is going to have that evening. Set in London. Develops around mrs D. feelings and the reactions of people she chances to meet.. The emphasis of the novel is on the subjective internal lives of the characters and not on external events.
NARRATIVE TECHIQUE: she is of greet importance because of her experiments with narration, characterisation and style.
for her event were not important for themselves → what was important was the impression they made on the characters who experienced them. The shift in this choice involved a revolution in narrative tecnique → since she valued the subjectivity of experience, more highly then the objectivity of events, she could no use the traditional omniscient narrator.
The great technical innovation she introduced was to shift the point of view inside her characters’ minds, revealing them by their own sensations and impressions.
This led the abandonment of the chronological order of events → in following the processes of the characters’ mind, her novels involve constant shifting backwards and forwards in time according to the sensations and recollections aroused in the characters by the events they are experiencing.
The were often 2 level of narration: 1 of external events arranged in chronological order, the 2nd of the flux of thoughts arranged according to the association of ideas.
LANGUAGE AND THEMES: her main aim was to convey through words the nature of human consciousness.
- prose characterised by few subordinate sentences and it’s often broken by semicolons to convey what was the typical feminine way of building the sentence as it develops in the mind.
- Very flimsy plots
- Focus on internal feelings and reaction in a highly evocative and figurative language
- Objects and events are often counterparts of internal feelings or emotions and as such they often take a symbolical meaning
Like in “TO THE LIGHTHOUSE”: where the external events of the journey to the lighthouse is the counterpart of an internal journey of self-awareness of the main characters.
Lighthouse is the central symbol(something concrete that stands for else, an idea..)of the novel. Its alternation of darkness and light symbolises the contradictory aspects of life. Also the SEA has a deep symbolical meaning: in the 1st part is portrayed in its positive aspects to represent the positive situation of the characters . in the 2nd part its destructive aspect becomes symbolic both of the decay of environment and of the sorrow which has struck the family.
The novel is deep interested in the way events and people are perceived in a different way according to the point of view.
The focus of fiction is on how the events and characters are experienced.
Characters are built through the way they are perceived by other characters. Mrs Ramsay, comes out as different person, according to the various people who come into contact to her: to some of the guest→she is lovable, to others→tyrannical

TO THE LIGHT HOUSE
The novel is highly autobiographical. It is based on her childhood recollections of holidays in Cornwall, which becomes an isle in the Hebrides in the novel. There are close links between Virginia’s childhood and the Lighthouse.
- mr & mrs Ramsay and their relationship, are based on V’s own father and mother
- like the premature death of mrs Ramsay → death of her mom
- death of one of Ramsay children in war → death of V’s own brother
She write this novel prompted by a deep psychological urge to distance herself from the obsession of her childhood memories. The memories element in the novel, however, are transformed and take on a symbolical and universal values.
The novel is set in a summer house on one of the islands in the Hebrides.
1st part: the Window, introduced the main characters and their relationship to one another:
- mr Ramsay, an eminent London professor of philosophy
- mrs Ramsay, his wife, a beautiful, but no longer young women
- their child
- and the guest, where one of them, Lily Briscoe, was a particular and significant character in the novel’s structure
2nd part: Time Passes, covers ten years. Description and the decay of the house. Mrs Ramsay was prematurely died, one of their sons has also die died war and one of they daughters has died in childbirth.
3rd part: The Lighthouse. The Ramsay return to the house. Lily, one of the guest complete a picture she had started ten years ago.
The novel end with a delayed fulfilment of the initial project.