Larking and PlungingHUM 3285: British and American

LiteratureSpring 2013Dr. Perdigao

January 14-21, 2013

Robert Harms’ Mrs. Dalloway (1995)

http://www.durhampress.com/harms/index.html

Mapping Dalloway’s Day• 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” (Greenblatt 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 T. S. 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”

Constructing England• Peter’s idea of war (50-52)

• Idea of “civilization” post World War I

• British citizens abroad, reimagining nation

• Expatriates in London

• Old England re-membered

• Septimus’ story, entry into war, idea of the war (84-87; 86)

• Poet

• Disillusionment

• Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owens even?

• Psychoanalysis

Repression and Release• Eros and Thanatos

• Erotic longing, sexuality; desire for the end, violence, aggression

• Creation and destruction

• Latent death wish vs. Septimus’ statement that he will kill himself

• Flames as symbol for both Clarissa and Septimus

• Drowning as release, suffocation

• Clarissa’s dress

• Repression—memories, trauma, fears

• Return of the buried self, consciousness

Reflections and refractions• Five years after the war, 1923

• Day in June—Like James Joyce’s 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

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

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