Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf ,

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The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High
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Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf , (1882-1941)
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Virginia Woolf by Wyndham Lewis, 1921
Virginia with her father Sir Leslie Stephen, 1902
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Richard Kennedy, Virginia Woolf Setting Type,
Hogarth Press
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The Woolfs home, Monks House, in East Sussex
Woolfs writing lodge at Monks House
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G. E. Moore (1873-1958) Cambridge Philosopher
Rather than define the good in terms of
happiness, which begs the question, what is
good? G. E. Moore asks what things are good. On
this Moore gives a most eloquent pitch for such
things as friendship, art and knowledge as
forming the ideal that utilitarian rules will
conduce to maximising ('ought' being definable as
what maximizes good). It was this appeal to art
and friendship as simply and irreducibly good, or
intrinsically valuable, that so thrilled
Bloomsbury. www.philosophers.co.uk/cafe/phil_jul2
003.htm
Bloomsbury district
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Painting of Woolf by her sister Vanessa Bell both
members of the Bloomsbury Circle
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Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington (1916)
Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell members of the
Bloomsbury Circle
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Roger Fry Self-Portrait (1930-4)
Angelica Bell, Clive Bell, Stephen Tomlin and
Lytton Strachey (1926)
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Because Bloomsbury carried forward and made new
the Enlightenment projects self-critical and
emancipatory force and meaning, it put England
on the map of modernist movements. . . .
Bloomsbury artists and intellectuals entered a
struggle not to save their civilization but to
help advance Europe toward its own unrealized
ideal, a civilization that had never existed.
Bloomsbury carries the Enlightenment struggle for
civilization dialectically into the twentieth
century in its pacifism and internationalism, its
sense of history not as inevitable progress but
as an unending fight for a future that is always
open and free. Froula, Virginia Woolf and the
Bloomsbury Avant-Garde xii
Vanessa Bell, The Memoir Club (1943)
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Russell Square Bloomsbury
It's not like the movies / They fed us on little
white lies
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If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if
he could write what he chose, not what he must,
if he could base his work upon his own feeling
and not upon convention, there would be no plot,
no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or
catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps
not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street
tailors would have it. Woolf, Modern
Fiction, 2089
Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf. Two Stories.
Hogarth Press, 1917. Includes Woolfs The Mark
on the Wall. Woodcuts by Dora Carrington.
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James Joyce, spiritualist
Arnold Bennett, materialist
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Modernist Oedipus
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged life is a luminous halo, a
semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the
beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not
the task of the novelist to convey this varying,
this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever
aberration or complexity it may display, with as
little mixture of the alien and external as
possible? Woolf, Modern Fiction, 2089
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
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• Modernist strategies of narrative
• (a) free indirect style permeable form of 3rd
  person in which the idioms and
• rhythms of particular characters
  determine the texture of narrative voice
• (b) stream of consciousness, often alternating
  with free indirect style
• unexpected shifts in narrative perspective
  Woolf creates caves, the
• dark places of psychology that allow her
  to connect her characters
• (Diary, p. 65-6)
• (d) repetition of images linked by association,
  echo, juxtaposition
• (e) non-linear narrative structures emphasis on
  what the French philosopher
• Henri Bergson called durée, or duration,
  the subjective experience of
• space-time
• memorialization, use of memory to structure
  narrative, often in lieu of
• historical models present and remembered
  past exist in a single
• narrative frame

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Mrs. Dalloway Cover design by Vanessa
Bell 1925
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Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorris' 1996 film adaptation
For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how
one sees it so, making it up, building it round
one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh
. . . In peoples eyes, in the swing, tramp, and
trudge in the bellow and the uproar the
carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich
men shuffling and swinging brass bands barrel
organs in the triumph and the jingle and the
strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead
was what she loved life London this moment of
June. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 4
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An example of a recurrent, echoing image Big Ben
tolling the hours. First a warning, musical
then the hour, irrevocable (4) a young man . .
. swinging dumb-bells this way and that (48)
clocks dividing and subdividing the June day
(102) Volubly, troublously, the late clock
sounded, coming in on the wake of Big Ben, with
its lap full of trifles (128).
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
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It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush
which one tried to check and then, as it spread,
one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the
farthest verge and there quivered and felt the
world come closer, swollen with some astonishing
significance, some pressure of rapture, which
split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an
extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and
sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an
illumination a match burning in a crocus . . . .
the most exquisite moment of her whole life
passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally
stopped picked a flower kissed her on the
lips. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 32, 35
Tamra Otis, Exquisite Moment
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One of the most important elements of the novel
is the representation of character. In modernism,
this becomes a problem not only of realistic
depiction of action and motivation, but also of
subjectivity itself. In your paper, discuss the
issues and problems associated with the modernist
representation of women and of a womans
subjectivity in Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway. Subject
2.b. the mind, ego, or agent of whatever sort
that sustains or assumes the form of thought or
consciousness Subject early 14c., "person under
control or dominion of another," from O.Fr.
suget, subget "a subject person or thing" (12c.),
from L. subjectus, noun use of pp. of subicere
"to place under," from sub "under" combining
form of jacere "to throw" (see jet (v.)). In
14c., sugges, sogetis, subgit, sugette form
re-Latinized in English 16c. Meaning "person or
thing that may be acted upon" is recorded from
1590s. Subjective mid-15c., "pertaining to a
political subject" (now obsolete), from L.L.
subjectivus, from subjectus (see subject (n.)).
Meaning "existing in the mind" (mind"the
thinking subject") is from 1707 thus, "personal
idiosyncratic" (1767). Related
Subjectively. subject, subjectivity. These terms
typically refer to Western traditions of
citizenship, selfhood and consciousness. The
subject of modern western societies is often
referred to as the subject of knowledge (i.e., of
a specific epistemological framework) or the
universal subject and is regarded as autonomous,
sovereign and self-determining. Many theorists
challenge these characteristics when they become
normative, regulative or repressive. For them,
the subject is at the mercy of social forces that
determine it, more or less completely.
Subjectivity is the condition of being a subject,
specifically the condition of self-identity
(i.e., self-awareness), and the ability not only
to recognize oneself as a subject (agent or
citizen) but also to regulate ones actions
accordingly. To be capable of conscious action
and social and historical agency, the subject
must occupy a recognizable and legitimate subject
position within a specific social context. See
subaltern.
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John Singer Sargent A Street in Arras (1918)
To love makes one solitary, Lucrezia thought. .
. . And it was cowardly for a man to say he would
kill himself, but Septimus had fought he was
brave he was not Septimus now. . . . the
scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not
want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave
of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal
loneliness. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway,
23, 25
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Vincent Van Gogh Large Plane Trees (1889)
To the Prime Minister, the voices which rustled
above his head replied The supreme secret must be
told to the Cabinet first that tress are alive
next there is no crime next love, universal
love, he muttered, grasping, trembling, painfully
drawing out these profound truths. . . . beauty,
that was the truth now. Beauty was
everywhere. Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway, 67, 69
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Wyndham Lewis Battery Shelled (1919)
London has swallowed up many millions of young
men called Smith. Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway, 84
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Dr. Bradshaws diagnosis of Septimus Warren
Smith It was a clear case of complete breakdown
complete physical and nervous breakdown. The
European War that little shindy of schoolboys
with gunpowder? Had he served with distinction?
he really forgot. In the War itself he had
failed. Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway 96
C. R. W. Nevinson, Paths of Glory (1917)
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Human nature, in short, was on him the
repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils.
Holmes was on him. Dr. William Bradshaw never
spoke of madness he called it not having a
sense of proportion. . . . Health we must have
and health is proportion. But Proportion has a
sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess
even no engaged in the heat and sands of India,
the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of
London, wherever in short the climate of the
devil tempts men to fall from the true belief
which is her own . . . Conversion is her name and
she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to
impress, to impose, adoring her own features
stamped on the face of the populace. Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway, 92, 96, 99-100
Victim of Shell Shock
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Peter Walsh, the colonial civil servant She
flattered him she fooled him, thought Clarissa
shaping the woman, the wife of the Major in the
Indian Army, with three strokes of a knife. What
a waste! What a folly! . . . .
Only one person in the world could be as he was,
in love. And there he was, this fortunate man,
himself, reflected in the plate-glass window of a
motor-car manufacturer in Victoria street. All
India lay behind him plains, mountains
epidemics of cholera a district twice as big as
Ireland decisions he had to come to alone he
Peter Walsh, who was now really for the first
time in his life, in love. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway,
46, 48
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Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of
it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in
Regents Park, was enough. Too much
indeed. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 79
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Regents Park, London
Straightening himself and stealthily fingering
his pocket-knife he started after her to follow
this woman, this excitement . . . Was she, he
wondered as she moved, respectable? Witty, with a
lizards flickering tongue, he thought (for one
must invent, must allow oneself a little
diversion), a cool waiting wit, a darting wit
not noisy. . . . He pursued she changed.
There was colour in her cheeks mockery in her
eyes he was an adventurer, reckless, he thought,
swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last
night from India) a romantic buccaneer, careless
of all these damned proprieties, yellow
dressing-gowns, pipes, fishing-rods, in the shop
windows and respectability and evening parties
and spruce old men wearing white slips beneath
their waistcoats. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 53
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May Day, ring round the maypole
A sound interrupted him a frail quivering sound,
a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour,
beginning or end . . . the voice of no age or
sex, the voice of an ancient spring spouting from
the earth which issued, just opposite Regents
Park Tube station from a tall quivering shape . .
. the battered woman . . . stood singing of love
love which has lasted a million years . . . .
As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regents
Park Tube station still the earth seemed green
and flower, still, though it issued from so rude
a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too,
matted with root fibres and tangled grasses,
still the old bubbling burbling song, soaking
through the knotted roots of infinite ages . .
. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway,
80-1
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Lady Bruton, after lunch, imagines a kind of
connection And they went further and further from
her, being attached to her by a thin thread
(since they had lunched with her) which would
stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as
they walked across London as if ones friends
were attached to ones body, after dining with
them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed
there) became hazy with the sound of bells,
striking the hour or ringing to service, as a
single spiders thread is blotted with
rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway, 112
Draft page of Mrs. Dalloway
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Pierre Auguste Renoir Luncheon of the
Boating Party (1881)
Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of
them criticized her very unfairly, laughed at her
very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That
was it! Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway, 121
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Omnibus, c. 1925
Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most
competently boarded the omnibus, in front of
everybody. . . . She might own a thousand acres
and have people under her. . . . She would
become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into
Parliament, all because of the Strand. Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway, 135-6
The Strand in London
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She looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a
little way towards St. Pauls, shyly, like some
one penetrating on tiptoe, exploring a strange
house by night with a candle . . . . For no
Dalloway's came down the Strand daily she was a
pioneer, a
stray, venturing, trusting. . . She penetrated
a little further in the direction of St. Pauls.
She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood,
brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to do her
good. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 137-8
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But he would wait for the very last moment. He
did not want to die. Life was good. Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway, 149
Georges Leroux, L'enfer (1917)
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... my husband was called up on the telephone, a
very sad case. A young man (that is what Sir
William is telling Mr. Dalloway) had killed
himself. He had been in the army. Oh! thought
Clarissa, in the middle of my party, heres
death, she thought. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 183
John Northcote Nash, Over the Top, 1st Artists'
Rifles at Marcoing, 30th December 1917 (1918)
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Somehow it was her disaster her disgrace. It
was her punishment to see sink and disappear here
a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness,
and she forced to stand here in her evening
dress. . . Fear no more the heat of the sun. She
must go back to them. But what an extraordinary
night! She felt somehow very like him the young
man who had killed himself. She felt glad he had
done it thrown it away.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 184-5
Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours
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I will come, said Peter, but he sat on for a
moment. What is this terror? what is this
ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that
fills me with extraordinary excitement. It is
Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 194
Vanessa Redgrave plays Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorris' 1996 film adaptation
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I jumped in the river and what did I see?
Black-eyed angels swam with me