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Larking and PlungingHUM 3285: British and American
LiteratureSpring 2011Dr. Perdigao
February 2, 2011
Robert Harms’ Mrs. Dalloway (1995)
http://www.durhampress.com/harms/index.html
Like Ulysses? (Sorry, it won’t go away)• http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/TVSeminar/dallwalkmap.html
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)• Born Adeline Virginia Stephens on January 25, 1882 in London
• Father Leslie Stephen “Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer, and scholar” (2080), member of “intellectual aristocracy” of Victorian England; mother Julia Jackson Duckworth, of Duckworth publishing family
• Mother died in 1895, Virginia suffered mental breakdown; half sister Stella ran household until her death in 1897
• Father died in 1904, Virginia suffered second mental breakdown; brother dies of typhoid in 1906
• Vanessa ran household, moves family to Bloomsbury; “The Bloomsbury Group”
• Leonard Woolf had joined Civil Service, returned in 1911; married Virginia
•
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)• Virginia starts writing The Voyage Out in 1908, finishes in 1913, published in 1915
• Second realistic novel Night and Day (1919)
• 1917—Woolfs start own press, Hogarth; Virginia publishes through it after 1921; press published Eliot’s Poems (1919)
• Moved back to London from Surrey; publishes Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• Orlando (1928), masculinity, femininity
• Jacob’s Room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• The Waves (1931)
• Three Guineas (1938)
• Between the Acts (1941) [posthumous]
•
A shopping list• Technology—planes, trains, and automobiles?
• Sky-writing; ideas of language
• Race, class, gender, sexual orientation
• Repression and burial; return of consciousness
• The double—Dr. Jekyll, Dostoevsky’s “The Double”
• Presence of war, for Dalloway and for Smith
• As “war novel”
• Unfulfilled characters, concealed relationships
• Peter, Evans, Sally
• Changing perspectives: “eye” versus “I”
Reflections and refractions• Five years after the war, 1923
• Day in June—back to Ulysses; Woolf’s reception of Joyce’s text
• Constructing character of Clarissa, shifting perspectives, “not this” and “not that”
• Third person omniscient narrator; free indirect discourse with limited omniscience (learned from Joyce)
• Dichotomies within the text
• Movement between attraction to solitude and connection to others
• Angst and delight
• Death as solitude or embrace?
• Uses of memory—for Clarissa, for Septimus
Writing as revision• “The Hours” as working title
• Differences in manuscript, with ending: Clarissa’s suicide as double plot; madness/sanity split
• Party to end with her death:
• “Eight said Big Ben, nine, ten, eleven; and then with a sort of finality, though presumably the strokes were accurately spaced the last no more empathic than the first twelve . . . But Clarissa was gone”
• Changes to “For there she was” as symbolic death
• http://litimag.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/06/25/litimag.imq018.full
Deconstruction• Versions of Clarissa at end; disembodied in last 8 pages, only alive in dialogue,
part of conversations but absent (mentioned 32 times after her body disappears)
• “Where’s Clarissa?”: “There she was”
• Does she return?
• Has the experience changed her view?
• Postmodernist absent presence
Playing parts• No body, in memory with Peter—her dress, “something floating” : Nobody?
• Must be completed by others because she is not real, a symbol
• Idea of voyeurism—Clarissa in London; characters viewing Clarissa; Ellie at party
• Insights come from watching others
• Clarissa enacts his death
• Actress all along