Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf, (1882-1941) The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing.

Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf , (1882-1941)

The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing

Virginia with her father

Sir Leslie Stephen, 1902


Virginia Woolf

by Wyndham Lewis, 1921


Richard Kennedy, Virginia Woolf Setting Type, Hogarth Press

The Woolfs’ home, Monk’s House, inEast Sussex


Woolf’s writing lodgeat Monk’s House


Bloomsbury district

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_jul2003.htm

G. E. Moore(1873-1958)Cambridge Philosopher


Painting of Woolf by her sister Vanessa Bellboth members of the Bloomsbury Circle


Lytton Strachey and Clive Bellmembers of the Bloomsbury Circle

Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington

(1916)


Angelica Bell, Clive Bell, Stephen Tomlin

and Lytton Strachey (1926)

Roger FrySelf-Portrait (1930-4)


Vanessa Bell, The Memoir Club (1943)

Because Bloomsbury “carried

forward and made new the

Enlightenment project’s 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


Russell

Square

Bloomsbury

It's not like the movies / They fed us on little white lies


Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf. Two Stories. Hogarth Press, 1917. Includes Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall.” Woodcuts by Dora Carrington.

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


Arnold Bennett, “materialist”James Joyce, “spiritualist”

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)


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

(c) 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

(f) memorialization, use of memory to structure narrative, often in

lieu of

historical models; present and remembered past exist in a single

narrative frame


Mrs. Dalloway

Cover design by

Vanessa Bell

1925


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

people’s 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

Vanessa Redgrave as

Mrs. Dalloway in

Marleen Gorris' 1996

film adaptation


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


Tamra Otis, Exquisite Moment

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

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 woman’s subjectivity in Woolf’s 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 one’s 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.


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

John Singer

Sargent

A Street in Arras

(1918)


“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

Vincent

Van Gogh

Large Plane Trees

(1889)


“London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith.”

Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 84

Wyndham

Lewis

Battery

Shelled

(1919)


Dr. Bradshaw’s 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 96C. R. W. Nevinson, Paths of Glory (1917)


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


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

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! . . . .


Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant,

now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much

indeed.Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 79


Regent’s 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 lizard’s

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


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 Regent’s 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 Regent’s 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

May

Day,

ring

round

the

maypole

Draft page of Mrs. Dalloway


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

one’s friends were attached to one’s

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 spider’s thread is

blotted with rain-drops, and,

burdened, sags down.



“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

Pierre

Auguste

Renoir

“Luncheon

of the Boating

Party”

(1881)


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


She looked up Fleet

Street. She walked

just a little way

towards St. Paul’s,

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.

Paul’s. She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar.

It seemed to do her good.Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 137-8


But he would wait

for the very last

moment.

He did not

want to die.

Life was good.


Georges Leroux, L'enfer (1917)


... 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,

here’s death, she

thought.


John Northcote Nash, Over the Top, 1st Artists' Rifles at Marcoing, 30th December 1917 (1918)


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


“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


I jumped in the river and what did I see?

Black-eyed angels swam with me

Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf, (1882-1941) The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing.

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Transcript of Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf, (1882-1941) The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing.