Gender and Geometry in Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse

1996 ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Josephine Carubia
2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.


1985 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-497
Author(s):  
J. K. Johnstone

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rebekah Galbraith

<p>The defining features of the female Künstlerroman in Virginia Woolf’s writing suggest a revision of the narrative form to accommodate, navigate, and interrogate the artist’s gender and origins of her creativity. This thesis plots the birth of the female artist and the conditions of her artistic development within Woolf’s writing by first examining the construction of Rachel Vinrace, the rudimentary artist of the equally embryonic text, Melymbrosia (1912-1982). Rachel’s failure to privately self-identify as an artist is contrasted with her reluctance to accept her future potential as a wife and mother, suggesting that “woman” and “artist” are two mutually exclusive identities. For this reason, Woolf’s use of the female Künstlerroman examines the complexities of the female artist’s ability and, indeed, inability to acknowledge and inhabit her creative identity.  But how, exactly, the narrative form develops in Woolf’s writing relies upon a reading of the relationship between the figure of the artist and the novel she occupies: Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia; Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando in Orlando: A Biography (1928); Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver in Between the Acts (1941). Each of these works present a modification of the female Künstlerroman, and, in doing so, a markedly different artist-as-heroine. Moreover, in Woolf’s later writing, the narrative development of the female artist incorporates aspects of historical non-fiction, the biographical and autobiographical, and epistolary and essayistic fictions. An analysis of the intertextual relationship between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando: A Biography, and Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts, is therefore critical to the argument of this thesis.  The following is an exploration of how a variety of female artist-figures are constructed within Woolf’s writing: a musician, a painter, a social artist, a poet, and a pageant-writer-director. Through Woolf’s diverse expositions on the creative process, her heroines embody the personal difficulties women encounter as they attempt to realise their artistic potential. In this way, the female Künstlerroman is used by Woolf to examine, often simultaneously, the aesthetics of failure, as well as the conditions of success. But that a multitude of creative mediums appear in Woolf’s writing suggests there are universal obstacles when the artist in question is a woman, an implication in the narrative of the female Künstlerroman that the gender of a protagonist is the primary source of complication. Therefore, the degree to which each heroine achieves a sense of creative fulfilment is dependent on her ability to recalibrate her identity as a woman with her self-authorisation as an artist.</p>


Scriptorium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 33180
Author(s):  
Adriana Madeira Coutinho

Este artigo reflete sobre a condição humana e seu fim último, a morte, através do romance “To the Lighthouse”, de Virginia Woolf, em que a narrativa se desenvolve na relação entre a vida e a morte. Nas três partes do romance os acontecimentos giram em torno da morte, não só da morte física mas também de uma morte simbólica. Para tanto são apontadas algumas observações sobre subjetivismo e realidade objetiva, sobre temporalidade e sobre a própria prosa moderna nas formulações de Erich Auerbach. Em uma perspectiva empírica a autora aproxima o romance de sua realidade concreta, desnuda a dificuldade da escrita após um evento traumático além de apresentar aos leitores a fragilidade humana diante do inesperado. O presente trabalho foi realizado com apoio da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) - Código de Financiamento 001.  *** When silence tells what happened: death in "To the Lighthouse" ***This article reflects on the human condition and its ultimate end, death, through Virginia Woolf's novel "To the Lighthouse," where the narrative unfolds in the relationship between life and death. In the three parts of the novel, events revolve around death, not only physical death but also a symbolic death. To this end, some observations on subjectivism and objective reality, on temporality, and on modern prose itself in the formulations of Erich Auerbach are pointed out. In an empirical perspective, the author brings the novel closer to its concrete reality, exposes the difficulty of writing after a traumatic event, as well as presenting the human frailty before the unexpected. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.Keywords: Virginia Woolf; Death; Human condition; Literary criticism.


Author(s):  
Vincent P. Pecora

Both Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein confront the need for belonging with a certain American ambivalence, one that can also be found in the novelistic tradition, but their complicated attitudes toward the land of their birth puts the English attitude that we find in George Eliot in sharp relief. The English novel after George Eliot turns increasingly to what has been called questions of agro-romantic values. The chapter looks specifically at such values in Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d’Urbervilles); Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim); D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow and The Plumed Serpent); E. M. Forster (Howards End and A Passage to India); and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts).


Author(s):  
Bryony Randall

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.


Author(s):  
Lesley Higgins

T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf demonstrate contrasting modes of Modernist response to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. While Eliot grudgingly acknowledged Hopkins’s innovations even as he dismissed him as a writer of narrow range and limited importance, Woolf’s response was robust and lasting. Close readings and textual analyses of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Between the Acts, as well as Woolf ’s diaries and letters, reveal that from 1919 onwards, Hopkins is never far from Woolf ’s modes of discourse, becoming an important resource as she developed her theory of “prose poetry” and worked to develop her own singular rhythms.


Author(s):  
SeyedehZahra Nozen ◽  
Bahman Amani ◽  
Fatemeh Ziyarati

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice…”. Woolf’s belief has been put to the test in the Bloomsbury Group and this paper intends to investigate the validity of her claim through a critical analysis of the selected works of its novelist members. In a central part of London during the first half of the twentieth century a group of intellectual and literary writers, artists, critics and an economist came together which later on was labeled as Bloomsbury group. The group’s members had an influential role in blooming novel in a different form of expression and profoundly affect its literary figures, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, in the composition of their fictions The Waves, A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Forster’s A Room with a view and Howards End. The formation of Bloomsbury circle acted as a bridge from the Victorian bigotries and narrow-mindedness to the unbounded era of modernism as they searched for universal peace, individual liberalism and human accomplishments due to ideal social norms. They freely exchanged their views on variety of subjects without any limitation. The reasons behind their popularity compared to several contemporary groups were their innumerable works, the clarification of their lives through their diaries, biographies and autobiographies and their diverse kinds of activities such as criticism, painting, politics and literary writings. They were adherents of truth, goodness, enjoyment of beautiful object, intrinsic values, aesthetics, friendship and personal relationship. Intellectual intimacy and cooperation can be considered as the main attribute of its members as they collaborate with each other and employ the fundamental tenets of the group within their works. The modern style of its artists as post-impressionist highly affects the narration technique of its literary figures. These novelists tried to narrate the verbal utterances in a visual way as if the whole of the story is depicted on a canvas. Furthermore, this paper tries to discover the role of the non-literary (painters and critics) members of the group in blooming and forming of a different and novel kind of narration technique, namely ‘stream of consciousness’, through the visual impact of the painter and the discussion method of critic members of the group.


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