Study Like a Boss
Anna Quindlen, Bill Bryson, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tertullian, Thomas Paine, 1984, A Raisin in The Sun, Animal Farm, Beowulf, Fahrenheit 451, Frankenstein, George Orwell, Hamlet, Into The Wild, Lord of The Flies, A Modest Proposal, All Quiet on The Western Front, Allegory, Antigone, Between The World and Me.
“There was a dignity about her. She was not worldly, like Clarissa; not rich, like Clarissa. 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)…He pursued; she changed. There was colour in her cheeks; mockery in her eyes” … Read more
In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf bases her exploration of consciousness on the premise that men and women perceive the world in vastly different ways. However, Woolf believes that creativity can (and must) transcend the boundaries of gender. Life and work are incredibly fragile, but art, she believes, is the means of making one’s life … Read more
Virginia Woolf grants us an access to a new concept of time in “Mrs. Dalloway”, through which temporality-moment is investigated in two contradictory ways: one is continuous, deadly, dissolving while the other is placid, immortal, infinite; hence the combination of them has created a new type of temporality – androgynous time. The deadly and dissolving … Read more
Alexandra Harris claims in Romantic Moderns that to plant flowers in the middle of a war was to assert one’s firm belief in the future. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925 seven years after the first world war, and her final novel Between the Acts, published in 1941 in the midst of the second, … Read more
Elsewhere some Hindus were drumming – he knew they were Hindus, because the rhythm was uncongenial to him. (E.M. Forster, A Passage to India) While writing and revising Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf was corresponding with E.M. Forster, who was working on A Passage to India. In September of 1921, she records in her diary: “A … Read more
Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, is regarded as one of the first and most important modern feminist writers. In Orlando: A Biography, she tackles and bends the concepts of gender roles and gender identity and, on the other hand, deals with the subject of biography and novels. Woolf’s work was innovative at the time, as … Read more
Chapter 17 sees all members of the Ramsay family and their guests at dinner. The interaction of these characters in this chapter allows for themes such as challenging expectations and, more importantly, the theme of communication to be explored. These themes in particular are concerns of the novel as a whole, meaning that Chapter 17 … Read more
The word ‘romantic’ is derived from the medieval romaunt, which was a tale of chivalry, written in a romance language, that often took the form of a quest. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this idea of romance became an intellectual or artistic quest which focused strongly on the individual’s personal search for the meaning … Read more
Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway uses themes that scrutinize the environment of interwar England, which inhibited the ability to effectively communicate one’s thoughts and feelings, because the cultural norm dismissed them in favor of keeping a “stiff upper lip”. In order to survive in this setting, the characters of Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours have … Read more
In lieu of an action-packed or scandalous plot line, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway takes a more subtle and psychological mode to ensnare its reader, one of course meant to depart from the strict Victorian and Edwardian novels that preceded it. This modernist form of narration, which pays much more attention to the inner-workings of character … Read more
It is neither unique nor uncommon for great authors to weave themselves into the fabric of their own works; it is a technique that adds realism and believability to otherwise complex fictional characters. D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are examples of this occurrence … Read more
In any story, conflict is vital. It drives forth plot and reveals truths about the characters involved, keeping readers engaged. It also reflects the world of its writer, who often uses conflict as a tool to illustrate personal ideas. This is particularly true in the case of early twentieth-century writer Virginia Woolf. Throughout her most … Read more
Mrs.Dalloway by Virginia Woolf was set in London in 1923, five years after the end of the First World War. World War I, which took place between 1914 and 1918, had devastating effects on the lives of soldiers and civilians, to a degree never experienced before. Mrs.Dalloway takes place in an imperial, urban London marked … Read more
In both the play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and the novel ‘Mrs Dalloway,’ the protagonists are primarily isolated within society by the consequences of their pasts. While Williams and Woolf use the past to evoke both nostalgia for a better time and regret over the tragic elements of the past for their characters, and both … Read more
In the works of Virginia Woolf freedom is an often unattainable ideal. Woolf discusses freedom at great length in her texts, ranging from the broader freedom of the individual to live as they please in her fiction to the creative freedom of the artist in her nonfiction. There are a few instances in her work … Read more
Mention Virginia Woolf and almost inevitably the words ‘stream of consciousness’ will appear. But what does this actually mean, and how does Woolf distance herself from both reader and Clarissa, and, indeed, does she bother? Mrs Dalloway is, we are frequently told, a radical new form of prose breaking the mould of 19th century fiction. … Read more
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about time: its quality, its depth, and its composition. Woolf conveys the complexity of time by drawing attention to her characters’ unique struggles to create meaning for themselves within the confines of passing time. The entire novel takes place within one day, lengthening the experience of time, and … Read more
In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf focuses in great detail on the workings of dark and light on the relationships between her characters. The presence of light or dark tends to govern certain scenes: light brings people together in a harmony based on the physical environment, while darkness instead symbolizes the isolated, interior consciousness. Twilight, … Read more
In Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, allusions to other texts emphasize the importance of human connection and relationships. Mr. Ramsay values his ability to influence others with his philosophical works over his relationships with his wife and children. The most important thing for him is to reach the epitome of knowledge and be remembered for … Read more
Much of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse takes place within her characters’ minds. Although, of course, their thoughts cannot stop external happenings, they can and do stop time in one way: through memory. Thus, throughout the novel, Woolf employs certain objects as symbols to instigate memory and transport the mind into the past. One … Read more
The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed significant strides in the upheaval of gender bias and patriarchal standards. Women gained many more liberties, such as with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the first wave of feminism was at its golden age. However, gender roles, or ideals of how the binary genders should act, … Read more
From the invisible to the visible is but a step, and a very quick step at that. The task of the metaphor is to render concrete and palpable, through analogy, the abstract and unseen, and Virginia Woolf peppers To the Lighthouse, especially the largely interior “moments of being” dinner-party episode, with muscular metaphor and sinuous … Read more
“Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing… There is a vast upheaval of matter.” (Woolf 89). In Virginia Woolf’s 1917 “The Mark on the Wall”, the narrator is reflecting on the day she saw a marking on her wall and became utterly perplexed by it. As she stares at the wall, the thoughts in her head seem … Read more
In Virginia Woolf’s novel “To the Lighthouse” the author explores the theme of light through her characters Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Both women identify light differently in their lives, figuratively and metaphorically, and use light as a means of connection and inspiration. Both characters are affected by the lighthouse’s strokes of light and its … Read more
In Virginia Woolf’s book Mrs. Dalloway, a variety of characters with complex, unique personalities are brought to life. Woolf uses vivid imagery and poignant monologues in order to highlight and simultaneously criticize the social structure, political affairs, and economic state of post-World War I England. Many themes, such as the ones aforementioned, are displayed within … Read more
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway criticizes societal conventions as it portrays the internal thoughts of its protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, and the various characters that surround her in post-World War I London. Woolf illustrates the mental repercussions of the war and the past in general through the perspectives’ of individuals from a variety of different backgrounds and … Read more
‘Clarissa could not be wider of the mark when she “thank(s) heaven” that “the war was over”. Virtually every character we encounter is to some degree a living casualty of the class-based superficiality that led to the conflict and continues to dominate society.’ Explore and discuss. The war and its effects were far from over … Read more
Franco Moretti posits in The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture that “Even those novels that clearly are not Bildungsroman or novels of formation are perceived by us against this conceptual horizon; so we speak of a ‘failed initiation’ or of a ‘problematic formation’” (Moretti 561). While not a bildungsroman in the … Read more
In the memoir Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf reminisces on a sailing trip she experienced when she was younger. She is walking in the boring streets of London when she thinks of something that was more exciting. Afternoon sailing is revealed to be better than the walks she takes, and she begins talking about specific … Read more
Compare Helene Cixouss position on womens writing with that of Virginia Woolf in A Room of Ones Own. Do you think they would agree with each other? Why or why not – which aspects seem similar, which ones different, and which ones may perhaps be seen as complimentary to each other in some way? Lets … Read more
One of the greatest female authors of all time, Virginia Woolf, produced a body of writing respected worldwide. Driven by uncontrollable circumstances and internal conflict, her life was cut short by suicide. Her role in feminism, along with the personal relationships in her life, influenced her literary works. Virginia’s relationships throughout her life contributed, not … Read more
In Edward Albees controversial play, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , religion plays a major, yet often overlooked theme. There are constant references to God and Jesus throughout the play; in the third act, The Exorcism, George recites the Requiem for the Dead, the Catholic funeral mass. Throughout the play, these religious references and the … Read more
In her writings, Virginia Woolf wanted to capture the realness of life, as one would live it. In turn, Woolfs shared the significant elements of her life in her poetic prose novels, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, as a relative self-portrayal. In these books Woolf captured the life as she had lived it, performing … Read more