Mrs.

Dalloway

Discuss Mrs. Dalloway as a feminist piece of writing.

Bibliography

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. Her mother,
a famous beauty, Julia Prince Stephen (born Jackson) (1846–1895), was born in India to
Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson and later moved to England with her mother, where she
served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones. After the death
of their father and Virginia's second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde
Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel,

Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier
experienced. On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed suicide.

Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary
Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Brontë family. Recently,
studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such
as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf.

Mrs. Dalloway as a feminist piece of writing.

The aim of this study is to examine Virginia Woolf’s contribution to the feminist
question in her selected novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925) .The study shows how Mrs. Woolf
employed her novels to show women the way to obtain meaning in life and realize their
identities. Virginia Woolf established herself as a distinguished feminist woman writer in
her treatment of women’s helpless situation. She unveiled the causes of women’s
oppression and provided us with a comprehensive answer for the Women’s question.

Woolf portrays the impact of the patriarchal society of England on women’s lives.
She portrays the loneliness and frustration of women’s lives that have been shaped by the
moral, ideological and conventional factors. The action of Mrs. Dalloway is confined to a
single day in June. On this day, Clarissa gives a party in the evening. Peter Walsh comes
Unexpectedly and calls upon her. The party brings together several other friends from her
young days: Sally Seton, Whitbread and others. Clarissa is a middle-aged woman, over
fifty and the wife of Richard Dalloway, a conservative member in the parliament. They
live in West-minister, a rich and fashionable locality of London. Clarissa holds the center
of the stage, and her experiences of love are part of every warp and woof of the novel.

There is her love-story with Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway and Sally Seton. The
most important love-story of Clarissa’s life was that with Peter. Whenever she thinks of
the past, of Bourton, the town where Clarissa lived with her parents before marriage, she
thinks of Peter. She loved Peter when she was a young girl and still loves him. Memories
of Peter keep coming to her mind throughout the novel. After she had refused Peter’s
offer of marriage, he went to India, and married another woman, but that marriage didn't
turn out to be a happy one. At the age of fifty-two, he fell in love with a married woman.

The relationship between Clarissa and Peter starts with love, but it has been
marked with a sense of tension. Clarissa’s soul craves for love and to be loved, but also
wants privacy and independence of her own. In her relationship with Peter, her soul
underwent a constant tension between love and individual freedom. Clarissa wants to
preserve her virginity. She equates virginity with freedom as a result of an aggressive
social structure where women were snubbed and despised.

Peter is portrayed as a male dictator who believes that he has the right to dictate to
her how she should live and what she should do. Clarissa thought that if she had married
Peter, he would have engulfed her and forced her soul. She gives reasons for rejecting
him and marrying Richard.

Clarissa feared intimacy with Peter, and was unwilling to share him her feelings
and thoughts. She was attracted and frightened at the same time. The reason behind not
marrying Peter was her apprehension that he would not give her the kind of freedom that
she thought essential for her happiness. On the other hand, Peter thought that she was
cold and lacked female sympathy. He couldn’t understand the importance of her
emotional need. Peter is unconventional and visionary in society. He can’t fit into the
conventional society of London. He is able to see the worldliness, hypocrisy and
insecurity of his society. In his youth, he aspired to be a brilliant poet. He was deeply
interested in the affairs of the world.

Clarissa is not a visionary in society like Peter. She gives parties and likes to bring
people together. She regards her parties as an offering, though she doesn't know precisely
to whom. She compensates her need of warmth by giving parties and seeking the warmth
that other people offer. Clarissa vacillates between her need of love and her need of
independence. She lacks depth of feelings and understanding, and can’t see the inward
troubled soul of society. She only sees the world’s glittering body, but she knows nothing
about social problems.

This tendency in Clarissa seems to Peter to be excessive, and has made him say
that she would prove to be the perfect hostess. He thinks that she cared for rank and
society. He sees through Clarissa the hypocrisy and insecurity of the society of London.
He always scolded her and said sarcastically that she would marry a Prime Minister and
stand at the top of a staircase. Clarissa felt such comments were pretty hurtful and often
wept.

In "Mrs. Dalloway", Clarissa’s relationship with her husband hasn’t proved to be

successful. Throughout Virginia Woolf’s presentation of Clarissa-Richard marital
relationship, she emphasizes that marriage is not a guarantee of a happy relationship and
mutual understanding between a husband and a wife in patriarchal society, even while
living under the same roof.
Clarissa rejected Peter because his love was too possessive and domineering
while Richard's is not. In her decision to marry Richard, she chose privacy over passion.
But whenever she thinks of Richard, she automatically thinks of Peter. Clarissa tries to
feel convinced that she acted wisely in rejecting Peter, but the virtues she attributes to
Richard as a husband are obviously representing a pathetic attempt to view her married
life as a total success.

Clarissa lacks effusiveness and generosity. She can’t respond to male demands of
sympathy and is unable to provide her husband with the kind of romantic passion usually
expected in heterosexual relationships. She chooses an attic room as a refuge from the
traditional female role. This kind of marital relationship caused a state of loneliness and
lack of intimacy in marriage. Loneliness without any sense of partnership with the
husband is suggested through the narrow bed.
Clarissa has to mitigate her loneliness through social life and idle gossip. She has
come to accept that there is a gulf even between husband and wife. The following
conversation presents an evidence of the casual nature of Clarissa-Richard relationship.

CONCLUSION

To discussion the whole topic it would be said that Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs.
Dalloway is a feminist piece of writing. Mrs. Woolf was one of the great writers whose
works reflect her philosophy of life and identification of women. She grew up with an
intense interest in the feminist question, and her novels hold the key to the meaning of
life and the position of women.
Heart of darkness
Conrad uses the technique of impressionism in heart of darkness.

Bibliography
Joseph Conrad was an author who is remembered for novels like 'Heart of
Darkness,' which drew on his experience as a mariner and addressed profound themes of
nature and existence.

Regarded as one of the best novelists, Joseph Conrad wrote short stories and
novels like Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent, which combined his
experiences in remote places with an interest in moral conflict and the dark side of human
nature. Conrad's education was erratic. He was first tutored by his literary father, then
attended school in Krakow and received further private schooling. At the age of 16,
Conrad left Poland and traveled to the port city of Marseilles, France, where he began his
years as a mariner.

After his seafaring years, Conrad began to put down roots on land. In 1896, he
married Jessie Emmeline George, daughter of a bookseller; they had two sons. He also
had friendships with prominent writers such as John Galsworthy, Ford Madox Ford
and Wells. Heart of Darkness is a novella describing a British man's journey deep into the
Congo of Africa, where he encounters the cruel and mysterious Kurtz, a European trader
who has established himself as a ruler of the native people there.

Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness contain the signature elements of Conrad's
writing: faraway settings; dramatic conflicts between human characters and the brutal
forces of nature; and themes of individualism, the violent side of human nature and racial
prejudice. Conrad was interested in showing "psycho-political" situations that drew
parallels between the inner lives of single characters and the broader sweep of human
history.
 Over the last two decades of his life, Conrad produced more autobiographical
writings and novels, including The Arrow of Gold and The Rescue. His final novel, The
Rover, was published in 1923. Conrad died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, at his
home in Canterbury, England.

Impressionism in heart of darkness

Impressionistic literature can be defined as a work created by an author that

centers on the thinking and feelings of the characters and allows the reader to draw his or
her own interpretations and conclusions about their meaning.

Absolutely, Heart of Darkness is often cited as one of the preeminent examples of

Impressionistic literature. Throughout the novella, we witness the inner workings of
Marlow's thoughts and emotions as he journeys up the Congo River toward the Inner
Station and his encounter with Kurtz. In fact, it is Kurtz who presents the major focus on
Marlow's attention. However, Marlow never comes out and explicitly tells us what he
thinks and believes about Kurtz; instead, Conrad leaves us to draw our own conclusions.

Kurtz, too, is much the same. He also shares his thoughts and feelings about his
job and his role in the African jungle and the reader is left to "read between the lines" to
interpret his exact meaning.No example could better exemplify the element of
Impressionism with the novella than Kurtz's final words: "the horror, the horror." A
readers we do not know exactly what "the horror" is and instead are left to devise our
own interpretation.

Impressionism was originally an artistic rather than a literary movement. It was

based on the nature of perception, specifically the knowledge that we do not actually see
objects, but rather see light falling on objects that is reflected to our eyes. Thus
impressionists focused on portraying the light that impresses itself on our eyes rather than
reconstructing the object per se.

The symbolist poets sometimes were described as impressionists because, in

opposition to the realist movement, they believed that we do not experience external
events directly but instead as mediated through our senses and sensibilities. Thus poets
such as Rimbaud were concerned with the nature of sensation, of trying to describe
emotional impressions, rather than to create vivid approximations of an external world.

Perhaps the most prototypically impressionist novelist, in the strict sense of the
term, was Huysman, whose A Rebours focuses on an aesthete concerned with this
specific problem of maximizing certain types of sensation in his life. While certain recent
genre theorists have discussed Heart of Darkness as an impressionistic novel, stylistically
it is far closer to German Expressionist work than to the refined urban sensibilities of the
French fin de siecle poets and their imitators (such as Arthur Symons, whose poetry and
criticism were seminal in the use of "impressionism" as a literary term).

In some ways, Heart of Darkness has almost Gothic characteristics in its exotic
locale and atmosphere of horror. Simply expressing the interior thoughts of characters
does not make a writer an impressionist, as that is a feature common to almost all
novelists.

Ian Watts's position that Conrad was an impressionistic writer uses the term
somewhat ahistorically, not referencing Impressionism within its literary or artistic
context, but rather referring to Hume's philosophical concept of impressions and labeling
works focused on the interior states of characters, such as those of Conrad and Virginia
Wolfe, as impressionistic, as opposed to realistic novels that focused on the external
world.

Conclusion

To discuss the whole topic it would be said that Heart of Darkness is one of the
preeminent examples of Impressionistic literature. Throughout the novella, we witness
the inner workings of Marlow's thoughts and emotions as he journeys up the Congo River
toward the Inner Station and his encounter with Kurtz. No example could better
exemplify the element of Impressionism with the novella than Kurtz's final words: "the
horror, the horror." A readers we do not know exactly what "the horror" is and instead are
left to devise our own interpretation.