Study Guide to Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Intelligent Education

• Verlag: Influence Publishers
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645425274
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Study Aids
• Thema: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Virginia Woolf, one of the most controversial feminist writers. Titles in this study guide include Mrs. Dalloway and The Lighthouse.As an author of twentieth- century modernism, her writing have greatly impacted the feminist movement. Moreover, Woolf establish the stream of consciousness method as a narrative device. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Virginia Woolf's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 into one of England’s most distinguished literary families. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen (whom she was later to portray as Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse) was an editor (of the Dictionary of National Biography and the Cornhill Magazine), a critic, biographer and philosopher, a man who moved in the best Victorian literary circles. And his relatives - the Stephens - were most of them equally distinguished: his brother a jurist and Anglo-Indian administrator, his niece the Principal of Newnham College, etc. His first wife was Thackeray’s daughter; his second - Julian Jackson - was a famous, an almost legendary, beauty (on whom Virginia Woolf, of course, based her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay). By her he had four children - Julian Thoby, Adrian, Vanessa and Virginia, and since she herself already had three children from an earlier marriage, the Stephen menage must indeed have closely resembled that of the Ramsays.

More important, with its vigorous intellectual atmosphere - Leslie Stephen, a typical Victorian parent in some respects (not allowing his daughters to smoke or go about unchaperoned, for instance) gave them the complete freedom of his large and unexpurgated library even in their early teens - this household provided the perfect nourishment for a developing writer. And perhaps most important of all, the social class to which Virginia Woolf belonged by virtue of her “Stephen connection” enabled her almost automatically to think of herself in professional terms, to think not - as some women would have to - of “scribbling,” but of seriously writing and of being taken seriously. For the members of the Victorian “intellectual aristocracy,” as Noel Annan (a biographer of Leslie Stephen has noted, had established almost a complete “intellectual ascendency” in their society, and they shared “the spoils of the professional and academic worlds among their children.” If one belonged by birth to this literary “establishment” (and birth was probably a better passport to it than talent) “no very great merit was required” (and here Virginia Woolf herself is speaking) “to put you into a position where it was easier on the whole to be eminent than obscure.”

Thus doors were opened easily, naturally, to Virginia Woolf. She had to spend little or no energy in knocking and beating at them. As a child, in her own drawing room she met - through her father - important literary figures like Henry James and James Russell Lowell. As a young girl she was introduced by her brother Thoby to the circle of talented young Cantabridgians who were eventually to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. As a grown woman she was herself at the center of this group, the very hub of the London literary wheel. In short, from first to last the atmosphere of literary England was her life-breath; there was no sudden adolescent “revelation” of a new and unfamiliar literary landscape as there is for so many writers. Instead the countryside - to extend the metaphor - was naturally, inevitably mapped out for her, full of familiar hamlets in which she’d been vacationing since the age of five. On the whole, such an intimate, family connection with literature - though it may narrow and rarify a writer’s work (as it did to some extent with Virginia Woolf) - can be a great boon to a writer, for his self-image is thus absolutely consistent, perfectly formed from an early age. There is no conflict between family expectations and his own artistic expectations, between family style and artistic style. He is free to concentrate - as a writer should be - entirely on his work.

BLOOMSBURY

After Sir Leslie Stephen died in 1904, his two daughters, Vanessa and Virginia, set up housekeeping with their brothers Thoby and Adrian at 46 Gordon Square, one of the Bloomsbury squares. To this house came a large group of friends, some of them Bloomsbury neighbors, others Thoby’s classmates from Cambridge. When Thoby died in 1906 and Vanessa in 1907 married Clive Bell, Adrian and Virginia moved to nearby Fitzroy Square, but the same group continued to visit them. “The nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group,” states Monique Nathan, “was a set of friends Thoby Stephen had made at Cambridge, where they had formed their own ’Midnight Society.’ Chief among these apostles, as they called themselves, were Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf.” Others included Duncan Grant, the artist, John Maynard Keynes, the economist, Desmond MacCarthy, the critic, and Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, J. Lowes Dickinson, T. S. Eliot. “Bloomsbury,” as Monique Nathan depicts the group, “was not a sober and inexpensive residential quarter between New Oxford Street and High Holborn, but rather a state of mind. The state of mind was nonconformity in all things: a wholesome reaction against the boredom of fashionable life, and the expression of a real need for intellectual freedom.”

Madame Nathan neglects to note, however, the central and all-pervasive influence on this group of Bloomsbury artists and thinkers of the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore, under whose spell Thoby and his friends had fallen while they were at the university. (Moore’s Principia Ethica, his most important work, was published in 1903.) Moore believed, as K. W. Gransden summarizes it, that “the contemplation of beauty in art and the cultivation of personal relations were the most important things in life,” and this philosophy influenced Virginia Woolf as much as her brother and his friends. Certainly her novels, more often than not, deal with the complex perfection of certain moments (and with their preservation in art); and certainly, too, the “cultivation” of personal relations was often her province as a novelist, rather than the larger social context against which personal relations are formed. She did, however, as we shall see, occasionally explore both the life of the mind and, in an admittedly subtle and delicate way, the structure of society, beyond the narrow limits of what came to be called Bloomsbury “aestheticism,” an aestheticism which may be defined by Gransden’s summary of Moore’s central precepts.

FEMINISM

One definitely nonaesthetic concern of Virginia Woolf’s - a social interest which persisted throughout her life - was her passionate feminism. Like most distinguished women, she felt that woman had for too long been subjugated-relegated to the kitchen, the nursery and the bedroom - and she often speculated on the subject of woman’s innate abilities, which she was sure were equal to men’s, despite the much lower level of female achievement in the arts and sciences. What might have happened to a twin sister of Shakespeare’s, she once wondered, to a girl possessing all the poet’s talents but denied the opportunities he was given - the education, the chance to go on the stage (for women couldn’t act in Elizabethan theatres)? Is it not possible, Mrs. Woolf added, that such a girl, tormented by talent she could not express, may be buried in some unmarked grave, driven to suicide or crime or madness by her “differentness,” her genius? In A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) Mrs. Woolf proposed her own solutions to the female problem-among them equal educational opportunities, leisure for self-cultivation, and new attitudes toward women. And though critics like Monique Nathan and Queenie Leavis have objected to the author’s feminism-Madame Nathan Because it seems outdated, “a quaint relic of the Victorian era”; Mrs. Leavis because it seems unrealistic - she is still, in these books, one of the most articulate and persuasive spokesmen that the cause of “women’s rights” has ever had. Indeed, her own accomplishments as a novelist themselves prove two of her basic points - that women may be just as talented as men, and that their environment and upbringing may often keep them from realizing their fullest potentiality. For much as Virginia Woolf achieved as a novelist, she was herself both aided and limited by her peculiarly feminine point of view.

THE FLIGHT FROM NATURALISM

Virginia Woolf has often been called a novelist of sensibility, an intensely feminine novelist. Three main forces seem to have shaped her into this kind of writer. First, of course, she was naturally poetic - that is, she had a poet’s temperament - the eye for metaphor and imagery, the ear for language, the delight in style which more often characterizes lyric poets than novelists. Second, the sheltered thought vigorously intellectual life which she led as a result primarily of her sex (though to a lesser extent of her social class) tended to develop her sensibility, her feminine appreciation of subtle shades of thought and feeling, rather than a larger, more objective social consciousness. (Thus, as we noted above, she was both aided and limited by her femininity.) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the objective naturalistic novel, the novel of social consciousness and dramatic fact, seemed at the point when Mrs. Woolf began writing seriously, to have gone about as far as it could go.

Writers like Hardy, George Moore, Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, and even the young D. H. Lawrence had thoroughly explored the English class structure, the external reality of life; the trivial-seeming facts of innumerable personal histories; they had developed and extended in their work, in England, the sort of social realism (or “naturalism” as it was called in certain cases) which was first attempted by French writers like Flaubert, Balzac, Zola and Huysmans. Now the novel had to find a new field to explore; the old territory was exhausted. And what more logical than for writers in English like Joyce and Mrs. Woolf and Dorothy Richardson to turn inward, to turn-following now in the footsteps of the American Henry James as well as Frenchmen like the omnipresent Flaubert (who influenced everybody) and the obscure Dujardin-to the novel of subjectivity or, as Leon Edel calls it, the “psychological novel”? Whatever one calls it, this sort of novel-as we shall see in reading Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, differs from the realistic novel in that its action is mainly internalized: the principal action takes place not in the real world of events, of marriages and catastrophes, but (though events, of course, do occur in such novels) in the mind, the all-absorbing “stream of consciousness.” Thought, in other words, is event in the subjective novel, for thought includes - as, again, we shall see in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse - not only crucial decisions and emotions but also the memories of real events.

EARLY NOVELS

Virginia Woolf did not, of course, begin writing experimental, subjective novels from the first; like most artists she had to evolve a distinctive style over a period of years-almost fifteen years, to be exact. She began writing her first novel. The Voyage Out, in 1909, when she was twenty-seven; she was already publishing book reviews at this point, though she was not to become known as a creative writer until this first book was published, six years later in 1915, several years after she had married Leonard Woolf. Though it quite clearly displayed much promise, The Voyage Out (in which Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway, interestingly enough, make a brief first appearance as characters) was significant mainly as a first novel by a talented novelist; even Mrs. Woolf’s friend and admirer, Lytton Strachey, who read the book with “breathless pleasure” complained that it lacked “the cohesion of a dominating idea.”

It was followed in 1919 by Night and Day and then, in 1922, by Jacob’s Room, in which Mrs. Woolf for the first time seriously experimented with the traditional style and form of the novel. It was not till Mrs. Dalloway, however, (published in 1925), that she seemed to have completely understood the direction-toward greater subjectivity-in which her talent was leading her. Jacob’s Room, despite its lyric intensity, is still technically uneven, not yet the work of a mature artist.

MRS. DALLOWAY AND TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

In contrast to Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, though it is not usually considered her best novel, is still Mrs. Woolf’s best-known, most widely read and most frequently studied novel. Perhaps this is because in Mrs. Dalloway, for the first time, Virginia Woolf applied both subjectivist and, as W. Y. Tindall has noted, symbolist precepts to the novel-exploring the minds of her characters in all their flow and flux and yoking together two seemingly unrelated characters in a kind of extended metaphysical conceit, to produce not only one of the first psychological novels but also one of the first symbolist-metaphysical novels (cf. Introduction to Mrs. Dalloway), a work which may seem a bit strained and unnecessarily ambiguous to some readers but which is still historically significant.

To the Lighthouse, on the other hand, is not only widely read; it is also often spoken of (along with The Waves) as Mrs. Woolf’s finest and most moving novel. Intenser than Mrs. Dalloway because more closely based on autobiographical fact, it has, as a result of its autobiographical origins, a poignant reality which reinforces its lyricism and its subjectivity to produce a three-dimensional record of life both as it is felt and as it is perceived.

ORLANDO, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A TIME MACHINE

After writing To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Woolf relaxed with the wonderful jeu d’esprit that is Orlando. At this point, fatigued by the intense concentration which her self-evolution as a novelist had demanded, she felt the need to feel free, to have fun writing a less “serious” novel. The “escapade,” as she called it, turned out to be Orlando, the fantastic biography of an...