"I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regent's Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and the rivers wound they knew not where-- such was her darkness." (Woolf, 24)
There are times when we feel alone in the world, as if no one is around to help us or to be our companion's in life. Rezia is certainly lost in this feeling of being alone. Her husband, Septimus, seemingly gone mad and haunted by hallucinations, has left her without any companion in life, since she has moved away from her home and sisters in Milan. Her poetic thoughts of being alone and comparing her darkness to the ancient land of England that the Romans came across when England is still uncharted territory is very poignant.
There are times when we feel alone in the world, as if no one is around to help us or to be our companion's in life. Rezia is certainly lost in this feeling of being alone. Her husband, Septimus, seemingly gone mad and haunted by hallucinations, has left her without any companion in life, since she has moved away from her home and sisters in Milan. Her poetic thoughts of being alone and comparing her darkness to the ancient land of England that the Romans came across when England is still uncharted territory is very poignant.
None of us know what the isles of Britain looked like before the conquering armies of Roman landed and charted out and built the framework of what is now modern day England. It is impossible to know, but reminds us of the time when maps were made of the world that look silly to us with their misshapen continents in our age of Google Earth. One of the last untouched worlds I can think of is New Zealand. Visiting the small island nation, it reminds me of a prehistoric Scotland or England. Not touched by the houses and development the way the flatlands of England are, the land seems virgin and untouched, a place where you could imagine rivers not knowing where they were going. This feeling of untouched land seems to resonant extremely well with Rezia's predicament.
Her predicament also reminds me of Hedda's predicament in Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler. The character, who is in control of her life in every possible facet, suddenly loses control towards the end of Act IV. The life that she was leading seems marginalized and she cannot see any remedy to her predicament. She, too, is in a darkness. Her darkness is solved by her suicide at the end of the play, but an action so bold I cannot see Rezia committing. Rezia plans to solve her darkness by divorcing Septimus, but will that solve the problem? Will she really be happy if she returns to Milan? Can that solve being alone? Or will she just remain in the darkness, never having a cartographer to map out the river of her emotion.
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