Assignment : 106 Twentieth Century Literature : 1900 to World war II

 22399 paper no.106 The Twentieth Century Literature: 1900 to World War II

Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English, M.K.Bhavanagar, University

Vachchhalata Joshi

Roll no. 20

Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gamil.com

Topic: Virginia Woolf Life and Notable Works

1.  .   Early Life

2.     Mental Health

3.     Contribution Towards Twentieth Century

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

 Life of Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf

 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941

 Was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors, and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight which included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.

Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. Woolf had romantic relationships with women, including Vita Sackville-West, who also published her books through Hogarth Press. Both women's literature became inspired by their relationship, which lasted until Woolf's death.

During the inter-war period, Woolf was an important part of London's literary and artistic society. In 1915, she had published her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. She is also known for her essays, including A Room of One's Own. Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism and her works have since attracted much attention and widespread commentary for "inspiring feminism". Her works have been translated into more than 50 languages. A large body of literature is dedicated to her life and work, and she has been the subject of plays, novels, and films. Woolf is commemorated today by statues, societies dedicated to her work, and a building at the University of London.

Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by mental illness. She was institutionalized several times and attempted suicide at least twice. According to Dalsimer, her illness was characterized by symptoms that today would be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, for which there was no effective intervention during her lifetime. In 1941, at age 59, Woolf died by drowning herself in the River Ouse at Lewes.

Her Major Works

Mrs. Dalloway

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”

Mrs. Dalloway 

Published on 14 May 1925

Is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.

The working title of Mrs. Dalloway was The Hours. The novel began as two short stories, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister". It describes Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host in the evening and the ensuing party. With an interior perspective, the story travels forward and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. In October 2005, Mrs. Dalloway was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since Time debuted in 1923.

Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Burton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband; she had married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh, and she "had not the option" to be with a female romantic interest, Sally Seton. Peter reintroduces these conflicts by paying a visit that morning.

Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran suffering from deferred traumatic stress, spends his day in the park with his Italian-born wife Lucrezia, where Peter Walsh observes them. Septimus is visited by frequent and indecipherable hallucinations, mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war. Later that day, after he is prescribed an involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping out of a window.

Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met throughout the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party and gradually comes to admire this stranger's act, which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness.

Woolf goes beyond commenting on the treatment of mental illness. Using the characters of Clarissa and Rezia, she makes the argument that people can only interpret Septimus' shell shock according to their cultural norms. Throughout the course of the novel, Clarissa does not meet Septimus. Clarissa's reality is vastly different from that of Septimus; his presence in London is unknown to Clarissa until his death becomes the subject of idle chatter at her party. By never having these characters meet, Woolf is suggesting that mental illness can be contained to the individuals who suffer from it without others, who remain unaffected, ever having to witness it. This allows Woolf to weave her criticism of the treatment of the mentally ill with her larger argument, which is the criticism of society's class structure. Her use of Septimus as the stereotypically traumatized veteran is her way of showing that there were still reminders of the First World War in London in 1923. These ripples affect Mrs. Dalloway and readers spanning generations. Shell shock, or post-traumatic stress disorder, is an important addition to the early 20th-century canon of post-war British literature.

There are similarities in Septimus' condition to Woolf's struggles with bipolar disorder. Both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of a window as Septimus does. Woolf had also been treated for her condition at various asylums, from which her antipathy towards doctors developed. Woolf committed suicide by drowning, sixteen years after the publication of Mrs. Dalloway.

Woolf's original plan for her novel called for Clarissa to kill herself during her party. In this original version, Septimus whom Woolf called Mrs. Dalloway's "double" did not appear at all.

Existential issues

When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes that his relationship with the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life." By focusing on characters' thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of private thoughts on existential crisis rather than concrete events in a person's life. Most of the plot in Mrs. Dalloway consists of realizations that the characters subjectively make.

Clarissa Dalloway is depicted as a woman who appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and create happy moments. Her charm, according to Peter Walsh, who loves her, is a sense of joie de vivre, always summarized by the sentence: "There she was." She interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life and her mood remains light, even though she hears about it in the midst of the party.

Feminism

As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies sexual and economic repression and the narcissism of bourgeois women who have never known the hunger and insecurity of working women. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a patrician politician, but she is still able to express herself and find the distinction in the parties she throws.

Her old friend Sally Seton, whom Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent woman – she smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge bag, and made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When Clarissa meets her in the present day, Sally turns out to be a perfect housewife, having accepted her lot as a rich woman married, and given birth to five sons.

Homosexuality

Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted to Sally Seton at Bourton. Thirty-four years later, Clarissa still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about Sally "as men feel," but she does not recognize these feelings as signs of same-sex attraction.

Similarly, Septimus is haunted by the image of his dear friend Evans. Evans, his commanding officer, is described as being "undemonstrative in the company of women." The narrator describes Septimus and Evans behaving together like "two dogs playing on a hearth-rug" who, inseparable, "had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other...." Jean E. Kennard notes that the word "share" could easily be read in a Forster manner, perhaps as in Forster's Maurice, which shows the word's use in this period to describe homosexual relations. Kennard is one to note Septimus'  "increasing revulsion at the idea of heterosexual sex," abstaining from sex with Rezia and feeling that "the business of copulation was filth to him before the end."

 

 

Orlando: A Biography

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”

Orlando: A Biography

 Is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. Inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover and close friend, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.

The novel has been adapted a number of times. In 1989, director Robert Wilson and writer Darryl Pinckney collaborated on a single-actor theatrical production. This had its British premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 1996, with Miranda Richardson playing the title role; Isabelle Huppert performed in the version in French, which opened at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in Lausanne in 1993. A film adaptation by Sally Potter, simply titled Orlando, was released in 1992, starring Tilda Swinton in the title role. A stage adaption by Sarah Ruhl premiered in New York City in 2010, and the novel was also adapted into operatic works.

The eponymous hero is born as a male nobleman in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. He undergoes a mysterious change of sex at the age of about 30 and lives on for more than 300 years into modern times without aging perceptibly.

As a teenage boy, the handsome Orlando serves as a page at the Elizabethan court and becomes the "favorite" of the elderly queen. After her death, he falls deeply in love with Sasha, an elusive and somewhat feral princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy. This episode, of love and ice skating against the background of the celebrated Frost Fair, held on the frozen Thames River during the Great Frost of 1608, when "birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground", inspired some of Virginia Woolf's most bravura writing:

Great statesmen, in their beards and ruffs, despatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda ... Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies walked abroad ... Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth.

The melting of the ice coincides with Sasha's unfaithfulness and sudden departure for Russia. The desolate Orlando returns to writing The Oak Tree, a long poem started and abandoned in his youth. He meets and hospitably entertains an invidious poetaster, Nicholas Greene, who proceeds to find fault with Orlando's writing. Later Orlando feels betrayed on learning that he has been lampooned in one of Greene's subsequent works. A period of contemplating love and life leads Orlando to appreciate the value of his ancestral stately home, which he proceeds to furnish lavishly. There he plays host to the populace.

Ennui sets in and Orlando feels harassed by a persistent suitor, the tall and somewhat androgynous Archduchess Harriet, leading Orlando to look for a way to leave the country. He is appointed by King Charles II as ambassador to Constantinople. Orlando performs his duties well, until a night of civil unrest and murderous riots. He falls asleep for a period of days, and others cannot rouse him. Orlando awakens to find that he has metamorphosed into a woman – the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman's body. Although the narrator of the novel professes to be disturbed and befuddled by Orlando's change, the fictional Orlando complacently accepts the change. From here on, Orlando's amorous inclinations change frequently, although she stays biologically female.

The now Lady Orlando covertly escapes Constantinople in the company of a Romani clan. She adopts their way of life until its essential conflict with her upbringing leads her to head home. Only on the ship back to England, with her constraining female clothes and an incident in which a flash of her ankle nearly results in a sailor falling to his death, does she realize the magnitude of becoming a woman. She concludes it has an overall advantage, declaring "Praise God I'm a woman!" Back in England, Orlando is hounded again by the archduchess, who now reveals herself to be a man, Archduke Harry. Orlando evades his marriage proposals. She goes on to switch gender roles, dressing alternately as a man and woman.

Orlando engages energetically with life in the 18th and 19th centuries, holding court with great poets, notably Alexander Pope. Critic Nick Greene, apparently also timeless, reappears and promotes Orlando's writing, promising to help her publish The Oak Tree.

Orlando wins a lawsuit over her property and marries a sea captain, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. As Orlando, he is gender non-conforming, and Orlando attributes the success of their marriage to this similarity. In 1928, she publishes The Oak Tree, centuries after starting it, and wins a prize. In the novel's ending, Orlando's husband flies over the mansion in an airplane, which hovers above Orlando until Shelmerdine leaps to the ground. A stray bird flies over his head and Orlando exults, "It's the goose! The wild goose!" The novel ends on the final stroke of midnight on Thursday, Oct. 11, 1928, the day the novel would be published.

 

 

Inspiration

Woolf and Vita Sackville-West were both members of the Bloomsbury Group, which was known for its liberal views on sexuality. The two began a sexual and safter that. Notably, this inspiration is confirmed by Woolf herself, who noted in her diary the idea of Orlando on 5 October 1927: "And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other".

 Nigel Nicolson, Sackville-West's son, wrote, "The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace, and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her."

 

To the Lighthouse

“To want and not to have, sent all up to her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”

To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel center’s on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.

Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. Cited as a key example of the literary technique of multiple focalizations, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no direct action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art, and the problem of perception.

In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923.

 

 

Part I: The Window

The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. The section begins with Mrs. Ramsay assuring her son James that they should be able to visit the lighthouse the next day. This prediction is denied by Mr. Ramsay, who voices his certainty that the weather will not be clear. This opinion forces a certain tension between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and also between Mr. Ramsay and James. This particular incident is referred to on various occasions throughout the section, especially in the context of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's relationship.

The Ramsays and their eight children are joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues. One of these friends, Lily Briscoe, begins the novel as a young, uncertain painter attempting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay and James. Briscoe finds herself plagued by doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the claims of Charles Tansley, another guest, who asserts that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr. Ramsay, a philosophy professor, and Ramsay's academic treatises.

The section closes with a large dinner party. When Augustus Carmichael, a visiting poet, asks for a second serving of soup, Mr. Ramsay nearly snaps at him. Mrs. Ramsay is herself out of sorts when Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two acquaintances whom she has brought together in engagement, arrive late to dinner, as Minta has lost her grandmother's brooch on the beach.

 

 

 

 

 

Part II: Time Passes

The second section, "Time passes", gives a sense of time passing, absence, and death. Ten years passed, during which the First World War begins and ends. Mrs. Ramsay dies, as do two of her children – Prue dies from complications of childbirth, and Andrew is killed in the war. Mr. Ramsay has left adrift without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of fear and anguish regarding the longevity of his philosophical work. This section is told from an omniscient point of view and occasionally from Mrs. McNab's point of view. Mrs. McNab worked in Ramsay's house from the beginning, and thus provides a clear view of how things have changed in the time the summer house has been unoccupied.

Part III: The Lighthouse

In the final section, "The Lighthouse", some of the remaining Ramsays and other guests return to their summer home ten years after the events of Part I. Mr Ramsay finally plans on taking the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with daughter Cam and son James. The trip almost does not happen, as the children are not ready, but they eventually set off. As they travel, the children are silent in protest at their father for forcing them to come along. However, James keeps the sailing boat steady, and rather than receiving the harsh words he has come to expect from his father, he hears praise, providing a rare moment of empathy between father and son; Cam's attitude towards her father changes also, from resentment to eventual admiration.

They are accompanied by the sailor Macalister and his son, who catches fish during the trip. The son cuts a piece of flesh from a fish he has caught to use for bait, throwing the injured fish back into the sea.

While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily attempts to finally complete the painting she has held in her mind since the start of the novel. She reconsiders her memory of Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay, balancing the multitude of impressions from ten years ago in an effort to reach an objective truth about Mrs. Ramsay and life itself. Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving some sort of legacy in her work.

Complexity of experience

Large parts of Woolf's novel do not concern themselves with the objects of vision, but rather investigate the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of looking. To be able to understand thought, Woolf's diaries reveal, that the author would spend considerable time listening to herself think, observing how and which words and emotions arose in her own mind in response to what she saw.

 

The complexity of the human relationship

 

This examination of perception is not, however, limited to isolated inner dialogues, but also analyzed in the context of human relationships and the tumultuous emotional spaces crossed to truly reach another human being. Two sections of the book stand out as excellent snapshots of fumbling attempts at this crossing: the silent interchange between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as they pass the time alone together at the end of section 1, and Lily Briscoe's struggle to fulfill Mr. Ramsay's desire for sympathy as the novel closes.

Woolf began writing To the Lighthouse partly as a way of understanding and dealing with unresolved issues concerning both her parents and indeed there are many similarities between the plot and her own life. Her visits with her parents and family to St Ive's, Cornwall, where her father rented a house, were perhaps the happiest times of Woolf's life, but when she was thirteen her mother died and, like Mr. Ramsay, her father Leslie Stephen plunged into gloom and self-pity. Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell wrote that reading the sections of the novel that describe Mrs. Ramsay was like seeing her mother raised from the dead. Their brother Adrian was not allowed to go on an expedition to Godrevy Lighthouse, just as in the novel James looks forward to visiting the lighthouse and is disappointed when the trip is canceled. Lily Briscoe's meditations on painting are a way for Woolf to explore her own creative process and also that of her painter sister since Woolf thought of writing in the same way that Lily thought of painting.

Woolf's father began renting Talland House in St. Ives, in 1882, shortly after Woolf's own birth. The house was used by the family as a family retreat during the summer for the next ten years. The location of the main story the Lighthouse, the house on Hebridean Island, was formed by Woolf in imitation of Talland House. Many actual features from St Ives Bay are carried into the story, including the gardens leading down to the sea, the sea itself, and the lighthouse.

Although in the novel the Ramsays are able to return to the house on Skye after the war, the Stephens had given up Talland House by that time. After the war, Virginia Woolf visited Talland House under its new ownership with her sister Vanessa, and Woolf repeated the journey later, long after her parents were dead.

 

 

 

 

Bipolar Disorder

Mental illness in Virginia Woolf’s family can be traced back to James Stephen, her grandfather on her father’s side. James was allegedly cyclothymic and, according to Bell, also given to self-mortification and depression.7 He was eventually institutionalized, after running naked through Cambridge. He died in an asylum. Virginia Woolf’s parents also suffered from mental disorders - her father was what at the time was called cyclothymic, whereas her mother suffered from depression.6 Sir George Savage, a prominent psychiatrist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, diagnosed Virginia’s father Leslie with “neurasthenia,” a common medical term used in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.8-10 Her half-sister Laura, who spent most of her life at the Priory Hospital Southgate in London, is believed to have had some type of psychosis. Her specific mental illness, however, is yet unknown. Amongst Virginia’s other siblings, both Vanessa and Adrian appear to have been cyclothymic, and Thoby was known to have hypomanic episodes. Hence, Virginia’s BD symptoms appear to be strongly linked to her family background.

Virginia’s biological inheritance translated into a great risk of developing mental illness. Nevertheless, it could be argued that her disease would have been milder had she not been exposed to childhood traumatic experiences.11 Virginia Woolf was sexually abused by her half-siblings, George and Gerald Duckworth, for nine years.6 According to De Salvo, “these experiences had spoiled her life before it had fairly begun.”10 When she was only six, Gerald molested her while the Stephen family was vacationing in St. Ives, Cornwall. George’s advances would not come until seven years later, after their mother Julia had passed away. The age difference between Virginia and her brothers should be noted - Gerald was 16 years her senior, and George was 15 older. Below is Virginia’s account of Gerald’s first sexual move toward her.

Death of Virginia

After completing the manuscript of her last novel posthumously published, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to the one she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. When Leonard enlisted in the Home Guard, Virginia disapproved. She held fast to her pacifism and criticized her husband for wearing what she considered to be "the silly uniform of the Home Guard".

After World War II began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened. On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

In her suicide note, addressed to her husband, she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.