A Room of One's Own

Going back to A Room of One’s Own, the image that stood out to me the most from the first time I read it was when the narrator tries to enter the library and is told that since she is woman she cannot enter alone. I think the first time I read this I was completely revolted by the idea because it seemed completely ridiculous. I, like the narrator, was angry. I was seduced by the narrator’s intense emotions into feeling the same way as the same way, being sympathetic. I don’t think it is the same type of seduction that Jane Marcus suggests in her article “Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own.” However I feel Woolf makes a strong rhetorical appeal to women’s emotions and reason. In “Modernism and Gender,” Marianne Dekoven says, “Woolf revised the association of Modernism with masculinity by associating it with the feminine” (187). I believe Woolf does this in A Room of One’s Own and her other fiction.

On the second reading, I noticed how the narrator, Mary, goes from an essentialist’s view of women to an anti-essentialist view of women. I believe that she must make this conversion or growth in order for the woman reader to relate to her. Most women would see themselves as inherently different from men, helping them accept their subjugation. They would need to see the problem through the differences of men and women to ultimately accept Mary’s conclusion that there should be no distinction between the two. Mary begins to hum a Tennyson poem and says, “What that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war? And the women? [quotes another poem] . . . Was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war?” (Woolf 12). She separates the minds of women and men in this passage, adhering to the idea that there is something inherently different that would cause men and women to hum different tunes/poems. Mary also talks about the differences between the short and concise language that men use in their writing and women’s wordy and flowing sentences that was considered sentimental. She says of Jane Austin and Emily Bronte, “[t]hey wrote as women write, not as men write” (74). She makes it clear that there is something inherently feminine that is expressed when women write, possibly due to the circumstances that women face. It seems Mary believes by the end of the narration that the only reason that men and women are not equal, are not capable, or do not appear the same is because of the subjugation of women by men.

She says at the very end of her narration, “it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly” (102-103). She has come to the conclusion that sex should not be taken into account. There should be in some ways a bisexuality of each person. They should not identify with one sex or another but should be sexless, a combination of both sexes. If both men and women are a combination of both sexes, there is no sex identification, nothing inherently male or female.

Virginia Woolf and her Characters

In Both “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf emphasizes the importance of characters and characterization in the novel. In “Modern Fiction,” she talks about how old form of the novel is centered on plot and writing style, and this is the reason why modern writers do not like the old form of the novel. She says the way they write is not how life is and that free of this model writers would base writing on their “own feeling and not upon convention” (Woolf “Modern” 3). She says of Mr. Bennett, “His characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for?” (2). This shows the concern with character and the relation to the focus on the writer’s concern, which for her is psychology (she notes this later in the essay as the concern of the modern writer). This focus on psychology makes the character more important than a focus on the plot. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf says, “Most novelist have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes before them and says in the most seductive and charming way in the world, ‘Come and catch me if you can.’ . . . they flounder through volume after volume, spending the best years of their lives in pursuit . . .” (Woolf “Mr. Bennett” 234). This is chase after a character or an idea for character, and Woolf says in the next paragraph, “men and women write novels because they are lured on to create some character” (234). To Woolf, the characters are more important to the reader (and to her, the writer) than any other aspect of the novel.

In Mrs. Dalloway, we see how important the characters are to Woolf. Her seamless, and sometimes confusing, transitions between voices show that she is focused on the characters of the novel rather than the events. The characters mull over their life, which gives us insight into the psychology of the character. The majority of the novel is focused solely on thoughts, feelings, and emotions; the plot is secondary to this. The events that happen take place in the span of one day, but Woolf is able to fill 200 pages. Virginia Woolf says of Mrs. Dalloway, “[i]n this book, I almost have too many ideas,. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity. I want to criticize the social system, & to show it all at work, at its most intense” (qtd. in Steinberg 6). Woolf intertwines her ideas about life and death, and sanity and insanity into her characters emotions. From the switch between Septimus’s voice and Rezia’s voice, we understand the insanity that he is going through. The scene in the party is particularly interesting because we get society’s view of death, through Clarissa. At first, she is angry that this death would be talked about at her because it would ruin the party. Clarissa thinks, “[w]hat business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party” ( Woolf Dalloway 179). However, later Clarissa begins to relate to Septimus, and she thinks, “death was an attempt to communicate. . .She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it all away” (180-182). Woolf uses Septimus’s death and Clarissa’s reaction to it to show all the things that she said she wanted to show in this novel.

The end of the novel also reveals her focus on character. Instead of focus on what is going on around them, Sally and Peter are engaged in a deep talk. In the last glimpse of the story, we get Peter’s intense emotions. Instead of knowing that Clarissa has entered the room through a description of her, we get Peter’s emotions and the revelation of her presence.

"What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary ecstasy?

It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was" (190).

Here the character’s emotions are put before the action of plot, and it shows how Woolf saw her character as more important than anything else in the novel, and it elicits more emotion from the reader.

The Waste Land

I was put off at first by The Waste Land because I was unfamiliar with all the references that Eliot makes in the poem. Originally, I read the poem in order to work on a section of my honors thesis about the literary allusions in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. It seems that King, in a less talented way, was following Eliot’s example. Possibly it is a hindrance to the poems, but I can’t disassociate the two works. As I read it this time for class, I was a bit more (surprisingly to me) enthusiastic.

In reference to the Hero’s journey, I cannot help but think about the poem as being the hero returning to master the two worlds and share what he or she has learned about on the journey. Since the speaker is the one experiencing the journey, it is the poem that is message to others what he has learned on his journey. Headings says that in the last line of “The Burial of the Dead,” “You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable,--mon frère!,'” Eliot is directly addressing the reader, which important (Eliot l. 76; Headings 1). Brooks says that this quotation “from Baudelaire completes the universalization of Stetson begun by the reference to Mylae. Stetson is every man including the reader and Mr. Eliot himself” (Brooks 192). Also in the second stanza of “The Burial of the Dead,” the speaker speaks directly to the reader about what he is going to show the reader in the poem.

(come in under the shadow of this red Rock)

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (Eliot l. 26-30)

When the speaker addresses the reader, he is asking him or her to relate to the story and trying to tell the reader what he has learned from his journey through death and rebirth. Campbell’s hero’s journey consists of death and rebirth. The Hero must cast aside his life go down, sometimes to hell, reemerge and begin living life again. Eliot has images of death and rebirth, according to Headings, throughout the poem. Headings says, only when the life of temporal involvement is transcended, only when the towers and cities crumble as central psychic foci, only when the emptiness of the material . . . can one approach the grail chapel, hear the crow of the cock in a flash of lightning on the rooftree, and feel the damp gust that brings the rain so long awaited” (Headings 3)

I am fascinated with the water, or lack there of, references. The lack of water is most prevalent in “The Burial of the Dead” and “What the Thunder Said.” In the first stanza, it seems the speaker is remembering a time when there was water. Eliot says, “Memory and desire, stirring/ dull roots with spring rain” and “Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee/ with a shower of rain” (Eliot l. 3-4, 8-9). The use of the word memory and of the past tense with surprised show that the rain is something the speaker remembers. In the second stanza, Eliot says, “the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief/And the dry stone no sound of water” (l.23-24). This lack of water is a lack of basic nourishment for the people in the waste land. Again at the beginning of “What the Thunder Said,” the speaker talks about rocks with no water, rain or sound of water. It seems that all the people of modern times are lacking the knowledge that Eliot is giving them in the poem, through his knowledge because at the end of the poem it finally does rain. The structures of society fall apart and the cock crows, a symbol of enlightenment and then it rains; there is a stripping away of the modern society and then the people are provided with the nourishment of life, water (Brooks). “In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust/ bringing rain” (l. 394-395).

Mansfield, Women, and the Moon

I found the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf particularly interesting. It seems that both women had their own set of problems. Mansfield’s was her deteriorating physical condition and Woolf’s was her mental condition (bipolar disorder). It is interesting that neither one of these women take the other’s condition into consideration when they are mad at one another. Hermione Lee describes Woolf and Mansfield as “mutually inspiring but competitive” (Lee 381). It is interesting that after Katherine Mansfield’s death Lee describes her as haunting Woolf. “Katherine haunted her too, not as a literary rival but as an object of ‘deep feeling’ (Lee 394). Both of their lives seem tragic in their own right.

The close female relationship that Woolf and Mansfield shared, as troubled as it was, is depicted in her stories. In the short stories that we read there seems to be, at least at some point in the story, a pairing of two of the female characters. In “Bliss,” Miss Fulton and the narrator stand at the open window and stare out at a flowering tree. The two women come together to have a unique experience. “Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands?” (Mansfield 153). At the beginning of “Prelude,” you have Kenzia and Lottie sitting together, while Isabel was “perched beside the new handy-man” (79). Often Lottie and Kenzia are depicted together and Isabel is on the outside. In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” the two sisters, Josephine and Constantia, are together the entire story. I found that they did not seem to even have personalities of their own but functioned more as a pair than as individuals. In “At the Bay,” Beryl Fairfield is paired with Mrs. Harry Kember in section V. This is the scene where Beryl decides to bathe with Mrs. Harry Kember instead of her family. They talk and Mrs. Harry Kember encourages her not be as shy as she is because she is beautiful. There is not as much a pairing in “The Garden Party.” However, Jose and her mother stick together against Laura when she wants to cancel the party because a poor neighbor has died.

Another commonality between the stories is the reoccurrence with scenes where the moon is present in the description. Excluding the “The Garden Party,” every story that we read had a scene where the moon was described or used and most of these scenes involved the female characters only. In the scene from “Bliss” that I quoted before, Miss Fulton and the narrator are staring out at the moon as the light shines on them. In “Prelude,” old Mrs. Fairfield has pin or necklace (I could not determine which one because it only said “at her throat”) with “a silver crescent moon with five little owls seated owls seated on it” (92). Also in “Prelude,” “[s]taning in a pool of moonlight Beryl Fairfield undressed herself” (87). In the first scenes of Prelude Kenzia and Lottie are traveling under the moon. In the last scene of “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Constantia remembers, “the time her wonder was like longing. She remembered the times she had come in here, she crept out of bed in her nightgown when the moon was full” (229). In the last scene of “At the Bay,” Beryl is romping around out in the moonlight with Harry Kember. The last section says, “[a] cloud, small, serene, floated across the moon. In that moment of darkness the sea sounded deep, troubled” (279).