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Mrs. Ebury, A Footnote

2009-05-04T20:11:00.000-07:00

I love fashion. I also love London. I'm still trying to decide which I love more and if such a decision is even possible. Because of these loves, my ears perked up at the name Mrs. Ebury--a very, very minor character in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. Mrs. Ebury, mentioned only once, "had forbidden Fanny to act because of the nettle-rash" and with that, had completed her role as concerned townsperson. She might be completely forgettable, except for her name...Ebury. I'd heard that name somewhere before.

Ebury Street is the name of a street in London. But more importantly, Anya Hindmarch, one of my favorite British designers, had named a handbag after the street. I think that the handbag reference is what made the name stick. It really is a great bag, sturdy and classic, there's even a "bespoke" version that can be made in the buyer's (or recipient's) choice of leathers and then inscribed with a note, in the buyer's handwriting, above where the inside lining begins. I dream of having one of these bags given to me. But I digress.

The bag was named after a street and I wondered what significance the name might have for Woolf. Several of Woolf's characters, particularly in Mrs. Dalloway, seem to have names that are anything but random. Septimus Smith--a common surname, combined with a first name that bears the weight of the world. Septimus is every young man in England that was lost or damaged by World War I. Clarissa's last name, Dalloway, is perhaps a play on "dally"--she takes her time with everything, dallying in flower shops as well as her past. So, I figured I'd have a look around and see if Ebury Street could mean something special for Virginia Woolf. And it looks like it just might.

First of all, Ebury Street is located in Westminster, London. Nothing particularly special there, except that Clarissa Dalloway lived in Westminster. Perhaps Woolf, by using Mrs. Ebury as the character who takes Fanny out of the show because of nettle-rash, is making a comment on the upper-class Londoners who inhabit Westminster--maybe they're too cautious, unfair, or just not very much fun. I think that might be stretching it a little. Of more interest to Woolf, I think, is the person in her life who lived on Ebury Street: Vita Sackville-West.

Sure, Mozart lived on Ebury Street for a few months when he was writing his first symphony. Alfred Tennyson, a poet laureate who ran in Woolf's parents' social circle, also lived on Ebury Street--apparently spending much of his time there smoking shag tobacco and drinking port as well as writing Maud. However, it's no secret that Vita Sackville-West held a special place in Woolf's heart--their love affair lasted from sometime in the early 1920s until Woolf's death in 1941. I'm fairly confident that Mrs. Ebury was named after the street that Sackville-West (and her husband, Harold Nicolson) called home and a place that Woolf certainly visited more than once.

Call me crazy, maybe I am looking too far into this. I still can't figure out why Mrs. Ebury is the one to pull nettle-rash Fanny (that particular reference a blog post for another day, perhaps) out of the show and Googling "Sackville-West afraid of germs/contagions/rash" does no good at all. Regardless, though, I know two things for sure:
1. There's something there--it seems impossible that Woolf would name a character after the street her lover lived on purely by coicidence.
2. I want the Ebury bag...my birthday's right around the corner..I'm just sayin'.

Go Fish: Marriage!

2009-05-04T17:39:00.000-07:00

This is my sixth semester as an Undergraduate and I still don't know the most efficient way to study for an English final. While I love compressing semesters into index cards that I then can neatly file away after finals, the index card is not compatible with Woolf's winding prose. I've also given up on the idea of rereading everything on the syllabus before even attempting to tackle this insane plan. Perhaps blogging will help?

If it wasn't for the very end of Between the Acts, I would have hated Oliver and Isa's marriage. Isa and Oliver both lust after other people; their marriage seems limiting and rather Victorian throughout the majority of the novel.

I began thinking of Isa and Oliver as a Victorian couple while reading Woolf's description of their initial meeting. The two were fishing when their lines got tangled so Isa gave in to her position as an inferior woman to the superior man by letting him take over. The fishing scene and the motif of fish in Between the Acts reminded me of the hacked fish that fascinates James and Cam Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. The hacked fish, which makes its appearance in between Lily's thoughts of Mrs. Ramsay, and all the numerous references to fish in Between the Acts present fish as a symbol for past, or Victorian, notions of traditions, marriage and family. For instance, Oliver follows Mrs. Manresa like a "fish on a line" (p. 74) after the narrator presents Oliver's infidelity as an accepted component of his and Isa's marriage. The fish in Between the Acts are consumed, caught, killed, and ordered for the traditional community play. Woolf presents fish as they are dieing or already dead, implying that Victorian notions of a proper family and marriage hinder modern men and, in particular, women.

While Woolf presents Oliver's infidelity as something Isa is forced to accept, Isa is not passive about the issue after Mrs. Manresa leaves. Isa rejects and insults Oliver during the rather phallic presentation of a fruit: "Giles offered his wife a banana. She refused it." (p.145) Isa remains quiet until she is left alone with her husband. Woolf presents Isa and Oliver on equal footing in a rather tender foreshadowing of their night. Oliver and Isa as husband and wife must openly present their qualms with one another before they can become intimate. Woolf presents the act of creation as one that requires the blending of two essences. Thinking of the girl and guy getting into the cab in A Room of One's Own led me to think that it is the sexual act between a male and female who are open with each other that seems the most balanced and, ironically enough, androgynous for Woolf.

The audience in Between the Acts cannot identify itself during the silent interval that Miss La Trobe labeled as "The Present Day" in the program. Even identifying what the members of the audience are not like proves unsuccessful: "they were neither one thing nor the other; neither Victorian nor themselves." (p. 121) While the audience is uncertain as to who they actually are, they are also unsure whether they are or aren't similar to the Victorians. This passage seems to capture a major Woolfian theme: the transition from the Victorian marriage and family structure into...

Well, that's left as a source of conflict for many of Woolf's female characters. Lily Briscoe triumphantly finishes her painting after feeling validated that the Rayley's marriage fails but her thoughts are paired with tears in To the Lighthouse. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa thinks fondly of Peter Walsh and Sally Seton while married to Richard.

Isa and Oliver's marriage is unique in Woolf's body of work because the lasting impression Woolf leaves on the reader is a unity achieved through a harmonious action: "They spoke." (p. 147) Woolf concludes Between the Acts by describing an England beyond the reach of history books. The Victorians and the entire history of the British notion of marriage is wiped away; Isa and Giles become the model for husbands and wives in a new era of marriage.

Against the Looking-glass

2009-04-16T18:57:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago, I went through the process of applying for a teaching position with the Japanese government. The first stages of the application were straightforward and left me more or less in control of the impact of my application; I picked each and every word of my cover letter and employed careful phrasing, indentation, and even font choice on my résumé, carefully crafting an image of responsibility, creativity, and experience; my references were briefed with specific talking points distinct to each of them which, when read in the context of the others' letters, would create a balanced, enticing image. The application was genuinely a multimedia work of art, conceived with of coherent artistic agenda and executed with, I believe, considerable skill.

I lost control with the next stage: submit two passport-sized photos (2 x 2 inches). Left ear must be showing. Applicant should be photographed wearing business attire. Detach reply form from this letter at dotted line. Affix here using glue. Do not smile.

I'm still not entirely sure why that demanding little letter, with its series of staccato strictures, was so jarring, but I think Woolf may be on to something at the end of the Between the Acts, when the players turn the mirrors on the audience, to much consternation:

The hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment. It was now. Ourselves.

So that was her little game! To show us up, as we are, here and how. All shifted, preened, minced; hands were raised, legs shifted.

The audience is “laughed at by looking glasses” amid grumblings that the gaze of the mirrors is “distorting and upsetting and unfair”. The distortion is of their self-images, and the unfairness results when they are stripped of these images. The audience and I shared a similar dismay at having all of our calculated facades, the little projections and mythologies we exhibit, shorn away in the face of the determined Gaze.

You cannot argue with a mirror any more than you can with a camera.

Woolf's audience had only to see themselves, but my ill-shaven, sleep deprived, unkempt mug traced a circuitous route from the phototech at CVS's discerning gaze to the halls of the various ministries of the Japanese government, at one of which it remains today, enshrined in a manilla folder with the comments of some bored civil servant scrawled around it. There, prodded at, judged, evaluated, analyzed, and, ultimately, rejected, this utterly truthful, horrifying image, complemented by a series of little black squiggles, arranged in an oval shape and called my fingerprints, was left to plead my case.

In that moment, I became a member of that audience, offended and dejected that the story should end with nothing but the truth about myself.

Mrs. Dalloway: British Connexion

2009-04-08T19:10:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a Disney world where age and wisdom increase proportionally. So it is a little weird for me to watch more mature people act so fastidious and puerile. Therefore, you can imagine how difficult it was to try to analyze the characters and the motives for their actions in the 1997 movie Mrs. Dalloway. While much of the movie stays true to the novel by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and her circle of friends seem slightly senile with all the smiles, stares, and repetition of “look.”

Yet, as I warmed up to the characters and saw them in different frames of their lives, I began to sympathize with them. There seems to be such an abundance of misery and pain in this world that Mrs. Dalloway, Hugh, Peter, Richard, and Lady Bruton choose to focus on the superficial and less upsetting. Mrs. Dalloway veers around the awkward emotions creeping up on her since Peter has re-emerged into her life. She does not want to worry but knows that they have left things unresolved and unhappy. Will he be the same Peter who I once knew? Will he remember me? Us? Is life happy without me? These are questions that are perceptibly considered during the movie. The questions boil down to the significance of existence and how it shows in the lives of other people. Clarissa, nevertheless, shies away from such depth and introspective thoughts throughout the movie to utter “You won’t forget about my party! You’re coming to my party?” (except throw a British accent on it to pronounce pa-aw-ty).

Nonetheless, Septimus bears much of the depth in the movie, as well as in the novel for me. He is not afraid of introspection but suffers from it. He appears to be encumbered by every other character’s inability to deal with such deep thoughts, pains, and suffering. He endures enough suffering for all of them. When Mrs. Dalloway worries about her party or Peter about why Clarissa doesn’t like him or Lady Bruton about her new and brilliant cause or Hugh about stately appearance or Richard about…about…nothing really, Septimus is on the edge of such trivialities. He constantly hears a cacophony of sounds triggered by one “clamorous sound." He says "all the world is clamoring" and notices that he is finding it insufferably difficult to continue to be in such pervading anguish. He seems desensitized when he feels the most out of all of the characters. Hugh talks to Clarissa about his indisposed wife and Clarissa seems to feel very little when compared to Septimus’s reaction to Dr. Holmes as a “sneaky hunter.” (Dr. Holmes implies that Septimus is feeling lost or displaced mainly because “Men coming back from war…their work has been commandeered by women” and not because he saw a comrade, Evans, blown up in front of him.)
On the other hand, Septimus sets the tone of the movie and gives reason to why these characters are the way that they are. The movie opens with Italy 1918 and Septimus in the trench calling out to his comrade, Evans, before the comrade’s demise. Soft echoing music with still, detached notes resonates. This event is big. Perhaps, it is too big to live up to or to contemplate. It becomes easier to focus on the little things. Shift in the little things like choice of hat or dress or meaningless parties do not have as great or immediate an impact as actually confronting issues like death, the war, or suicide. Mrs. Dalloway’s patrons can experience momentary satisfaction in her parties and can reserve pensive remembrances of the night for later. Clarissa talks about the significance of a party to “give people one night in which everything feels really enchanted.” The aim of her having a party is to give a spark to life and to advocate appreciation for it. She tries to share this enchantment with her guests. Clarissa is connecting and uniting with people in a world with such solitary thoughts and trivial focus where the characters may fail to understand one another because they do not venture deep enough within themselves and each other to comprehend one another. Clarissa connects with her guests, with Septimus as a participant (not victim because she does not see it that way) of suicide and flower-shop onlooker, and with the woman she sees in the window from her balcony at the close of the movie. The difference between Septimus and Clarissa is that, among other things, Septimus turns away from the person he connects with and sees through the window across from Dr. Holmes’s office. He rejects personal connection while Clarissa seeks it and strives to maintain it.

All in all, Mrs. Dalloway was a bit long for me but accurately portrayed much of the novel, except for the car scene—a big scene to me. The hues used in the movie were beautiful neutrals and pastels that mirrored the level of passion and depth within the world of Mrs. Dalloway (tepid with superficialities). The costumes were nice pieces. The actors portrayed the characters well. Mrs. Dalloway is an interesting movie and an individual who likes to see the novel-to-movie transition should see it.

The Hours: Review

2009-04-07T13:23:00.001-07:00

The Hours attempts to connect the stories of three women that are all connected by Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The movie is interesting in that it is very Woolf-ian and connects all three of the characters that are disconnected by time, much like Woolf connects the characters within Mrs. Dalloway without ever having them meet. Likewise, it also spans only one day in each of the characters’ lives (the exception being that Woolf is shown at the end of her life as well) with each having some sort of party event looming on the horizon.

All three actresses play the parts very well, though I’m surprised Nicole Kidman got an Academy Award for her performance. Although good, it was not anything amazing. More so, Julianne Moore is perhaps the most dynamic of the three, playing Laura Brown who probably is the most delineated from the plot of Mrs. Dalloway. Rather, she is seen reading the book throughout and how it inspires her. Although not directly from Mrs. Dalloway, the character seems to have elements from other Woolf novels: the relationship between her and her son seems to have a touch of Mrs. Ramsay from To the Lighthouse and her inability to make a cake mirrors Rhoda’s trouble in The Waves to comprehend numbers.

Were it not for the middle story, the third story would have hardly any meaning. All the events eerily parallel Mrs. Dalloway and even most of the characters retain the names from the novel. Clarissa is trying to throw a party. Richard and Sally are switched as Sally is now in the long-term relationship with Clarissa, but there are obvious clues that Richard and Clarissa had a history. There is a daughter who comes home and a Peter character. What makes the novel so great is the relationship of these stories to the Septimus storyline. Instead, it is Richard who falls out the window (could see that one coming from a mile away) and AIDS is the substitute for shell shock.

It’s sort of comic that the characters know of Woolf’s novel, as it is even mentioned throughout, but do not realize they are carrying out situations and fates that are within the novel. The movie, however, looks great and the cinematography is very much inspired by Woolf, as it pays attention to details within the days of the characters, much as Woolf’s novel does. Phillip Glass’s wonderful music is probably what keeps the stories together. If you have never read Woolf’s novel, the story will probably be much more fascinating, but having read them and knowing how much deeper Mrs. Dalloway is, the movie does not reach to the same level as the novel.

The Courage to Live; A Review Mrs. Dalloway

2009-04-07T08:19:00.000-07:00

Every moment of everyday is filled with choices; the choice to dream, the choice to love, and the choice to live. Of the thousands of choices we make in a day, some we realize will effectually change our lives for ever, while with others, there can be know way of knowing their eventual influence, unless, of course, we consider them in hindsight.

Perhaps that’s why Clarissa Dalloway thinks that is so “dangerous to live for just one a day.” Everyday requires the courage to live with the choices we have made, while simultaneously making new ones.

Mrs. Dalloway, a film directed by Marleen Doris, stays true to that theme. We follow Mrs. Dalloway, played by Vanessa Redgrave (who looks curiously like Virginia Woolf in her physical appearance), during and after she makes the choice of a lifetime to marry the more “safe” and predictable Richard “Dalloway, it’s still Dalloway,” over the brash, young, and pocket-knife-fondling, Peter Walsh.

We also follow Septimus Smith (Rupert Graves). Septimus’ story makes evident that many choices are made for us. The death of his friend Evans, for instance, by a wartime blast was cruel and sudden. Overcome with grief and despair, Septimus cannot use human reason to categorize his friend’s death. The doctors, in turn, can’t seem to categorize Septimus and vow, instead, to “take him away.” Yet Septimus believes that the mark of his own sanity is the choice to go on living as he like and if he can no longer do that, then he chooses to die rather than be “in their power.” It is the audacity of Septimus’ choice as well as the one she made that summer in Borden which eventually posses Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts to the point in which she is compelled to reflect on them: “That young man killed himself, but I don’t pity him. I’m somehow glad he could do it- throw it away. It’s made me feel the beauty. Somehow feel very like him- less afraid.” The simple fact that Septimus made a choice is what is so attractive to Mrs. Dalloway, it recalls in her a time of youth and promise. It makes her realize how much life and promise is still left for her to live.

This is not an easy film to produce, for the obvious fact that it is novel based on first-person narration, which take place in the narrator’s own mind. At times I thought the insert of thoughts by Clarissa were rather forced and intrusive and disrupted the flow of the film, but Vanessa Redgrave's performance is so subtle and gracious, it is hard not to be enchanted by her. I was especially moved by the last scene. After Mrs. Dalloway asks herself: “What makes us go on?” She returns to the party. There she joins Peter, Richard and Sally in a dance. After the years of separation, loss, and defeats small and large, they still find comfort in one another, fun and even laughter. What makes us go on? It is moments like these, among friends and family, who, despite all our choices and whether they were for good or ill, can still gather together to celebrate one another and to celebrate life.

Soliloquy

2009-04-06T23:02:00.000-07:00

Like some of you, I got caught in a thunderstorm after last Friday's class. My copy of The Waves, which was swam inside my purse, took quite a beating; the book dried into a wave shape with corners watercolored with the periwinkle from the cover. I admit that I rather like it when design of an object reflects its function or content but the rain distorted some of my markings present inside. The rain especially targeted the last page of Bernard's soliloquy since the traces of words written in my light blue V5 pilot dispersed into blossoming water marks. I can't decipher what I originally wrote, which is rather appropriate since I find the the concluding section an especially perplexing component of The Waves.

I could argue that Bernard's soliloquy is Woolf's version of bildungsroman for the lost male who finally achieves his destined role as a patriarch. After all, Bernard takes over as the sole voice of the concluding section. While the other voices distinguish themselves against others, Bernard is most capable of self-reflection and defining himself without necessarily comparing himself to the others.

Yet, I referenced to the "self" three times within the last sentence and it is precisely this issue of "the self", self-identity and being that is such a struggle for Bernard: "Let me cast and throw away this veil of being." (p. 218) For a character who has just taken over as the dominant being in the concluding section of work, Bernard seems more concerned with abandoning his self-identity rather than relishing in his maturation into a complete individual. Though he is appointed as the one to reflect upon the others and to stand as an individual at the moment that the sun sets over the waves, Bernard's reflection is a cumulation of experiences bound into the story of one life. Then the waves break on the shore and Bernard's being disappears.

The last line of The Waves could indicate death. It could also indicate a complete transcendence into a realm outside of the confines of semantics and linguistic structures. Woolf is a keen observer of relationships amongst people or, rather, the lack of boundaries between beings. Like the thread that extends between the characters of Mrs. Dalloway, the waves rock the beings within The Waves and unite them. However, Woolf achieves such fluidity in her prose that the beings lose their distinctive shapes until they are entirely freed from the confines of "identity" and "the self."

Just like the waves that dispersed Bernard's identity at the conclusion of Woolf's novel, the rain unbound my presence from the fibers of the book's pages.

The Hours; A Review

2009-04-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

The drama of The Hours is thus: Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway, Sarah Brown--preggers--is reading Mrs. D in 1950's U.S. suburbia, and Clarissa Vaughn is unknowingly living Mrs. D in 2001 New York. The film begins with Woolf standing in a river and ends with her drowning herself in a river. Each plot is a day in the life of a woman. Sarah Brown bakes a birthday cake for her husband and questions her life. Clarissa prepares for a party and painfully reminisces with old friends. Woolf has a visit with her sister and tries to escape her small town life. There are surprises and twists. And of course, 3 lesbian kisses, evenly distributed.

This is the umpteenth time I've seen The Hours. I honestly thought the first time I saw it would be the last. It seemed like Michael Cunningham, author of the novel The Hours, was just working out his mommy issues and his obsession with Mrs. D. But then I thought, "There is totally something up with Richard's robe." I watched it again. "OMG his robe matches"--SPOILER ALERT--"his childhood bed sheets!" The second time I watched it, I became obsessed. I noticed the blue and yellow color scheme, how Clarissa and Richard's dad point at Richard in just the same way, and how familiar that woman in the flower shop looked (Eileen Atkins who played Virginia Woolf in "A Room of One's Own" and wrote the screen play for "Mrs. Dalloway"). I love connections and The Hours is full of them. I also love Philip Glass, the composer for the film.

Reading Mrs. D only fed the obsession. I looked for connections with the book. Obviously, there were many. Furthermore, I felt that the pacing of the film and the weaving together the present with the past were wonderfully Woolfian. But what, then, does the film have to offer? It celebrates life. So does Mrs. D. It explores the ambiguity of sexuality. So does Mrs. D. It plays out the legacy of a masterpiece. So does--just read Mrs. D. The Hours, being based on a novel that was inspired by a novel, has a manifold challenge: it must contribut something that its predecessors do not. Perhaps, in that sense, the film fails.

The Hours has this going for it; it's a movie and a beautiful one. Mrs. D is not accessible to all people and The Hours provides a lovely treatment of the themes explored by Woolf. So if you can't read Mrs. D, watch The Hours. Woolf's characters are so elaborate and real that any reinterpretation of them will be interesting. Cunningham has a wonderful imagination and Stephen Daldry, director, knows how to make a film. My reaction comes from someone who's studied the film and Mrs. D many times. If you asked me years ago, in my youth, I'd say that the film was quite moving.

As Good As It Gets

2009-04-06T17:53:00.000-07:00

It was with trepidation that I started watching The Hours. I had just finished the book and had heard, for years, about how good the movie was from my best friend and my sister, who had never actually read The Hours. But I picked up the book earlier this year--it was on sale at B&N--and I loved it. It served as a re-introduction to Woolf for me (I had read some of Mrs. Dalloway when I was thirteen, but didn't really like it), and I suppose this may be blasphemous, but The Hours made me pick up and finish Mrs. Dalloway.

The Hours follows the entwined lives of three women: a modern-day Clarissa Dalloway, a housewife reading Clarissa Dalloway in post-World-War II suburbia, and finally, Clarissa Dalloway's creator herself, Virginia Woolf.

Michael Cunningham's Pulitizer-Prize-winning novel is better than its movie adaptation--but the movie itself is about as good as movie adaptations get. Stephen Daldry has remained true to the source material and I doubt that fans of the novel will be disappointed. It is well-shot, well-written, well-scored, well-lit, well-designed, well-acted; all in all, a heart-breaker of a film, from start to finish.

Meryl Streep is luminous (but isn’t she always? What can’t that woman do, seriously?) and I feel like she really gets the essence of Clarissa, both Dalloway and Vaughn down…she flits from scene to scene like a butterfly, and yet when she breaks down, she breaks down. She gets the lightness and quiet despair of the novel better than either Moore or Kidman.

Julianne Moore is gorgeous (but isn’t she always?) and she pulls off the fragile, extremely depressed Laura Brown well. I was slightly terrified watching her, because throughout the majority of the film, she truly conveys the sense that she is a woman on the verge of collapse; that at any given moment, she could shatter into a million little pieces, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put her together again.

Nicole Kidman tries. She tries really hard (for Nicole Kidman), and while I don’t think she completely succeeds, I think she went farther than where she usually goes, and I think that is why the Academy gave her Best Actress. Kidman gives a good performance; it just happens to be a performance that is somewhat stereotypical. She gets the very British dryness of Woolf down, but can’t grasp the passion and feeling of Woolf, not even in the train station scene. Still, Nicole Kidman tries and her effort is worth watching.

The supporting cast is very solid; surprisingly Claire Danes did not annoy me (I usually can’t stand her), and Ed Harris as Richard was also terrifying to watch, because he was so clearly on the edge and half-way gone. It is the boy Richard, played by Jack Rovello, though, who is astounding.

The look of the film is gorgeous--the lighting is superb and the color palette seems muted but is pleasing to the eye. The most visually stunning scene is unfortunately already given away in the trailer--Julianne Moore lying on a bed, river water rushing up to engulf her--but it is still great to watch. Philip Glass's soundtrack is haunting, and like other reviewers said before me, it ties the three narratives neatly together.

I want to say that overall, the film adaptation of The Hours was delicate--and I am well aware of the negative feminist connotation of the word--and yet it was delicate. It was delicate but razor-edged all at once, as its original source material is.

For a movie which deals so heavily with depression and suicide, it isn't a depressing experience--it is extraordinarily sad and poignant, but it is also clear-cut and truthful--The Hours, like Mrs. Dalloway, shows life, in all its fragility, in all its heartache, in all its light, in all its darkness, and in all its beauty.

Ahead of Her Hour

2009-04-06T13:26:00.000-07:00

Virginia Woolf recognized the importance of having a voice in one's own development, even if others challenge, disrespect or disagree with that voice, and apparently, whether or not that voice was at its most sane. "The Hours" is an applaudable performance, in that it successfully magnified that key interest of Virginia's. I take a departure from my peers' reviews when I say, that I feel the character of Laura Brown is a very true representation of a Woolfian character, and she really possesses a shared quality so often displayed in many of Woolf's novel characters: the need to self-assert because we can and therefore, we should.

What means a good film doesn't mean having virtuous characters. Nicole Kidman's Woolf mirrored the real Virginia Woolf in that she speaks to a greater cause, human dignity. You need to assert yourself against those who try to stifle or belittle the value you see in the choices you wish to make for yourself. When Leonard first confronts Kidman's Woolf and dismisses her plea to return to London, she says, "They [the doctors] don't speak for my interests [...] this is my right, the right of every human being." Leonard moved the press outside of London for the sake of Virginia's health, and now she wishes to relocate despite that gesture. This scene is the vindication of "I will get the flowers myself" or "I will bake a cake," because here we finally have a purely verbal form of self-assertion. Perhaps the most controversial and paradoxical representation of self-assertion in the film is suicide: the ultimate consequence of living the life you wish for yourself, may mean for you, the ending of that life.

Laura Brown continues this circular thought when she ponders, "What does it mean to regret when you have no choice?" At the end of the film, Brown brings us to the root of self-interest by examining it, proving that self-assertion often serves under the guise of selfishness, and that may be ugly and you may not like it, but it must be accepted for what it is because it is human. In essence, you may not have been able to live with the kind of choices I've made, but it is because of those choices I have been able to live with myself. Laura Brown choose not to live with false comforts, as Clarissa Vaughn has been doing.

In response to the melodrama that Brown brings to the film. I think filming Laura Brown as melodramatic is very true to Woolf's own approach to her characters: the internal drama that exists in all of us and that she wrote so uncannily. Very often, Woolf will have her characters leave us off with those one-liners, only to return to that character and never address that suspenseful thought again.

*While I was watching Kidman pace in the train station scene, there was something very familiar about her wardrobe, and I realized Burberry's SP09 line suggested some of that depression chic.

"There Was A Guy..."

2009-04-06T12:05:00.000-07:00

I was having beers with a few of my buddies at a table in the corner of a towny bar last July, as we commiserated about how our jobs prevented us from doing that sort of thing more often, when I first heard a strangely compelling alternative rock song come soaring out of the jukebox: "This monkey's gone to heaven, this monkey's gone to heaven..." I turned to my friend Mike, who had put the song on, and asked who the band was. "It's the Pixies, man," he said. A few days later, I went out and bought the album Doolittle, and it remained in heavy rotation in my car for the rest of the summer.

I mention this because I have a similar feeling about that song as I do about The Waves. The lyrics of "Monkey Gone to Heaven" appear enigmatic at first, just a series of images: "There was a guy/An underwater guy who controlled the sea/Got killed by ten millions pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey." Now, it may seem obvious that Frank Black is writing about the environment here, yet it is the way he put it ("an underwater guy...got killed by...sludge") that caused the meaning to elude me for a long time; it was the simplicity of it that stifled my analysis. It's the same way that The Waves continues to cause problems for me in my reading. Here's Rhoda's take on the dinner party in Percival's honor:

Strangers keep on coming, people we shall never see again, people who brush us disagreeably with their familiarity, their indifference, and the sense of a world continuing without us. We cannot sink down, we cannot forget our faces. Even I who have no face, who make no difference when I come in (Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces), flutter unattached, without anchorage anywhere, unconsolidated, incapable of composing any blankness or continuity or wall against which these bodies move. It is because of Neville and his misery. The sharp breath of his misery scatters my being. Nothing can settle; nothing can subside. (88)

I think that there are several ways to approach this passage. We have no need to go to the dictionary for any of the words, and the sentences, though lengthy, are constructed plainly. We can look at the broad scope: Woolf is trying to convey the awkward discomfort or even melancholy that first arises in a mixed social setting, being forced to put on a congenial face and interact with people amiably, even though all parties know that they are merely exchanging formalities. It isn't hard to pick up on this aspect of the reading. Yet, when we examine each of the clauses on their own, Rhoda's emotion becomes abstract and indefinable: "Even I who have no face, who make no difference when I come in (Susan and Jinny change bodies and faces), flutter unattached, without anchorage anywhere..." Here, there are only glimpses of finite, understandable language; we know that Rhoda feels removed from Susan and Jinny, both of whom she perceives to be well adjusted: they "change" their appearances at the party to fit the setting. But the first clause, "Even I who have no face" can, to me, go one of two ways. Either Rhoda feels that she does not have the "face" suitable for a party, meaning she cannot feign enthusiasm among acquaintances, or she may mean that she feels diminished, faceless in the sense that she is overlooked, unrecognized. "Nothing can settle; nothing can subside," seems (and I believe that I can only say "seems") to reflect her restlessness, her discomfort in this environment.

It is not in spite of these complexities, but because of these complexities, that this passage (and indeed, much of the book) is bizarrely tangible. Woolf isn't writing literal events, she is contemplating emotions (the same way, I think, James Ramsay had the urge to stab his father, but didn't). I think back to that night at the bar now that I consider where Rhoda is coming from. There were certainly moments when shooting the bull about our jobs, or the summer Olympics, or about the Mets' bullpen, or retelling stories from our past would dry up. And, though friends, we'd each sip our beers or adjust our caps or chuckle uncomfortably. Although Rhoda's speech is ambiguous and complex, it is perhaps one of the best attempts in prose that I have read which seeks to defamiliarize something as common as a social setting, and truly flesh out the initial feeling of discomfort that many of us understand but have never tried to define in such precise terms.

It seems that I find strange parallels in my life sometimes. Last semester, my roommate, an avid hip-hop fan, said, "Dude, I have no clue what this song is about, but it sounds sweet." On Saturday, he came into my room and said, "Dude, you're still reading that?" Thus, I relate the Pixies' song to Woolf's book because both are stupefyingly simple, yet rich and puzzling; every time I listen to that song, or read the same passage of The Waves over again, I notice something I hadn't the time before. The same way that the riff of "Monkey Gone to Heaven" is a straightforward E-Fsharp-A-D, Woolf's diction is direct and elementary. Yet, the simplicity of each impeded my understanding of them. It's been a painstaking trudge through The Waves for me, but not because I can't read it. Beneath the simplicity of the language, it takes care on the reader's part to decipher the intricate emotions that Woolf is handling.

"All the world's a stage..."

2009-04-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

“Although it was so brilliantly fine–the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques–Miss Brill was glad that she had decided on her fur. The air was motionless, but when you opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip, and now and again a leaf came drifting–from nowhere, from the sky”

How exquisitely Woolfian of Katherine Mansfield to begin her short-story, “Miss Brill,” by not only comparing the air to a crisp, bright drink but by introducing her heroine by her marital status and intention – a la Mrs. Dalloway. Or, as “Miss Brill” was published in 1920, perhaps Woolf was the mime, choosing to begin “Street Haunting” and Mrs. Dalloway in these veins. As woman modernists, outward shows of friendly camaraderie and private rivalry aside, Woolf and Mansfield are both interested in a similar quandary. Both attempt, through the crises of Mrs. Dalloway and Miss Brill, to illustrate isolation. Through the liveliness of a meticulously plotted party and the buzz that comes with the inauguration of the Season, both writers examine the malaise that accompanies the realization of remoteness.

Miss Brill, exhilarated by the quickening pulse of the public gardens at the start of the French Season, dons her beloved impish fur and perches on her usual bench to observe and comment on the passers-by. Like my Aunt Marian, who enjoys nothing more than keeping a quiet commentary of those who parade down the beach in various states of dishabille (Oh, Di! Take a look at this one!), Miss Brill quietly passes judgment on the strangers who move around her. A lonely woman at her core, Miss Brill establishes false relationships: her fur, her pupils, her geriatric. She fantasizes that her class would be interested in her Sunday tradition and that the old man she reads the newspaper to is dazzled by Miss Brill, the secret weekend actress. While she sits imagining these amicable relations, Miss Brill, stationary in both her pose and existence, casts a discerning eye on the strangers who pass her by. “How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play.” Suddenly, Miss Brill’s Sunday is a matinee and she quickly reasons that she herself plays a part. She is an actress, and part of a cast. She belongs. The band nearly brings her to tears as she imagines they are part of an ensemble whose upwelling notes will lead to a song-and-dance number.

Poor Miss Brill. No sooner has she concocted a delusion of unity and connectedness than it is devastated by her hero and heroine whose conversation she can hear. The lovers turn the tables on Miss Brill. Now, the critic meets criticism. In mocking tones, they scoff at her pathetic appearance and her presence among them. Immediately after finding solidarity with the strollers in the gardens, she is faced with true alienation. Not only is she ignored, but she is scorned by the hero and heroine whose appearance she admired so much.

Mansfield’s Miss Brill, like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, not only wrestles with her own identity, but moreover, perhaps, with the role her identity plays in the lives of others. Miss Brill, accompanied to the park only by her stuffed fur (“Little rogue!”), grows restless with her silence. She yearns to be acknowledged. She yearns for a part. Unmarried, Miss Brill thinks only about her pupils and the sickly old man. Needless to say, it doesn’t sound like the woman has many friends. When she synthesizes a unified world, a structure which she herself helps to support – a play – she is momentarily fulfilled by her role as actress. After the comforting epiphany, the snide comments of the lovers snap her into reality. Miss Brill is then forced to acknowledge her separateness.

In the same way that Mrs. Dalloway attempts to assert herself as hostess by presiding over a dinner-party congregation, Miss Brill inserts herself into the lives of others. By commenting, she silently assumes a role and wields a quiet power. Similarly, Clarissa attempts to solve her issues with her own atomization and privacy, by hosting a party. Clarissa’s dinner party, for her, becomes a sort of play. She carefully assembles the players and designs the set. She buys the flowers and mends her costume. She constructs communication and connection. When the party comes into fruition and the curtain goes up, Clarissa is made to cast off her expectations. Septimus’ suicide, like the jarring comments of Miss Brill’s lovers, infiltrates the diorama and Clarissa retreats to resolve, for herself, the problem of alienation. She is forced to acknowledge human alienation in her neighbor's solitary room and she is forced to interpret the death of a stranger.

The Wolf in Woolf

2009-04-03T19:47:00.000-07:00

I ask you to once again peer into the lives of George and Martha of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The film begins with a couple, the couple, exiting from a party. The conversation of the couple is barely audible but appears genial and familiar at a distance. As the couple approaches, the volume is increased and the conversation is heard. Their apparent light and familiar tones are perceptibly exhausted and partially biting. They enter their home and Martha peers around her and her husband’s cluttered home. She says “What a dump!” and invites her husband to find meaning in the exclamation. Well, not quite invite, Martha prods her husband to tell her “What’s that from?” He dismisses the question and we are left like Martha to find meaning in the “dump.” We, or maybe just me, search to find what is so important about the “dump” and seek to find the reflection of an answer in their home. Every inch of their house is covered with something. No surface is completely visible. Even the radiator has a plank or counter over it which serves as a place for their knick-knacks. Every table is crowded with glasses, dishes, laundry, books, and miscellaneous objects. There is baggage everywhere and not just material baggage but emotional baggage too. Martha has daddy issues which add to George’s insecurities as a man, as an academic, and as her husband. Her father is the president of the university and is an invisible yet powerfully present force. Martha uses him as a weapon against her husband and other men. She also uses her father as the model man against which she compares other men, often times the men fall short.

On the other hand, if we dismiss the exclamation “What a dump,” we are like George and choose not to humor Martha in her little antics. We progress to the bedroom where, as Roxie beautifully recaptures in her post, the couple is seen as loving and playful. We see the last glimpse of the loving married couple before they are put to bed and before the entrance of their guests, the new couple. We have heard foreboding utterances and a few snide remarks prior to this bed scene but the new characters that arise from the bed give new energy to their bitterness and viciousness to each other. The couple that we see throughout the majority of the film is this couple. They undertake great pains and care to ridicule each other. Martha and George engage in a night-long game with the new couple, Nick and Honey. Martha and George find new ways to best each other and use the new couple for their gains.

Nevertheless, as dawn looms and the couples have bested each other for the night, the couples retire to their corners to review the night’s games in better light. Martha and George are done with Nick and Honey and the new day is fast approaching so they must leave. Martha and George remain to find comfort in each other and their feats from their mean and spiteful games. They find solace in the sarcastic, yet welcomingly caustic, niche of a home that they have created. With the light of day, Martha and George become the loving couple who was put to bed before the night games commenced. They are more sympathetic to each other. George says “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He tries to console Martha with the song she has been singing and enjoying all night. Her response is thought provoking. She says, “I am.” The audience wonders if the Virginia Woolf reference is an actual reference to the literary figure or to the boogeyman (wolf) or to their academic lifestyle.

Considering the reference to Virginia Woolf, one may wonder if the characters of Virginia Woolf are representative of Virginia, Leonard, Vanessa, and Clive(*skim Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. USA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1974). Martha could be a character who has similarities toVirginia Woolf. Both are gregarious, sociable, and intelligent women who are not really able to have children. Leonard Woolf was attentive and bowing to Virginia. We know George plays games with Martha and entertains the guests, though he is exhausted. Honey, Nick’s mousey wife, could be an auxiliary character like Vanessa in Virginia's life. Nick could be Clive who thinks that he is more intelligent than he really is and is clandestinely misogynistic in his attempts to profit in life. The relationship between George and Martha or Virginia and Leonard could be an example of an atypical marriage. They do love each other but instead of candy-sweet remarks to one another all the time and children they substitute caustic remarks tied with endearing nicknames and a phantom child.

Still, let us look at the last two possible references of the song before we decide if the literary figure trumps the boogeyman or academic explanation. As Kathleen Kane mentions in her post, the reference may be academically centered. Rather than big bad wolf, the song substitutes Virginia Woolf. The substitution has a similar rhyme, differing in the addition of one syllable. It also maintains the wolf with differently spelled “Woolf” that is apparent to the literarily aware, or academics; therefore, the change and joke hinges on wolf-Woolf which can refer to a menacing animal or to a prominent female literary figure. In this case, if Martha is afraid of Virginia Woolf she could be scared of this hinge, the scary and academic where illusions and reality are restlessly muddled or tested. In the history field the, the historians, like George, create stories of the past and of past historical figures. They take pieces of exhumed fact and couple them with assumptions of how things were. In the field of biology, the biologist creates a past and pieces together the present to the past in cladograms and phylogenies. In the lives of Martha (daughter of the president of the university) and George (a professor in the history department rather than the history department), illusion and truth have no definite boundaries:

Martha- Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference.
George- No,but we must carry on as though we did.
Martha- Amen.

The characters get lost in their games, their creations, and their academic lifestyles. They grope through critically acclaimed films, quotes from acclaimed plays, and get lost in their literature. They may even be like the big white rat with beady red eyes that George says is a fitting description for Martha’s father or a description fitting for Honey’s father. They may be smaller rats running the maze of life as Martha’s father or Honey’s father constructs it.

George- You take the trouble to construct a civilization…to build a society based on the principle of…principle…you endeavor to make communicable sense out of natural order, morality out of the unnatural disorder of man’s mind…you bring men to the saddest of all points…to the point where there is something to lose…then all at once, through all the music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes Dies Irae. And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? Up yours.

Could this be a comment on society? Their marriage is not what one expects from a typical marriage. Although they are learned individuals, they are not models of sophistication or civility. From the opening scene, they appear to be civil and genteel but, like Nick who is chastised by Martha for dealing too much in appearances, we must not trust appearances. Things are not that clear cut. Perhaps the significance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is not that definite either.

Although Edward Albee tries to explain the significance of the title, his explanation seems incomplete:

having beer one night, and I saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf…who’s afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical university, intellectual joke.(Paris Review interview with Edward Albee http://www.theparisreview.com/media/4350_ALBEE.pdf).

I am left with no definite conclusion, except that the reference is for all of the aforementioned reasons. Despite this befuddlement, I think the film is fantastic. The actors employ an emotionally unstable environment that functions on dysfunction and tantalizingly portrayed raw emotion. The audience feels the chillingly warm embrace of anger, lowered expectations, bitterness, resentment, and discontentment as the characters open their home, secrets, and vulnerabilities to us. Every word is enacted with the utmost feeling, save when George tells Martha to show Honey the euphemism because ironically bathroom or lavatory is too dirty a word to utter. Plus, I've always enjoyed the late 50s to 60s saying "Come off it." Twilight Zone uses a form of it in The Afterhours when characters say "Climb off it, Marsha." It is similar to the line in Albee's play, "Come off it, Martha."
See Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf asap.

Who's Afraid of Bourgeois Monotony?

2009-04-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

Like Kristen and Roxie, I too was drawn in by the eerie reverberation of the title Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a film adaptation of a play (which I have not seen) by the same name. Most practically, this is because the characters' repetition of the ghost-possessed-child phrase is the only direct allusion to Woolf in the entire film. As Roxie writes, Nichols focuses more on the philosophical dilemmas with which Woolf challenges us, rather than on references and parallels to specific texts. Nonetheless, the professorial professor George, and his equally cynical and sardonic wife Martha, make for a bizarre version of Clarissa and Richard Dalloway. This violently dysfunctional modern couple presages the postmodern couple of Sam Mendes' American Beauty, in which Kevin Spacey reminds us that some of us are too worn down to even bother with the traditional facade anymore. Indeed, the whole film seems to bring the existential crises that Woolf tackles to the surface, as Nichols infuses the scenes with dark lighting, and the soundtrack with plaintive classical guitar.

George conceals his fears of impotence and castration by confronting others with intellectual mind games. He attempts to assert his superiority with his brain, because he cannot do so with his bank account, or presumably with his sexual prowess, as his wife constantly cuckolds him. As with the absentminded Richard strolling in the park, constructing grumpy neighbor laws against horseplay in his head, George lives so much of his life in his head that it is impossible to believe he has a heart. He even goes as far as to rehearse the precise tone, inflection, and body language with which he will hurt his wife by telling her that their son has died. Similarly, Martha expresses her disappointment with George's relatively small salary so ferociously that one can hear in her tone of voice the yearning of Clarissa Dalloway to be at the top and center of her social circle.

I would like to emphasize one aspect of the film a bit more strongly than my classmates--the role of alcohol. If our actors did not actually imbibe some "Bergen" of their own as part of some pleasantly sacrificial method acting routine, they certainly deserve the Oscars for which the entire credited cast was apparently nominated (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061184/trivia). Liquor serves as the perfect metaphor for the permeation of reality into fiction, and fiction into reality. Our characters spend nearly the entire film in a drunken haze, as the saying has it, to forget their troubles, but instead end up revealing their deepest insecurities, and confronting each other with the harshest truths imaginable. In our attempts to escape reality, we only drive ourselves further into insanity, into illusions, which our nature prevents us from maintaining for very long. The characters make the inevitable re-entry into reality that much more striking and terrible for themselves. We are reminded of Raymond Carver's injunction against drinking and thinking.

As with the children's song of which the film's title is a mini satire, the answer to the question ends up being "We all are." Even as children, we develop Freudian defense mechanisms such as sarcasm to counter the feelings, people, and experiences we find unpleasant. While we are unlikely to encounter any literal claws and fangs in our urban setting, Woolf's modernist dilemma knocks patiently on our door.

[Clever Title]

2009-04-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

“And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self–analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference.” (A Room of One’s Own, 51)

Sometimes I forget that the really great book I’m reading was written by someone who probably had a few bad days. It’s hard for me to imagine that works of literature do not just make themselves appear in perfect form, but that they are created by other people—people who are talented, creative, and patient. It’s seems absurd that someone like Virginia Woolf had to deal with things like writer’s block, or any of those other frustrating interruptions that other not-so-talented, not-always-so-creative, and extremely impatient people like me deal with on a daily basis. That being said, this quote from A Room of One’s Own reminds me that even the greatest novels are not miraculous, neat packages of literary perfection, as they may seem to be. Most likely, Virginia Woolf did not just wake up on a Tuesday morning and say to herself, “I think it would be rather pleasant to write a work of literary genius today. And then perhaps I’ll have tea and do some gardening.” Really, it’s no mystery that writing well is difficult. So, if I’m having this must trouble writing a coherent blog, I can only imagine what someone like Virginia Woolf, or Jane Austen, or William Shakespeare must have felt like when they were writing their masterpieces.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf remarks that, “...to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire.” This is a four-hundred word blog that cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be called a work of genius (though perhaps my mother would say otherwise...she’s very encouraging). And even now as I try desperately to finish this assignment in peace, there are interruptions. I have a room of my own, which is a good start according to Woolf. The problem is that in the room of my own, there are also two loud roommates. And a television. And facebook. And I’m pretty sure the “world’s notorious indifference” is just outside my window in the form of a particularly thunderous lawn mower. I’m glad that we read A Room of One’s Own, because Woolf reminded me to appreciate the person behind the writing as an actual human being who struggled with normal, human interruptions. Occasionally I find myself separating the writing from the writer, because like Woolf said, geniuses like Austen and Shakespeare are difficult to find within their work. But they did actually write them. And if I want to call myself an English major, I really shouldn’t forget that.

“The Hours”

2009-03-31T16:20:00.000-07:00

“The Hours” focuses on three women who are secretly unhappy in their lives: Virginia Woolf the author, Clarissa a lesbian throwing a party for an ex-lover with AID’s , and Laura, a lonely housewife. All of these roles are played by great actresses including Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep. One of the underlying focuses of “The Hours” is suicide. We all know that Woolf committed suicide and that is depicted in the film. But all of the women experience or encounter suicide in some way throughout the film. The characters are also related to Woolf by the novel Mrs.Dalloway:
1923 was the year that Woolf wrote the book, Laura reads it so she won’t succumb to boredom and Richard (Clarissa’s ex-lover) jokingly calls her Mrs. Dalloway which is also ironic because Clarissa was Mrs. Dalloway’s first name. “The Hours” is a great movie that shows how important it is to be true to ourselves, that mental illness can be passed down and that love is blind.

Nicole Kidman is made to look like Woolf with a prosthetic nose, mousy-brown hair and plain clothes. Kidman’s version of Woolf is a great and albeit true one. Woolf is intelligent yet somewhat cold and snobbish. Woolf seems to want to be left alone but when she her sister and her sister’s children come to visit she seems to enjoy the company. But it does get a little weird when Woolf kisses her sister. Woolf was a lesbian but maybe she was just trying to seek comfort and solace with someone. It was clear she wasn’t happy: she repeatedly told Richard she hated Richmond and was lonely. When Woolf commits suicide by filling her pockets with rocks and drowning herself it is a sad and short scene.

Laura, played by Julianne Moore is a secretly sad and lonely housewife who reads “Mrs. Dalloway” so she wont succumb to boredom. Laura looks like any other housewife but she doesn’t feel like one. She’s pregnant with her second child and is always with her clingy son Richie. When her friend Kitty comes over to tell her that she is sick Laura kisses her. Here we see one of the reasons why Laura is unhappy. She is secretly gay and has to hide her feelings. Coming-out in the 1950’s was simply unexceptable back then. The ideal woman was supposed to stay home, cook and clean for her husband and raise her children. Richie also seems to view everything about his mother, so it seems to effect him. After the kiss Laura goes to a hotel to commit suicide by taking pills. But she later returns home and throws the birthday party for her son. It’s a good thing that she didn’t commit suicide but it’s sad that she has to go on living a lie. This is similar to what Woolf says in the film: “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

Clarissa is a lesbian living in the modern day. She has a daughter that is of college-age played by Claire Danes who joins her when she is preparing Richard’s party. Richard appears ravaged by AID’s: he is shockingly thin and depressed. Although both are gay, both Richard and Clarissa dated in college. Clarissa seems to still love Richard, and it is evident by her affection and kindness toward him. Also when Clarissa says, “That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other,” we can see that she is thinking of what life would be like without Richard. But Richard later succumbs to his depression and kills himself. We later find out that he is Laura’s son. He believes that his illness was passed on to him. But what illness he is talking about? It could be that he thinks that he inherited being gay from his mother. Or his mental illness, as he is suicidal and his mother was too. Although she came back from the hotel Laura later left her family after giving birth to her second child. When she hears of her son’s death she thinks that maybe that was a horrible mistake.

I think that if she had seen it Woolf would’ve been proud of “The Hours”. It did not paint a false version of her and it discusses the message she wanted to live her life by. Which is being true to oneself. -- Baha Awadallah

The Transience of Things

2009-03-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

I once heard a term: mono no aware. It means recognizing the transience of things and the bittersweet sadness at their passing.

It’s the sort of theme inspires rainbows, the last days of summer, and that farcical “bag scene” in American Beauty. Since I discovered this little phrase, it has been my favorite theme, and I look for it everywhere- in books, films and even in the people I meet.

In all my reading, though, no where do I find this theme of transience more prevalent than in the works of Virginia Woolf. It is why, considering all her works as a whole, she is my favorite writer. And the work that I believe is most exemplary of this theme is in Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse.

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. –Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

It’s one of my favorite last lines I’ve ever read and, if you don’t take my word for it, the American Book Review lists it as the tenth best last lines in all of literature: http://americanbookreview.org/PDF/100_Best_Last_Lines_from_Novels.pdf.

In a conversation I had with Julie Crosby, professor of English at Columbia University and director of the Women’s Project (the very woman who produced Freshwater), she summed up one reason to her what the ending was so meaningful to her: “One of my favorite moments is near the end of To the Lighthouse. I take such comfort in Woolf’s idea that the artistic visions of women can be realized with such deep satisfaction.”

The reason, though, why it is my favorite line is that, up until this point, Lily has suffered the “extreme fatigue” of life; she has seen the aging of children, the deaths of people she cares about, and withstood innumerable failures. The beauty of that one singular moment in Lily’s life is at the cost of all the hours, days and months that came before it. And even though her painting will one day be “junk in someone’s attic,” Lily acknowledges the value of what she has accomplished and literally sees her “vision” through her painting. She achieves something that even her male counterparts, Mr. Tansley and Mr. Ramsay, who are plagued with Thoreau’s quiet desperation, have not done. It is what all of us strive for- a moment of being, in which we experience our personhood and our art (whatever it might be) in relation to the world. What’s more is that Lily is able to express that in her painting and, like Woolf, in her words.

I know in my life, I live, if for nothing else, in anticipation of these moments. And while probability is against me, and I may never achieve “my vision,” I am still grateful for the worthwhile occasion when I am able to experience a version of that vision through remarkable characters like Lily and in learning about great writers like Virginia Woolf.

Amanda

Woolf and West

2009-03-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

Rebecca West—could that possibly have been her real name? It is far too awesome. No, she would’ve had to ride a horse and carry a holstered gun to be Rebecca West. Or she would’ve had to float down 5^th Ave in monochromatic, impeccably crafted clothing from wool coat down to unmentionables. Nope, she was neither of these people. She was Cicely Isabel Fairfield, writer, critic, person. Now who is Evadne? Show me that woman.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved reading West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony.” It made my blood boil over with hatred for the imperial mamma’s boy, George. I loved the slippery and strong Evadne. Those characters flawlessly represent the struggle between husband and wife, colonizer and colonized—a tasty comparison. But the key word here is “flawlessly.” These characters are not realistic. Evadne is quasi-immortal, seemingly drowned by her husband but still beating him home. Furthermore, she is unphased by all this violence. She caresses him as he climbs in bed. A little much, no? Even Sally in Mrs. Dalloway is not that irrepressible.

Ah, but we never meet Evadne. No, we meet George’s idea of her. Here is the horse I’ve beaten before: men’s mystical perception of women. Septimus and Peter think Clarissa and Rezia can save them; George thinks Evadne has corrupted his soul, that he needs an absolution from the church. He confesses that he wants “a child’s God, an immense arm coming down from the hills and lifting him to a kindly bossom” (a.k.a. his mama). West and Woolf grapple with this same issue: men’s oppressive expectations of women. But in Mrs. Dalloway, we see beyond these expectations. When Clarissa and Peter meet after years of estrangement, we see inside Peter’s head, where Clarissa can make him suffer like no other human being. Then we see inside Clarissa’s, where her need for Peter’s approval renders her somewhat pathetic. Woolf does not leave us with the inflated perception of Clarissa. West, though, gives us only the male gaze. We can only see Evadne as a mysterious, cat-like porpoise thing.

Though Woolf and West were contemporaries, “Indissoluble Matrimony” came before Mrs. Dalloway. It was not influenced by the groundbreaking Mrs. D. West’s characters would be much more relatable if the narration had woven through different psyches the way Woolf’s narration does--perhaps West kicked herself in the pants when Mrs. D was published. Or maybe she didn’t. Side-by-side these texts are wonderful. We have West saying “Yeah, just try and repress us. We can swim better than you.” Then we have Woolf saying, “Ouch, boys, that hurts.” Both are true.

Martha, the big bad Woolf

2009-03-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

Watching, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” I incessantly looked for reasons for its alluding title. All the while, stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton fought ferociously, insulting each other cunningly as husband and wife, George and Martha. They are a captivating couple, whom, disregard manners or politeness and expose their destructive marriage to their unsuspecting guests and film viewers.
One review claims both characters are, from the start, equally malicious towards each other, while I found myself sympathizing with the brooding Burton, who, though desperately trying to ignore his wife’s awful stabs, eventually gives into and becomes quite engaged in her harmful games and mockery. He is an associate professor of history, a title that shames poor Martha, for she is the daughter of the president of the university he works at; she and her father were both expecting much more from George, but just look at the lazy slouch he’s become!
Walking into their cramped, cluttered home, inebriated Martha complains immediately. “What a dump!” she says, forcing George to tell her which movie that line is from. “I don’t know, Martha”, he says, but she yells and demands, as they make their way upstairs. They’ll be having company soon, she says, and suddenly a young, well-built professor and his “mousy,” waiflike wife arrive—they begin drinking. “Mousy,” which she is soon deemed by George, orders Bourbons; she becomes more giddy as the night wears on—Martha becomes more flirtatious towards her blonde guest, naming George’s shortcomings with a raspy snarl. As I watched, I grew tired, as did the first reviewer-- for, where was this all going? I felt like “Mousy”, in a way, dizzied and exhausted-- spun around by Burton’s unpredictable character. I chose to pause the movie fifty minutes before the ending and to finish it the next day. I slept on it, if I may, anticipating greatly the ending of this very strange, but fiery film.

Taylor and Burton are an incredible pair, and this is not surprising; apparently, they’d married in 1964, two years before the release of the film. Yet, as, in reality, they were falling in love with each other—were, I assume, happy newlyweds, their portrayal of a failed marriage is shockingly poignant. I returned to the film the next night, and as their night continued before me, each character, with the encouragement of liquor, exposed their deepest, most shamed secrets. We learn that “Mousy” had a terminated pregnancy; soon after, as Martha talks of her own son with such engulfing love, “Mousy” screams and cries, “I want a baby!” And finally, Martha is broken down by George, who tells her their own son never was—shakes her from her comfortable denial, or insanity, which he sometimes shares. Was Martha’s pregnancy terminated as well? Nothing in this film is explicit, which, I believe, is the reason one can’t seem to free themselves from it afterwards. The jingle “Whose afraid of the big bad woolf?” was mistaken for “Whose afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—This is not only a funny coincidence. Martha, who sings this eerie tune at moments throughout the night, is dealing with her own insanity—which she acknowledges at times, saying, how could George love me? Virginia Woolf, as we know, had spouts of insanity-- at times heard voices, and was put in rest homes by worried friends and family. Woolf also grieved over her inability to have children; Martha grieves over her loss of a child, or the child that never really was. Perhaps, Martha really is afraid of Virginia Woolf, of becoming suicidal Woolf. While this is all unclear, there is, undoubtedly, a reason for the daunting mention of Woolf.

Party Games, Upgraded

2009-03-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

The 1966 film adaptation of Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, begins with a long, pan-out camera shot during the initial credits. The scene is quiet and serene as a middle-aged couple walks home in the dark. The credits fade and the film blends genres to resemble a play as the couple flicks the light switch of their living room to represent the beginning of a scene. However, this aspect of a play is present within a movie, so the lens takes the viewer right into the scene. Martha's throaty voice yells, "What a dump!" and the viewer is thrust into a two hour long emotional tug-of-war.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton play Martha and George, a married couple who host a small get together that pushes everyone involved to the brink of a break down when paired with psychological games and endless rounds of drinks. Kathleen's blog provides an excellent and thorough synopsis of the film so I'll try to stay away from summary to present a commentary.

Filmed in black- and-white, director Mike Nichols uses a camera technique that gives the sense of an amateur home video or a mock documentary (think of the extreme close ups of Michael's face as he makes a desperate announcement in The Office). This blurring between Hollywood film and a home video mirrors the the blurring between truth and lies, as well as objective and subjective reality within the movie. Martha and George declare something only to contradict themselves a moment later. While I don't want to give away any spoilers, I must admit that I enjoyed realizing that nothing is what it seems in this film and discovering that the viewer is yet another player in Martha and George's game.

The movie left me with numerous questions since I found it surprisingly complex. Is Martha a miserable person while George simply enjoys being miserable, or are they both rotten, miserable people? Does this movie document the moment that Martha and George "snap" or is this just a typical night with its typical scenes that occur regardless of who is present? Can Martha or George triumph over one another when they view reality as a malleable thing, or as a game with an endless supply of "Make Your Own Rule" cards?

The film showcases excellent performances by its leading couple. Taylor thoroughly dedicated herself to the role; the wikipedia gods informed me that she gained 30 pounds to become Martha, who is described as "frumpy" and "thick-hipped" throughout the movie. Though Taylor would be more successful at looking frumpy if she took up the role now, her transformation is drastic when compared to how she looked in Cleopatra or even The Sandpiper, which Taylor and Burton starred in only a year prior to the release of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Both actors adapted gestures and mannerisms that enhance their characters; Taylor's yelling and wild eyes make Martha seem vulgar while Burton's slumped shoulders and side glances reflect George's sense of personal failure.

I can't imagine many actors pulling off the complex and intimate relationship of Martha and George besides a pair that has worked together in previous roles. The dynamic between Taylor and Burton's Martha and George is impressively realistic. For instance, Martha accusingly asks George why he didn't put any ice into her drink when the couple is laying on their bed during the first scene. After he mumbles that she always eats her ice, Martha rolls over George, reaches into his drink, and drops the retrieved ice cubes into her own glass with a hand now dripping with alcohol. This moment is executed so flawlessly that, paired with the intimate camera technique, the viewer feels that Martha and George have been together for years and, though their marriage is dysfunctional, they share a deep emotional bond. Of course, it might help that Taylor and Burton were actually married off-screen. Twice.

As for the reference to Virginia Woolf, I have to admit that I don't get it. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" is an alteration of "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Woolf." I see that the this movie makes a jab at academics who view themselves as intellectually superior though they might be more ruthless and primitive than the average person, but I doubt whether this joke actually contributes anything to the film. I found more connection between the characters' inability to name and know anything with T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," rather than finding a connection between the film and any of Woolf's works. Perhaps Woolf was regarded in a negative light during the '60s due to her association with stigmatized feminism. Perhaps this "joke" is simply in the same vein as describing something as "kafka-esque." Regardless, I found that the three times that this joke was forcibly brought up were the only moments of the film that I disliked.

Overall, I recommend this film with much enthusiasm but advise viewers not to distract themselves by attempting to find a connection between the movie and Virginia Woolf.

Woolf vs. Milton; Round 1

2009-03-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

“The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing sed,
But that two-handed engine at the door,
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.”
-Milton, Lycidas 125-131

Isn’t it amusing that Milton’s poem that Virginia Woolf calls out by name in her critical essay A Room of One’s Own contains her last named in it? Of course, it is not referring to her on any level, be it that the poem was written nearly 150 years before Woolf was born. It is interesting though, that ‘grim Woolf’ here is reference to the Catholic Church.

Woolf, obviously opposed to the Church by her sexual views as well as her pronounced agnosticism. Yet, despite Milton’s speaking out against the corrupt bishops and other Church figures, Woolf takes it upon herself to poke fun at Milton in her essay. She does not go into too much terrible detail about why she wonders what word Milton had dare think of changing, but in the end, she does not classify him within her group of ‘androgynous’ writers.

Yet, Milton was an extremely politically active figure who commonly was a thorn in the side for many a bishop or king. Perhaps, his involvement deemed him too Christian, since he never thought of breaking away from the Church, only sticking to strong, Protestant beliefs. Yet, for someone who has been linked to Virgil and Homer, should not he be included within Woolf’s list of writers? Milton seems to just be getting the short end of the stick. Perhaps it is that he merely lived in a time when women’s rights were not in the collective, public consciousness. Then why does Shakespeare, who lived only a generation or two before Milton, get elevated to the highest in the pantheon? Perhaps it is that his true identity has remained shrouded in mystery or that his body of work is greater than Milton’s?

It’s all very debatable. Certainly, there is a case for both Milton and Shakespeare in that heavyweight match. Yet, just as Woolf strives to change the tempo of the novel and pursue a different lifestyle than was the norm, Milton, too, ruffles some feathers of his contemporaries. Maybe, just maybe, if they had met, Woolf would have warmed to Milton. Or at the very least, they’d have gotten into a great argument.

The Inheritance of Woolf (Good and Bad) in The Hours.

2009-03-26T20:22:00.000-07:00

When I finished watching Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, I was plagued by a feeling of ambivalence. Bookended by the image of Virginia Woolf’s slow and resolute tread into the River Ouse, the plot weaves in-and-out of the lives of three women: Woolf (Nicole Kidman) in 1923, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) in 1951 and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) in 2001. Switching off the television after the final scene and staring at the dark screen, I sat on the couch quietly deciding how I felt about the film. This was two weeks ago. I’m still trying to make that decision.

In the tradition of Mrs. Dalloway, the plot traces one day in the lives of Virginia (writing her masterpiece), Laura (reading Woolf’s masterpiece), and Clarissa (living Woolf’s masterpiece). Although the women live in different places and times, they struggle with similar issues and choices: art or obscurity, happiness or dissatisfaction, life or death. While I felt like I understood the creative quandaries of Virginia and Clarissa, perhaps because of my enrollment in the class and having read Mrs. Dalloway, I (like Pat) was frustrated with Laura Brown. Sure, she was unhappy. Sure, she felt trapped. Haven’t we all experienced the panicked pangs of displeasure? Do we all give up? No. Are we supposed to, according to Laura? While I do not agree with her decision and her later pseudo-redemption with her "I chose life" speech, I do understand her vital role in the plot. At least, for my own purposes. She is the example of the choice to live selfishly. While she chooses to live, she ruins those closest to her. I suppose the unanswered questions and the ambiguous functions which attach themselves to these characters is the very essence of the film.

Despite my frustration with Laura Brown, I was deeply interested in the broken relationship she had with her son, Richard, especially in light of current events. When I read that Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, had committed suicide last week, I instantly had an image of Richard Brown letting himself fall from his apartment window. The ensuing media-based scientific debates about a hereditary inclination to suicide made me think about the legacy that parents left their children: Laura’s to Richard and Leslie Stephen’s to his daughter Virginia. Laura’s abandonment, her figurative suicide, not only influences Richard’s life, but also his writing. He writes about her as if she killed herself – to him, she is dead. However, he does write about her, just as Woolf wrote about her father in To the Lighthouse. While we are never told whether or not Richard’s writing helped him come to terms with his mother’s desertion, his act of writing about his mother in an attempt to better understand her strikes a chord of resonance with Woolf’s writing that is both subtle and sincere.

Finally, I had huge issues with Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Woolf. According to The Academy, as Pat already mentioned, she must have done something right. However, I am discontented by her performance. While Kidman plays a manic writer very well, I can’t help but wonder if her depiction of Woolf is fair. Is that Virginia Woolf’s entire legacy? Having studied Woolf’s writing this past semester, I have come to know an immensely talented writer, who is as witty as she is staid. Kidman’s Woolf is a curmudgeon who saunters about the house seemingly thinking only of Mrs. Dalloway and her next opportunity to end it all. I was sorely disappointed. Where was the Woolf who wrote Freshwater? Where was the Woolf who dressed as an Abyssinian diplomat during the Dreadnought Hoax? The prosthetic nose and the highborn scowl donned by Kidman illustrate the common perception of the iconic Woolf – the feminist Brit writer who drowned herself. Kidman’s performance, while it shows glimmers of brilliance, such as in the scene with Leonard at the train station, is eclipsed by its homogeny of depression.

The One Where I Harp on Nicole Kidman's Accent in The Hours---for HOURS

2009-03-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

I was around thirteen years old when The Hours came out in theaters. It was conveniently rated PG-13, so there was nothing my mom could say when I begged her to take me to see it. I made a point of reading the book before I saw the movie and The Hours was one of the few films that I didn't have to say was better than the book. I loved them equally. I bought The Hours pretty soon after the DVD was released and when I lost my copy somewhere between Florida and New York, I promptly bought a digital version off of iTunes. The movie provided the background each time I opened Mrs. Dalloway and again when I wrote the paper. I feel like I know The Hours like the back of my hand, but every time I watch it, I notice something different. That doesn't mean that I don't have some major issues with the characters or the actors who played them.

Normally, I think that Nicole Kidman is an excellent actress. She somehow manages to make breathiness into a plausible character trait for every role she plays: Satine in Moulin Rouge--breathy because of consumption; Grace in The Others--breathy because she was dead; Ada in Cold Mountain--breathy because she's...Southern? But this doesn't really work when playing a real person. As a thirteen-year-old, I'm not sure I even knew who Virginia Woolf was and after seeing The Hours, I didn't know much more (She wrote. She killed herself. The end, right?). Once I actually started to study Woolf, however, and began to research her life, I discovered this, the last audio recording of Woolf in existence, on the BBC website. I was a more than a little surprised and disappointed to find that Kidman sounded nothing like Woolf. Sure, every actor doesn't have to sound like the person they're playing and, okay, maybe Kidman didn't have access to this recording (the site was last update in October of 2008), it is all about how believable they are as the character and we can't really use Woolf herself as a measuring-stick for Kidman's portrayal of Woolf and on and on. But this breathiness, that Kidman has brought to every role I've seen her in, distorts our perception of Woolf.

Go on and give that recording a listen. Woolf's voice alone is a pretty striking thing. To me, it sounds almost like every exagerrated, stereotypical impression of British snobbery that I've ever heard. That voice is the way we were encouraged to speak in my high school acting class, when first learning the British dialect. Woolf's voice isn't breathy at all, it's strong and clear and, in not giving the audience that impression, Kidman offers us a very one-sided portrayal of Woolf. By changing her voice, Kidman transforms Woolf from a strong woman (albeit one afflicted by mental illness) to one that is weak and vulnerable, like the dead bird Angelica wants to give a funeral for. For some people, The Hours may be the only glimpse of Woolf they ever get, and Kidman should've made it a good one--not turning Woolf into someone so melancholy and frail that one was almost glad to see her go.

There's also been a discussion about the character of Laura Brown (Julianne Moore). I don't find Laura admirable (like Justine), but I also don't find her irresponsible (like Pat). Or maybe I think that she's both of those things. Honestly, I didn't ever think much at all of Laura Brown until she became the subject of such heated discussion on this blog. I thought she was a little boring, only meant to serve as a somewhat-clever bridge between the writing of Mrs. Dalloway (1923) and the being of Mrs. Dalloway (the present-day, Meryl Streep segments). Upon closer inspection, though, it seems like Laura is a what-might-have-been for the character of Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa "was a Radical" (Woolf, 150) in her youth, reading Shakespeare and Plato and having thoughtful discussions with Sally and Peter "about how they were to reform the world" (Woolf, 33). One gets a sense of who Clarissa might've been had she stuck with Sally or Peter rather than marrying Richard and settling into a life of domesticity, where choosing flowers to a party is more important than reading Shakespeare. Laura is reckless, sure, no good mother would leave two young boys and their father because that was "death"--but she certainly illustrates one of the larger themes of both The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway: how "dangerous" it is "to live even one day" (Woolf, 8). If Laura hadn't experienced the kiss with her neighbor, or left her son to go spend a few hours reading and possibly contemplating suicide, maybe she would've stayed with her family and just maybe, Richard wouldn't have killed himself years later. Similarly, if Virginia Woolf hadn't buried the dead bird, or had been able to have the meal she wanted, or any number of things, perhaps she wouldn't have drowned herself. Who knows? One day can be very, very dangerous and the women in The Hours experience the effects of that danger.

I really wish I had more to say about Meryl Streep in this film but, really, she can do no wrong. I agree with Pat that Clarissa was "the only character...who acts in someone else's interest." Clarissa also seems to be the most well-adjusted. Maybe, though, if The Hours were to have a sequel, she might be experiencing the after-effects of this day and would be a little more selfish because of it.

I think Philip Glass did a great job with the score, the repetitive nature of the music echoed the connectedness of the women's lives. But, listening to Glass's other recordings, I realized that he basically uses the same few notes over and over again...so he loses points for creativity.

Back to Nicole Kidman's voice: perhaps it was the nose.

The Current of Indoctrination

2009-03-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

Woolf intends her titular metaphor to have significances as countless as the shifting identities of her characters. We may at first be tempted to translate the symbol by seeing the waves of life's experiences wash away, again and again, the sands of her characters' identities. However, as the novel progresses, Woolf hints that this current is much more malevolent, enveloping, and unnatural than her potentially calming image suggests. Woolf views the waves as an antagonistic force-- as the imposing social obligations that conscript her characters into an existence which, deep within themselves, they regret and even reject.

Woolf expresses this foremost by drowning her prose in compassion and admiration for her characters, though they are flawed and often despise one another. At the beginning of the novel, the young characters distinguish themselves by "speaking" (that is, ruminating) in unique poetic tones. Jinny is "fiery," Rhoda "pale," and most everyone seems to loathe Bernard's intellectual arrogance (21, 16). However, none of the characters can escape the onslaught of the clergy, whom they disbelieve even as children, school, from which they yearn to escape, and urban street mobs, which Louis later pauses to avoid as if they were, perhaps literally, the waves. As he grows older, Bernard laments that the best art is always produced in "solitude" (58). Indeed, he seems nostalgic for the earlier sections of the novel, a time when the characters were freer and more distinguishable. Though the young Rhoda echoes the disenfranchised, contrarian sentiment of A Room of One's Own, and the young Susan pines for unrequited love, all of the characters become in some way disenchanted as they grow older.

Woolf here reveals another application of the metaphor-- the waves draw the countless crystalline grains of sand from the shore, into the sea of conformity. Ironically, Woolf is not echoing the affirming and unifying Hindu image of the soul, in which human drops of water in the sea are in a state of oneness with the universe. Instead, the waves alienate her characters further from the world around them, and from one another. They become, as Bernard describes it, an "encircled population, shuffling past each other in endless competition along the street" (114). Rhoda echoes precisely the metaphor Walter Benjamin applies to the hopeless working class in Paris, "I will fling myself fearlessly into trams" (163). Though the waves may draw the characters together physically over the years, the water soon flings itself upon the shore in a violent splash, alienating them emotionally and spiritually.

[I have chosen to skip ahead to the fourth, "topic of choice" option, as I have not yet had a chance to see one of the films.]

The Hours: Deal With It

2009-03-26T10:10:00.000-07:00

When I finally got around to watching Frost/Nixon a few weeks ago, I thought it was a well-paced, suspenseful film with solid performances by Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, and (even) Kevin Bacon. I was, however, constantly distracted by Frank Langella's Nixon impersonation; I didn't see much of a resemblance, and his voice was overdone, with each word spoken from the jowls. It bothered me the entire movie.

Last night, I watched Stephen Daldry's film The Hours, and a similar problem arose for me. Every time Nicole Kidman was on screen as Woolf, I couldn't help but wonder who was in charge of that prosthetic strapped to her nose. Nearly all the dramatic wind was sucked out of Woolf's sails by that silly makeup job; I couldn't take anything she was saying completely seriously, and it didn't even make her look more like the writer. That's just one man's opinion though. She did manage to take home the Oscar for best actress.

The other technical issue I had with the film was the music, particularly during the Laura Brown story line. I would find myself in a seemingly innocuous moment of a scene, when suddenly my heart would start to race, and I would have no idea why:

Laura: I'm going to make a cake. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make a cake for daddy's birthday. [music: a swelling, swirling crescendo of strings and piano].

I was on edge the entire time she was on screen. Now, I know what you're thinking: well, duh. that's the point; it's part of the suspense. I maintain, however, that there was no suspense at all. Nothing actually happens with the Laura character, except the metastasizing of her vague, selfish unhappiness. When I watch a movie or read a piece of fiction, I appreciate actual drama, not melodrama. In fact, nothing irks me more than melodrama; I find it disingenuous, and it undermines the value of a work for me.

This brings me to my main contention with this film (or perhaps even Michael Cunningham's book, which I have not read). I disagree entirely with Justine's assessment of Laura. Justine wrote, "I really admired her acknowledgment of her unhappiness and the urgency of having to do something about it; of having to think of herself before others." I believe the opposite to be true. Laura had an obligation to Richard and his sister, from which she fled. What is this film saying about personal responsibility? About the abuse of the American dream? -- start over whenever you feel like it? What about the responsibility to accept the consequences of your choices? (I never believed, for a moment, that she "had no choice.")

Claire Danes, despite what many say about her acting abilities, actually plays a pivotal role in this film. When Laura arrives at Clarissa's apartment in New York, Julia says, "So that's the monster." Yet after Laura's vague, quasi apology for her disappearance, it is Julia who embraces Laura, as if to accept her apology, as if to reach an understanding of why she needed to escape dreaded unhappiness. But I remained unconvinced; what on earth does "It was death. I chose life." mean? It seems to me that she had a comfortable life in LA to which she chose to be oblivious. (I was upset that I couldn't stand Julianne Moore's character, when I love that actress. Maude Lebowski, anyone?)

I remember something Denis Leary said in one of his stand-up specials several years ago: "Nobody's happy. Ok? Happiness comes in small doses, folks. It's a cigarette, or a chocolate chip cookie, or a five-second orgasm. That's it. Ok?" Every time I watch a film with the central theme of "well-off person searches for happiness because they don't recognize their fortune at having food, a warm house, and comfort," I get angry and end up ranting like this.

The saving grace I found in this film was Meryl Streep's Clarissa. Because she devotes herself to Richard and to throwing his party, she is the only character in the film who acts in someone else's interest. Though she breaks down for a moment in front of Louis, her reason is plausible; she is witnessing the physical and mental decay of her dear friend. She is the only character who realizes that showing love for others is the road to any kind of happiness. Streep saved me from hating this film, with her small glimmer of hope.

2009-03-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

Today, I scrambled through my folder looking for secondary readings to blog about--but to my dismay, nothing was really sparking any ideas. Eventually, I came across Mr. Cowper's poem "The Castaway," mercilessly shoved in the back of my folder with a dog-eared corner, a crease along the side, and the doodle of a forlorn-looking bunny in the margins.
"This looks promising!" I thought to myself, and then proceeded to read over the poem a few times to help generate some blogging ideas. I remember reading over the poem in class, I remember taking notes about it, and I remember an extensive conversation regarding domesticated rabbit poetry--but I had forgotten how much I love this poem. And finally, I decided that I want to retrace our class discussion about Mr. Ramsay, specifically how Woolf takes Coooper's poem (written well before her time, in 1799) and applies it to Mr. Ramsay's grief about his own life.
While I agree that Mr. Ramsay is a pretty ridiculous character for the most part, I think Woolf's incorporation of Cowper's poem does more than highlight Mr. Ramsay's melodramatic flair for eighteenth century poetry recitations around his beachouse. I think Woolf is also showing how Mr. Ramsay is a "castaway" within his own family.
It's funny to think of Mr. Ramsay marching around on a sunny beach occasionally barking out lines from tragic poems. How can he possibly relate his comfortable, beach-house-owning life to that of the Light Brigade from Tennyson's poem or the castaway from Cowper's? The idea seemed silly then--but now I'm not as sure. In the third section of To The Lighthouse (aptly entitled, "the Lighthouse") Mr. Ramsay is sitting with Cam and James on the boat, feeling like, "...a desolate man, old, bereft..." (169) murmuring the last two lines of Cowper's poem loud enough for his two children to hear:
But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he
Of course Mr. Ramsay's situation isn't like that of the perilous castaway from Cowper's poem; but, are his feelings all that different than the one's expressed by Cowper? At this point in the novel, Ramsay has lost his wife and he cannot emotionally connect with his children (in fact, his children kind of hate him). Essentially, he is alone on that boat, in the middle of the water, much like a castaway. He isn't under any mortal peril, but another kind of threat is present. There is the threat of him losing a slow battle against his own life; a life of unfulfilled intellectual aspirations, and a life where he is sinking under the waves of emotional incompetence towards his family. I don't think it's all that ridiculous for him to connect with this poem, because while he is a rather self-absorbed man (taking into account only his own grief throughout most of the novel, and demanding sympathy from everyone else), I think his self-woe is what makes him one the most realistic characters in Woolf's novel. Woolf uses Cowper's poem so that Mr. Ramsay has something to hold steadfastly onto; he doesn't have his wife, his children, or the kind of emotional consolation he needs. He has his knowledge, he has eighteenth century poetry, and he has the memorized lines of Cowper to express his innermost grief.

Secondary Reading,The Man Who Saw Himself Drown, Mrs. Dalloway

2009-03-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

"The Man Who Saw Himself Drown" by Anita Desai was published in 2000, decades and decades after Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. In the story, a man who is out of in town on business witnesses his own drowning and the ramifications of his death as he walks dazedly through them. The protagonist battles with the consequences of his death, the loss of his wife and children, while also examining what oppurtunities comes with getting a fresh start, ridded of responsibility and identity. As he comes to terms with the realization of his situation, the main character is faced with a choice, "to drown this self that had remained, to drown the double of the self that had already died" (Desai 98) or "to go on with another life, a new life?" (Desai 98) The story ends with a young boy discovering the body of our narrator, drowned by the timid trickle of a small stream. This story, like Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, uses a character to weigh and explore the meaning of life and death. Similar to the man in Desai's story, Woolf uses Septimus, an emotional ex-soldier struggling with life after battle. Both Desai's character and Woolf's struggle with the challenge of returning to life after it has, essentially, been taken away from them. For Desai, this robbery of life is literal, but Woolf creates a similar dilemma for Septimus and the hollowing out effect that the war has on him, stealing his idealistic youth, his naive mind. Though Desai doesn't refer to Woolf or Septimus in her story, her character's deliberate choice, his thoughtful acceptance of death in order to escape a life he can no longer fully live is reminiscent of Septimus, listening to the futile and imprisoning cures of Dr. Holmes downstairs, before he urgently "flung himself vigorously" (Woolf 164) from the window sill. Both writers use their characters to ask and observe the same question- when life is no longer full, when our grasp of it's beauties and realities, it's quiet pleasantries and joys has been broken, can relief only be found in death?

...even crazy people like to be asked.

2009-03-05T19:00:00.000-08:00

I’m sure it was more than the multitude of groans elicited from my father and my grandmother that began my fascination with The Hours from the first time I caught in on television. We tuned in, on shaky ground, right after Virginia kissed Vanessa, and somehow barreled through the movie for a bit, watched something else, and then tuned in just in time to catch Clarissa kissing Sally. No lie. This may seem silly, but this was my first experience with this movie. I had no idea what was really going on, but it was a (relatively) mainstream film and I was caught up in the Philip Glass and the delicious scandalous rush of it all, highlighted by my father and my grandmother’s fierce reactions of disgust and channel-changing. I was hooked and there were so many things I wanted to know. And I couldn’t show it.

This must have been 2005 (and I must have had my license) because the next day, I drove over to FYE and managed to find a used copy of the DVD for six dollars. I watched it that afternoon while dad was at work; no interruptions and no disapproval.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.

On the contrary, this film was one that threw you into the lives of these three women and the people that mattered to them. It was so delicate and yet so ceaselessly courageous, and I have never identified so much with one film, before or since.

From Laura Brown’s story we have the sense of a woman out of sync with her time and place in more ways than one. I really admired her acknowledgement of her unhappiness and the urgency of having to do something about it; of having to think of herself before others. I love her explanation to Clarissa Vaughn:

It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life.

She teaches Richard that we cannot live for others, try as we may; Richard sees a similar pattern in Clarissa [“Just wait till I die. Then you'll have to think of yourself. How are you going to like that?”].

At the same time, Clarissa expresses emotions that I have certainly felt. [“When I'm with him I feel... Yes, I am living. And when I'm not with him... Yes, everything does seem sort of silly”]. The three impulsive kisses in this film speak to this urgency, this relevancy of the person’s presence in their lives. With Philip Glass’s incredible score to top it off, this movie is intoxicating and inspiring.

Movie Reviews, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

2009-03-03T17:14:00.001-08:00

When I was in sixth grade and my sister was in high school, I happened upon her copy of the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf screenplay in a family car ride to D.C. While she slept against the window with her headphones blaring, I diligently read the entire screenplay, for lack of anything better to do. When I had finished it, my middle school mind teemed with questions and confusion. Why was everyone so angry? How could all of these characters mistreat each other with such violent, hateful games ? What was the point? And, most importantly, why was that the play's title? Several years, a high school diploma, and a soon to be bachelor's degree later, I have the same questions.

I thought it would be interesting to watch the movie now, with an older and hopefully more mature mindset, to see what my then 11-year old mind was missing. Though I was still confused and tired after watching Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (who play the main married couple in the movie) tirelessly berate and deride each other, taking with them their youthful and idealistic guests, I was able to pull a little more meaning from the story as well as the characters in it.

The story begins on a university campus, after an apparent party among the university's teaching staff. George and Martha, a middle-aged married couple stumble drunkenly home. Once home, it is clear that their relationship is less than perfect. George is sarcastic and demeaning, while Martha is taunting and vulgar. Neither gives each other a break and therefore, never receives one in return. While they fix themselves yet another drink (a pattern throughout the movie), Martha informs George that the young, new professor in the Math department will be coming by with his equally young wife for a late drink. It is gradually exposed that Martha's father is the president of the university and that George, a once promising history professor, has proved to be an academic and therefore familial failure in both Martha and her father's eyes. The story moves on from here in a haze of cocktails and crude, emotional games between Martha and George. Their repulsion for what the other has become is so tangible, the young professor and his wife are rapidly and unknowingly wrapped up in it. Throughout the movie, we witness the revelation of dark secrets and harsh betrayals, inflicting pain upon themselves and their guests.

However, the movie ends, surprisingly, quite calmly. The long night is over. The sun begins to rise. The frenzy of the evening cools and, like in the beginning, George and Martha remain, holding each other's hand.

The movie is both tiring to watch and intriguing. While I found many of the disagreements and behaviors of the characters disturbing, there is a sort of intrigue to the relationships in the movie, and a feeling that you are watching something too personal to see. The movie, as a whole, is not a feel-good flick. It's subject matter is dark and the characters are painful, pitiful creatures who emotionally and physically unravel throughout the film. However, it's unabashed desire to catch and display human beings at their most primal is something I have rarely seen in a movie before. The complexity and depth of human relationships is what this movie relentlessly explores, placing it's characters in abhorrent positions and testing the difference between passionate love and passionate hate. While I still don't know why the movie is called Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" I can surmise that it serves to make a mockery of the people that this particular movie centers around. The title is a song that Martha repeats numerous times in the movie, alluding to a joke at the party the couples had attended earlier that evening. It is here where the mockery may begin. Clearly, this is an intellectual joke, these people are supposedly academics, the movie is literally set on a college campus. However, despite their supposed intellectual facade, they behave like animals, selfishly and recklessly destroying each other with very little sign of remorse.

Therefore, though I didn't care for the movie much more than I cared for the screenplay after I read it, I can now recognize the boldness of the script as well as the hypocrisy of institutions such as academia, and marriage that is so definitively parodied.

Consumerism: A Necessary Evil....?

2009-02-16T17:58:00.000-08:00

So many demands are made on our time today that we often reminisce about the “good ol’ days” when there were no cell phones, computers, or even cars or televisions. Unfortunately, upon closer examination you’ll probably find that that idyllic existence is an illusion; even without such technology, life—or maybe society—demands that one must have a purpose at all times.

“‘Really I must—really I must’—that is it. Without investigating the demand, the mind cringes to the accustomed tyrant. One must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil.”
-“Street Haunting: A London Adventure”

With that, over seven decades ago, Woolf berates the musty old ‘must’ that never tires of plaguing our lives. A pencil seems innocent enough. One might write a long letter, or a postcard, or a novel; or one might write a list of things to do which require our attention. Regardless of purpose, the pencil is needed to propel us outside so we can shirk our other duties for a while.

This is the sad reality, folks. I was in the historic district of Seymour, CT for an appointment at the dentist’s over this past winter break. I was set to meet a friend afterward at the mall, but she was running late due to her mother’s concerns over the icy roads (Read: the roads weren’t making her late; her mother was). At any rate, I had some time to spare and thought it would be lovely to peruse an antique shop or two before heading up to the mall. It was cold and rainy out, so it was doubly lovely to be inside and with all kinds of great vintage jewelry, glassware, and books and such. Since I was killing time, I was poring over various objects for a longer than absolutely necessary. I had a conversation with the shop owner, the only other person in the store, and walked through every aisle. After fifteen minutes, she called out to me, “Found anything?” to which I replied, “Oh! You have so many great things!” Apparently, this would not suffice: “That’s not what I asked,” she said, “What are you buying?” With that, I was suddenly obligated. I couldn’t just take in all the pretty things and go on my way aesthetically satisfied before driving in the winter dreariness for eleven miles to get up to the mall.

So I bought a necklace…..and it was worth it. Not that I had a choice.

Out, damn spot!..Gosh!

2009-02-15T21:13:00.000-08:00

I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time…a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece…I’m not sure about it…I might get up but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain (p. 77)…Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail. – p. 83 of "The Mark on the Wall" by Woolf

vs
There are some black specks on the wall. I stare at them, certain they are moving. Well, I ought to be able to ignore a few bugs by this time. ‘Il ne faut pas mettre tout sur le même plan…’
I get up and look closely. Only splashes of dirt. It’s not the time of year for bugs, anyway. – p.349 of Good Morning, Midnight by Rhys

A few days ago, I found myself in the same plight. While checking my e-mail, commenting on my friends' posts on facebook, organizing some upcoming club events, and researching something on the internet, I was thinking about all the work that I had to do and readings that I had to undertake when I suddenly looked up and saw a spot on the wall. It blended in slightly which made me wonder if it was some kind of spider or dirt or…I don’t know. I knew it was some kind of projection by the way the part that blended into the wall had a dark underlining shadow forming a half moon. Yet, I didn’t know exactly what it was...Long story slightly shortened, it was a nail that had been painted over many times.

I found that Jean Rhys in the excerpt from Good Morning, Midnight that we read for class slightly parallels Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” but then diverges by the choices that the narrators make to ascertain what the mark is, or in the latter work was. Both narrators, and myself, use the “mark” or “speck on the wall” as a distraction. For Rhys, the “specks on the wall” intrude on her thoughts while she reflects on her friend Sidonie and her perception of Sasha, the narrator. Sidonie seems to orchestrate great influence over Sasha which may not always be what Sasha wants. Sasha says, “She imagines that it’s my atmosphere. God, it’s an insult when you come to think about it! More dark rooms, more red curtains…” (p.349). The thought that Sidonie perceives that this environment suits Sasha offends Sasha. Sasha seems to be trying to escape “the dark rooms” and “red curtains” but Sidonie, who thinks she knows what is best for Sasha, traps her in the very things she is trying to avoid. Sasha seems to indirectly challenge Sidonie when she says, “But one mustn’t put everything on the same plane. That’s her great phrase. And one mustn’t put everybody on the same plane, either” (p.349). Sasha twists Sidonie’s own philosophy against her. She lashes out, “And this is my plane.” Sasha’s words distance her from Sidonie’s control. Yet, Sasha’s distraction, “the specks on the wall,” seems to weaken her resolve. She broadens the distance from these rebellious thoughts by the taking some luminal and going to sleep at once.

On the other hand, the narrator in Woolf’s work approaches the “mark on the wall” differently. The “mark” saves her from an infantile fancy. The narrator says, “Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps” (p. 77). The narrator chooses more mature and progressive thoughts. The “mark” provokes her thoughts to transcend imagination and histories to the meaning of life. Her cavalcade of thoughts is therapeutic and welcomed. The narrator, enlightened by her deep thoughts, says “I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain…Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.” – p. 82

The narrator of “The Mark on the Wall” seems to be more in control of and willing to face her thoughts than Sasha, whose distraction flashes her from a state of pondering discontent to sleep deprived indifference. Sasha is more willing to face her “specks.” She uses them as an escape plan from her discontent and as a bridge to her luminal. Woolf’s narrator uses the “mark” as a bridge to her thoughts and seeping discontent with oppressive masculine authority. Her thoughts slither in and out of scenes of oppressive males.

From the people who used to live in the house but moved because the man said “they wanted to change their style of furniture” (p. 77) to a ludicrous Shakespeare who had “a shower of ideas that fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind” (p. 79) to a world where “illegitimate freedom” could spring from the governing “masculine point of view” if “men perhaps, should …be a woman” (p.80) to antiquated, “learned men” whose honor sinks with “dwindling superstitions” (p. 81) and, finally, to a place where men and women sit together and smoke cigarettes after tea, it seems like at the end of the narrative masculine authority is replaced with a semblance of equality where men and women have equal footing and the world blooms in “beauty and [where]health of mind increases” (p.81). Woolf’s narrator utilizes the “mark” to obtain some peace of thought while Sasha’s distraction turns her away from deep thought to mere superficiality and shallow cares, to dirt and bugs.

And my spot? My spot lacked such depth but successfully diverted my attentions and energies to one focus, rather than many.

“Streethaunting”

2009-02-13T11:17:00.000-08:00

In “Streethaunting: A London Adventure” Woolf talks about how much she enjoys browsing the streets in the wintertime. She says that streethaunting in winter is the “greatest of adventures” and states many reasons why. When Woolf streethaunts it’s a very relaxing and almost spiritual thing. When I walk the streets I don’t think like Woolf does: she notices almost everything. Including all of the things that people are doing, which I think that most people wouldn’t pay a lot of attention to. When she talks she seems almost like Mrs.Dalloway since she is noticing and remembering everything as she walks down the street. She also has that nosy, curious quality that Mrs.Dalloway has.

In the second paragraph, Woolf gives us the best time to streethaunt. “The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful,” she says. She also says that we aren’t longing to get shade and air like we do in the summer, so that makes it more enjoyable. I don’t agree with her: in the winter I like to stay in the house, bundled up in bed with cocoa. I also think that in the winter other people like to stay home as well, so the streets aren’t as interesting. But she thinks the streets are beautiful in winter and talks about the interesting characters she comes upon while streethaunting. “The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks,” she says. I think this means that we shouldn’t look for interesting things we should just let them come to us.

When Woolf asks the woman what it’s like to be a dwarf, it seems very mean and rude of her. But she seems to almost admire the woman. She talks about how she held her foot out and it was normal-sized. “At length, the pair was chosen and, as she walked out between her guardians, with the parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology came back, and by the time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only,” Woolf says. This seems like Woolf is saying that we judge a dwarf when we see them walk down the street. But if we get to know them and see who they are we wont see them as just a dwarf.

Woolf also talks about the excitement of entering into a new room. I think her excitement of entering into a new room is the excitement that we get when entering into a new country. “It is always an adventure to enter a new room for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it, and directly we enter it we breast some new wave of emotion,” Woolf says. I think she means that we don’t only get these things by the people that are in the room, we also get it by the way the room looks and the objects in it. Streethaunting to her isn’t just walking on the street, it’s walking into shops and observing people.--Baha

Freshwater

2009-02-13T08:09:00.000-08:00

I was happy as a clam to be sitting in the Julia Miles Theater and staring at a multicolored, patchwork curtain on a school night. I had no idea what Freshwater was about, but the summer sounds that filled the theater seemed promising and I like Woolf quite a bit. I thought, “I won’t understand it but I’ll probably like it.” This seemed to be confirmed when the characters were introduced and the only name that even wrung a bell was Tennyson. But I got that all the characters, except one, were artsy types and it turned out that that was all I needed to get. I knew that the play was written for the Bloomsburies, one artsy group, to make fun of the old Victorian artsy group; a younger generation making fun of the older. It’s a timeless situation and from it, you can easily anticipate the nature of the comedy.

The set looked like something that would be in the White Box at Fordham. It was a drawing-room/garden with a couple of oddly placed doors and ladders. The floor and lower half of the whitewashed walls were streaked with bold, seemingly hastily painted strokes of bright green paint—grass. It seemed to say, we are not in the realm of the ordinary—yikes. But I had read too much into it. Megan Carter, the dramaturg, explained later that there had been disagreement over whether to set the play in a garden or in a house. Set designer, James Schuette, surprised everyone with a combination of the two. The play is a farce and the set was farcical—perfect.

Naturally, I did not get every joke and reference, but I got enough of them (and enough bare butt) to laugh regularly. I also understood the plotline of Ellen Terry, the de facto hero of the play. She is constantly posing for abstract virtues in her husband’s paintings. Her husband, George Frederick Watts, keeps imploring that she be glad to be immortalized as Beauty, Grace, Modesty, or what have you, but she feels trapped by her beauty and trapped by art. In the end, she escapes with a strapping young sailor who kisses her instead of paints her. She made me think of Elizabeth in Mrs. Dalloway. Just when Elizabeth is “blooming” and starting to be noticed for her beauty, she longs to be in the country with her dad and her dogs. One of her captors is Ms. Kilman, who traps Elizabeth with lectures. Elizabeth escapes by taking off like a pirate on a city bus. Pirate… sailor… just pointing it out. What’s so interesting is that the confining nature of beauty still pervades; the drawing room play is still relevant (one of the many reasons why it was so wonderful to hear the Sex Pistols blaring at the end). Though, I don’t think that city buses or affairs with sailors are the best escapes from beauty’s shackles. Piracy is the only answer?

One last point: I disagree with my classmate that Ellen Terry was cast too old. The play was meant to be performed by a group of friends. When I was 5 years old and putting on plays with my friends and family, I played Friar Tuck, a part for which I was too young, female, and way too cute. The actors in Freshwater were playing the Bloomsburies putting on a play not unlike my backyard performance of Robin Hood. It seemed completely appropriate and much more realistic that the actors were not physically ideal for the roles.

“Fun and illuminating. Two thumbs way up.”—Becca Webster

Theatre Review: Virginia & Freshwater

2009-02-13T06:23:00.001-08:00

It’s not often that Virginia Woolf is seen in the theatre. Having only written one play, and a play that is rarely produced at that, Woolf does not seem to inspire much in the way of the dramatic arts. However, in one week I saw two theatre pieces that involved her.

The first one, a staged reading entitled Virginia, based on Virginia Woolf’s life was presented at Drama Books on Woolf’s birthday. The staged reading struck me as a piece that did not really have a real reason for being on the stage. It always bothers me when there is no ‘drama’, or action, happening on stage. This staged reading was case in point. Although it followed Woolf’s life from childhood to her ultimate suicide, it was not something that could not have been another literary form, namely an autobiography. Part of the problem was trying to cover Woolf’s entire life in a 90-minute play. Focusing on one aspect of her life might have been more moving, or even if the play had not gone chronologically. To me, the play felt as though I was merely reading an abbreviated Wikipedia entry about her life. One thing did strike me is the choice for three actors to play all the characters, with one play Woolf the entire show and the others play all the male and female roles. It was certainly interesting to see Woolf’s sister and lover double cast as well as her husband and the brother who abused her sexually.

The second piece was a revival of Woolf’s only play, Freshwater. The play is a farce, first and foremost, and to me, the time when I felt like the cast really got the attitude of the play happened as the Sex Pistols version of “God Save the Queen” blasted during curtain call. The rest of the play, the actors seemed to not really understand that their characters were meant to be ridiculous versions of the actual people and instead seemed more insistent on making them more real and creating a crass physical language. This physical language paid off at many points during the play, but during others, it seemed unnecessary. The one thing that bothered me the most, was that Ellen Page, the youngest character in the show, was being played by the oldest actor on stage. When questioned in class, the dramaturg replied that the director does not see age. This, I feel, is a cop-out. It bothered me that the young lieutenant kept referring to her young beauty in their moments, the decision to leave does not seem as reckless and her through line is essentially the only guiding light for the progression of the show, so why miscast the one crucial character? Other than that, the show was enjoyable. The set, reminiscent of a Victorian drawing room painted to resemble a spring weekend was great. The lighting, however, really did need to go to the next level and take us to ultimate-farce land, rather than simply being naturalistic. All in all, the play is a modest representation of Woolf’s only play, but perhaps, since she wrote it as an inside joke for her friends, maybe it should remain that way.

Within the Gap

2009-02-13T05:13:00.000-08:00

Michel de Certeau's essay Walking in the City illuminated a recent trip I experienced with my Service Learning group. On Monday, my group decided to take advantage of the warm weather and locate an abandoned Richard Serra sculpture and photograph it in order to make a proposal for its reinstallation, which is the main goal of the project. Though we knew that the sculpture was somewhere in the South Bronx around the 134th Street and the bridge to Randall's Island, we were unsure of its exact location so we spend several hours thoroughly examining the area.

Other than drifting during commutes or "exploring" Manhattan for new restaurants, I never approached my walks around the City with questions such as, "how could something be abandoned here?" and, "how can the abandoned be reintegrated to benefit the community?" Every element of the area had to be examined.

Unsure as to what exactly we were looking for, other than that it would be large and constructed out of steel, we looked anywhere we physically could enter to make sure that we weren't missing anything. Being that the area is mostly occupied by industry storage lots, power generators, and huge warehouses that compress the City’s garbage, there really weren’t many places where we could go. Our search led us to the water bank where we followed a path around the edge of a fenced off plot of generators. We were commenting on the amount of trash on the muddy bank and joking that this sculpture probably didn’t exist when we noticed several flat pieces of metal that were upheld by wooden beams. I don't know who made the observation that we were looking at shelters but, the three of us uniformly turned around and rushed to trace the path back to the street.

We didn't speak for a while.

There was something incredibly disturbing in finding the homeless literally pushed out to the extremes of the City’s space. This five foot wide piece of land between the extent of industry and the natural boundary of water was probably the last remaining physical space that was unclaimed towards the City’s conceptual identity.

I realized that I was so shocked to see the homeless on the outskirts of industry because I've grown so accustomed to seeing them in the highly urban areas of the City. I admit that I interact with the homeless in a similar manner to Richard's interaction with the vagrant woman in Mrs. Dalloway. While Richard "bore his flowers like a weapon," (Woolf, p. 113) it's become my second nature to use a book on the subway as a distraction from having to make eye contact with the homeless. Though I do happen to donate money and occasionally receive a "God Bless," when I say that I don't have any cash on me, which, as a student, is usually the case, I don't feel that interconnection that Woolf so successfully establishes between Richard and the vagrant woman, "still there was time for a spark between them." (Woolf, p.114)

Instead of this sense that everyone is bound by a unifying thread of human existence what remains are questions like Richard's, who initially wonders what could be done about the vagrant woman, presenting her as a problem that must be solved. Here, as discussed in de Certeau's essay, is where the problem of space becomes very real within the City. As Manhattan expands throughout its conceptual space and further develops its own identity, it becomes crucial to regulate its organization since Manhattan is confined to the physical boundaries of the island. Unfortunately, the homeless often fall into the category that de Carteau describes as, "a rejection of everything that is not capable of being dealt with and so constitutes the 'waste products' of a functionalist administration." Organizations and programs are constructed to “solve” these “problems” but they often only create an abstraction of power within the City that extends their administrative and ideal space, while attempting to utilize their limited physical space.

Several Bronx-based groups interested in ecology are currently working on creating a "green path" for bikes from North Bronx to Randall's Island that would run around the outskirts of industry. I can’t help but wonder how this would affect the inhabitants of the shelters.

We did find the Richard Serra sculpture, which was amazing. In that sense, exploring the area really was successful. Still, the shelters linger in my mind.

White peonies, cut short in small silver vases

2009-02-12T20:31:00.001-08:00

I have always felt that I was a bit shallow, but now I suspect that I may be extraordinarily shallow.

I began to have the faintest suspicion of the complete shallowness of my character while reading Mrs. Dalloway, because I related to Clarissa Dalloway. I feel ashamed admitting that, but it is true. We are both privileged females living in the Western world, far too often concerned with trivial things.

I had a Mrs. Dalloway moment last week. I was at the Barnes & Noble cafe with my friend Isabella and we were discussing a dinner party that we were going to have. It was going to be very intime but charming, eight in all, in my grandmother's dining room, with bone china and candles in silver holders going down the length of the table. I was going to wear my Age of Innocence dove-gray silk, Isabella was yet undecided on her wardrobe, but it was most likely going to involve large quantities of tulle and netting. We fell to talking about the flowers. White, I said, only white. White peonies, cut short in small silver vases. I was very firm on this point--in fact, I absolutely refused to hear of anything else. Isabella finally gave in arguing for yellow and as she conceded, I had a moment where I thought, this is silly. This is silly to argue for white peonies for a frivolous dinner party. The entire thing is absurd--the flowers, the dove-gray silk, the candles, the dinner party, me--all absurd.

It was a random moment of first-world guilt. It hits you when you least expect it. Not when you're sitting comfortably at home reading the horrific NYT story about the Sudanese rape victims. Not when you buy a $1400 handbag. Not when you moan and groan about having to get up for class and then see that in other parts of the world, girls are attacked with acid when they go to class. No, first-world guilt always comes unexpectedly--like when you're arguing for white peonies at a cafe table. And then you have to step back, and take a good look at yourself and the world you inhabit. To compare that world to the one in which the majority of humanity lives-- it's nearly impossible to really comprehend the gap between the two. Yes, it is easy to state the differences: a good deal of the world does not know when their next meal is coming and you do, but to actually realize what that means is difficult. Superficially, of course we understand. But internally? Perhaps not so much.

Similarly, the narrator in Woolf's essay "Street Haunting" observes the juxtaposition of the haves and the have-nots of humanity, except on a relatively microcosmic scale--in London.

It is jarring to go from "the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey" to suddenly in the very next paragraph, and presumably, in the next street, "everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty." The speaker observes this contrast, pointing out that:

[The derelicts] lie close to those shop windows where commerce offers to a world of old women laid on doorsteps, of blind men, of hobbling dwarfs, sofas which are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with baskets of many coloured fruit; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars' heads...

The speaker observes all this ironic contrast without any middle-class/upper middle-class guilt whatsoever. In fact, when describing "these derelicts," the speaker seems to feel a sense of revulsion over anything else, even pity. There is no attempt to empathize with these unfortunate beings, though the narrator does speculate about their lives, concluding that "life which so fantastic cannot be altogether tragic." While the speaker certainly sees the abject poverty of these people, it is clear that she or he does not truly understand the abject poverty. If the speaker did understand, then she or he would not have said that the derelicts did not grudge them their prosperity--especially when the speaker in question is wandering the streets of London observing its poor and handicapped as one might look at animals in the zoo.

A first-world guilt attack, for me, usually consists of a reevaluation of my entire life in short questions running through my head: what is the point, what does it matter, what I am doing with my life? The last question generally echoes around my head longer than the rest, because I feel that instead of living a privileged life in the developed world, I should be doing something to help those who aren't. After all, my life as it is now feels like dumb luck--just being born in the right place and time to the right people. I am undeserving of what I have--I think probably most privileged people are. All of humanity equally deserves to lead the lives that we as developed-world inhabitants lead.

Of course, I only think this way every so often--you forget about the guilt in the onslaught that happens to be your life. First-world worries consume me--like papers and grades and whether I can take a trip this summer or not and should I get bangs and internship applications--all these questions, which seem so insignificant in the larger scheme of things, are so important to me.

Sometimes I look at my life. I examine it closely, turning it this way and that way in my hand, to see if it catches the light. If I am possessed with nothing, I am possessed with ambition and I've recently begun to get a nagging feeling in me, the kind that starts in your throat and settles in the pit of your stomach and keeps you awake at night. It is not failure, exactly, but it's the middle road between success and failure. Mediocrity, I suppose. (I believe it is a first-world privilege to have continual, melodramatic, soul-searching, inner angst.) It's silly, at eighteen, to think this way, but I can't help it. I have this overwhelming sense of being pressed for time--like I have so much to do and so little time to do it all. I look at the quiet, ordinary days of my life so far, the days when I didn't write or come up with a plan to rule the world or nothing extraordinary happened to me, and half of me says those days are wasted and the other half of me says those days are and will be the most important days of my life.

After all, isn't that what Virginia Woolf writes about? Ordinary days, ordinary lives, ordinary people, and yet all are extraordinary. They all inhabit the same world and they all have a distinct viewpoint. Her works are worlds within worlds--and the dichotomy of two very different worlds living side by side to one another. My day may be ordinary and yours may be extraordinary, and yet we live in the same world. The speaker in "Street Haunting" imagines how pearls in an Oxford Street window could change her life and at perhaps at that very corner, there might be "a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery," looking at the same pearl necklace and thinking how it could change his life, but in a vastly different way. Half-way across the world, a girl hides from the rebel soldiers who have invaded her village, crouches, cowers, prays, knows the stories, and waits for her death, and perhaps in that same moment, I say white peonies, cut short in small silver vases.

Of Turtlenecks and Roses

2009-02-12T18:17:00.000-08:00

One of the things that impresses me most about Virginia Woolf is the way she allows characters to communicate without using words (sort of a strange enterprise for a writer). For me, the big moment when this nonverbal communication or communion occurs in Mrs. Dalloway is in when Clarissa quotes the same lines from Cymbeline as Septimus had some time before:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages

The familiarity with this quote from one of Shakespeare's most obscure works marks Spetimus and Clarissa as people of quality; they are not parroting "To be or not to be", or misusing the word "wherefore" as we could imagine the other guests might. Their shared moment is a more quiet, subtle one that can only shine and exist away from the people around them; for Clarissa, the line first surfaces in silence, in the absence of Lady Bruton's invitation, and for the last time when she is alone, away from her party.

Likewise, in The Mystery Guest, the narrator and his former girlfriend are linked by reading Mrs. Dalloway. This isn't in the excerpt we read in class, but the party they're at is filled with turtleneck-wearing, Dostoyevski-in-the-back-pocket-of-my-skinny-jeans-grade pretentious snots; amid all the windbaggery, the small line from Dalloway, "Roses were the only flower she could bear to see cut", describes a clear path between the two souls.
In neither case is the literary reference reduced to trivia; neither the narrator and his former lover nor Septimus and Clarissa are trying to gain street cred by showing off their knowledge, unlike the others at their parties, like Brierly who has made a career out of bloviating on Milton or the other guys at the fete, one of whom actually and inexcusably mentions Sven Nykvist.

In both cases, the shibboleth is silent or quiet; Clarissa and Septimus never meet, and the narrator in The Mystery Guest barely hears his girlfriend among the white noise of the party. In both of these works, so much of the speech is unnecessary, wrong, or misinterpreted. Holmes speaks a lot, but he doesn't understand much of anything. Jim Hutton can imitate Brierly, unsaddled by understanding, and the narrator's fellow revelers can and do titter away into the night without saying anything original. For the 'heroes' of our two works, literature, operating in silence, becomes the language of the link.

"Our" House on Ocean Point.

2009-02-12T18:04:00.000-08:00

Growing up, I was never really interested in taking photographs with Mickey Mouse or riding the Log Flume on the Wildwood boardwalk. For me, the word “vacation” was synonymous with the thrill of returning to explore a familiar rocky coast, the salty smell of the ocean that lingered in chilly morning air, and falling asleep to the soft, muted lullaby of a foghorn through an open window.

My father’s family has been vacationing in southern Maine since the late 1960s. For the entire month of July, my grandparents would rent an old house named "High Water" (Hi-Watah to the locals) on Ocean Point, an idyllic peninsular seaside community populated with turn of the century cottages. My father, along with his sisters and brother, would spend the month fishing, boating, and exploring the craggy beaches and Pine forests, while my grandparents would play host to an array of guests: second cousins and their lovers, neighbors, in-laws. Even as time went by and their children grew up and started families of their own, my grandparents held fast to their traditional summers in Maine. For better or for worse, my big (and often dysfunctional) family would voyage over ten hours worth of highway and cram into the old cottage.

It couldn’t have been more than a few months before she passed away that I found myself sitting in my grandmother’s living room drinking tea and having a conversation over the books we were reading. She had just begun To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf; she told me about a very brief passage in the book in which Woolf describes a summerhouse. She said the experience of reading the short sentences was one of those rare instances where she could not only relate to the text, but felt, almost eerily, involved.

Nearly three years later, I have stumbled upon the same passage, and finally understand the connection that the matriarch of my family must have felt with Mrs. Ramsay:

“She…saw the room, saw the chairs, thought them fearfully shabby. Their entrails, as Andrew said the other day, were all over the floor; but then what was the point, she asked, of buying good chairs to let them spoil up here all through the winter when the house, with only one old woman to see it, positively dripped with wet? Never mind, the rent was precisely twopence halfpenny; the children loved it; it did her husband good to be three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his libraries and his lectures and his disciples; and there was room for visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was done- they did well enough here; and a photograph or two, and books…Things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer. The mat was fading; the wall-paper was flapping. You couldn’t tell any more that those were roses on it.” (26-7).

For Mrs. Ramsay, her family’s seasonal seaside home lacks glamour; it does not age gracefully and is outfitted with retired pieces of furniture. “Shabby” as it is, with its faded walls and furniture in need of a good upholsterer, the house serves to unify the Ramsays. She believes the eight diverse Ramsay children love the home. It comforts her to see her husband away from the immediate and visible stresses of academia. The home itself is populated by memories- aged chairs and tables which have undoubtedly seen many of her happiest days. Mrs. Ramsay considers the Scotland house both a happy tomb for bygone days and a symbol for the closeness she wishes for her family in the future.

Our summer house, though we were only its lowly summer renters, unified, and continues to unify, my family. Though all twenty of us lead radically different lives, we share memories of creaky wooden floors, paper-thin walls, antique beds, mismatched consignment sofas, and dusty watercolors of torrid seas. No matter what change the winter months usher into our individual lives, the house stands as a concrete symbol for what it means to be related to one another. For us, as for Mrs. Ramsay, the house transcends its condition.

I have only been back to Maine once since my grandmother died, and it was only with my parents and my brother. We rented a different house. The whole time I couldn’t fight the haunting feeling that we were intruding upon another family’s memories.

Hidden Sights, Hidden Feelings

2009-02-12T17:57:00.000-08:00

While Woolf explicitly mentions only her work on To the Lighthouse in the personal diaries she kept during the General Strike, she also reveals in these worrisome journals the impressions, sensibilities, and sense of fear that guide "Street Haunting.” If World War I revealed uncertainty and madness in the state of the world, the General Strike revealed uncertainty and madness in Woolf's immediate context-- her beloved London. Gone are Mrs. Dalloway's flowing passages on skywriters, encounters with heads of state, or other such communal experiences. In "Street Haunting," this sense of British national pride is replaced by feelings of solitude and despair, and the vibrant imagery by grotesque figures and hidden "crevices." Rather than a mysterious and intriguing car that may hold the Prime Minister, in her diaries Woolf describes a "commonplace & official" voice reminding the Londoners in a "very trivial" way that the Prince of Wales is returning (woolfonline.com, personal diaries, “5th May 1926”).

Woolf encounters the strike with similar unease, feeling a similar sense of desolation. She writes, "...there is a brown fog; nobody is building; it is drizzling... There are no buses. no placards. no newspapers..." (“5th May 1926”). The strikers have cut off public transportation, the means of Elizabeth's foray into flaneuse-ing. Hence, any woman who wishes to have a wandering, solitary urban experience must instead stroll, like the narrator of "Street Haunting." One can imagine Woolf taking a stroll during this time of unrest, encountering strange rabblerousers, and marveling at the British working class that seems to have crawled out of the woodwork. As Woolf discovers with fright, if the poor are not driving the buses and building the homes, they gather in the public square. Suddenly, the modern urban world seems much more imposing, much more crowded, much more difficult to grasp within the conventional human understanding of the way the world, or the city, is supposed to work. As in Woolf's lengthy dissertations on the "dwarf" and the two blind men, London seems to her "tedious and depressing," while at the same time it presents an "unprecedented spectacle" (“5th May 1926”).

Woolf's diaries during this period illuminate the point of view of the narrator in "Street Haunting." Though Woolf may have supported the strikers in principle, she fills her diaries with an uncanny sense of fear and instability, rather than with socialist platitudes. "L.(eonard) & I quarreled last night," she writes, "I dislike the tub thumper in him; he the irrational Xtian in me" (“9th May 1926”). In this brief interlude, we understand that Woolf does not stand blindly behind Labor ambitions, and indeed, perhaps holds on to some of the flavor of her bourgeois upbringing. She concludes another entry, "Now to dine at the Commercio to meet Clive" ("7th May 1926"). While we would be unfair to expect Woolf to cease the activities of her normal life, Woolf here reveals that she is clearly not among those taking to the streets. Her following entry of May 20th, which mentions chess, tea, and poetry, suggests even more the objective, outside observer of "Street Haunting."

The conversation with Leonard also allows us to witness an instance that might drive Woolf, an "irrational" woman according to Leonard, to want to "obtain a pencil” (“Street Haunting”). Leonard unfairly attributes Woolf’s perspective purely to her fright, and to what he perceives as prudishness. At the same time, in the wake of the war, Woolf may be right to suggest that more violence and unrest will only make things worse. Woolf hence elucidates why a woman would then turn to her diary, or to a long walk through the dangerous but fascinating streets.

The Irresponsible Wanderer

2009-02-12T15:57:00.000-08:00

While Street Haunting is an essay about London, about its characters, it is also an essay about letting go of one’s identity and becoming, or rather realizing that each person is part of something larger. This, perhaps, is why the narrator’s gender and personal identity are so elusive at times, as she slips effortlessly into and out of other people’s lives and stories. Walking through London streets at night is not only amusing and entertaining for the narrator, but it is an escape, as she becomes part of each character and place she comes across.
After we leave our homes, which themselves have over time acquired our identities, Woolf writes, “We are no longer quite ourselves.” This shedding of our skin that we wear so proudly, or with shame, can be entirely liberating, as “who we are” is forgotten whilst shuffling through crowds of “anonymous trampers.” Clarissa Dalloway, felt comforted when she, “…felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere”(Woolf 167). This feeling of smallness, but also the feeling of being a part of everything can be a relief. It reveals for a moment that “our own temperaments” are not really our “own”, that we can toss them away.
Woolf writes, “But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others is broken…” When we leave our homes and the objects which sit in the glow of “the memories of our own experience”, our identities become vague and like puddy; we have nothing to support the claims that, “this is who I am,” no objects to use as proof. Immediately, Woolf’s narrator exalts at this moment thinking, “How beautiful a street is in winter!” Moments prior, the narrator says, “The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow,” as if staying true to one’s identity is a responsibility, as if shedding our skin completely is a childish, reckless act. The narrator’s excuse of going out to buy a pencil is significant, as she is still carrying out the responsibilities of her identity. Though we might attempt at times to completely rid ourselves of “ourselves”, be it, “banker, golfer, husband, father,” we do it hesitantly, not delving too deeply into the experience of another, knowing we should “be content still with surfaces only.” Woolf writes, “We halt at the door of the boot shop and make some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason…” And then, “…we may ask… ‘What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?” Rather than superficially and mockingly observing, I believe the narrator is deeply intrigued by the idea of being someone else- that instead of separating or distinguishing herself from this dwarf, she is blurring the lines by attempting to understand and determine her thoughts.
Though this essay reveals the differences of people, of genders, of classes, it also shows that, “we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run.” Like Clarissa Dalloway, the narrator of Street Haunting asks, “Am I here, or am I there?”
I believe the essay continues Clarissa Dalloway’s thought that, “… the part of us which appears, [is] so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide…”(Woolf 167).

Hey Neil Simon

2009-02-12T14:43:00.000-08:00

I'm aware that Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest alludes heavily to Mrs. Dalloway. As I read through "The Window" section of To the Lighthouse and got to know Mr. Ramsay, however, the narrator of The Mystery Guest and his sentimentality over the flowers rolled around in the back of my head, and I thought of the contrast between he and Ramsay. I also inexplicably felt the urge to go on YouTube and watch the opening theme to The Odd Couple.

The contrast between these two men is stark, to say the least. In the scene with the bouquet of roses, Bouillier's narrator is caught up in a Woolfian "moment of being." His language attempts the "purest ecstasy" that Woolf describes in her memoir "Sketches of the Past" (Moments of Being, 75). In that text, she writes, "I could spend hours trying to write that as it should be written, in order to give the feeling which is even at this moment very strong in me. But I should fail" (75). The protagonist of The Mystery Guest seems to be caught up in the same kind of sublimity:

Yes, suddenly it began to seem as though our separateness was bringing us back together, managing the impossible while we stood in front of that bouquet, in that silence. And during those freighted seconds everything grew more and more beautiful and harmonious and red and white and orange between us, and I wanted to believe in it... (78-79)

The beauty of the passage lies in the feeling of its transience, as if the narrator's happiness and comfort lasts only in front of that bouquet of roses. It reflects a level of observation and keen emotional intuition in him that is lost in most men. (I feel somewhat confident in the area of dudes and emotional expression.) In the grand scheme of things, however, the reader should be able to sense a certain melodrama in the narrator's placement of such import on a vase of flowers, as if they could actually "bring us back together."

On this note of constructive cynicism, the dissonant cadence of Felix Unger and Oscar Madison gnaws its way back up my spine as I turn away from Bouillier and back to To the Lighthouse. In a scene that I find quite poignant, Mrs. Ramsay is watching over James as he cuts pictures out of a catalogue, reassuring him that they will try to go to the lighthouse the next day. Enter Mr. Ramsay. Ever the pragmatist, he says, "James will have to write his dissertation one of these days," effectively ruining the moment and fueling James' hatred for his father (To the Lighthouse, 31). "There [isn't] the slightest possible chance that [you] could go to the Lighthouse tomorrow," Ramsay says later (31).

In terms of masculinity, Bouillier's storyteller and Mr. Ramsay provide a sharp counterpoint to one another. However, I think there are several reasons for this. To the Lighthouse was published in 1927, and it seems to me that in the character of Mr. Ramsay, the reader is meant to see the fading of the stern Victorian era; he is more of an uninvolved overseer of his family, rather than an affectionate father. He is also reminiscent of the dour Leslie Stephen, Woolf's father; this opinion is based on the knowledge I have from class, as well as from the reading of Virginia. Bouillier's The Mystery Guest, on the other hand, was published in 2004. Based on casual observation, Bouillier's rendition of a man in love makes me think that Zach Braff would be the protagonist of the film version of this novella; he's that guy who's constantly lovesick, and tries to sum up significant portions of his life with sprawling inner-monologues.

The clash between these two men is obvious. Mr. Ramsay shatters a potential "moment of being" with his practicality, while Bouillier's narrator is grasping for a "moment of being" where it seems one doesn't exist. It might be entertaining to watch the two of them share an apartment though.

Notebooks & Pencils

2009-02-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

I am not equating Joan Didion to the magnitude of Virginia Woolf (although I enjoy the works of both authors immeasurably). The writing styles are by no means identical; however, they share some similarities that I do not believe are a result of mere coincidence. While reading Woolf's, "Street Haunting: A London Adventure," a few select passages in Didion's well-known nonfiction essay, "On Writing A Notebook" unexpectedly came to mind. It occurred to me, that the same woman who would create buying a pencil after World War I into an occasion, would likely keep a notebook during the Vietnam War.

The narrator in "Street Haunting" meditates, "One is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime. It is about a woman called Kate that they are talking, how "I said to her quite straight last night . . . if you don't think I'm worth a penny stamp, I said . . ." But who Kate is, and to what crisis in their friendship that penny stamp refers, we shall never know; for Kate sinks under the warmth of their volubility; and here, at the street corner, another page of the volume of life is laid open by the sight of two men consulting under the lamp-post. They are spelling out the latest wire from Newmarket in the stop press news. Do they thin, then, that fortune will ever convert their rags into fur and broadcloth, sling them with watch-chains, and plant diamond pins where there is now a ragged open shirt? But the main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too fast to let us ask such questions" (Woolf).

This interrupted thought-manner of writing is mirrored in much of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion’s collective work. In "On Writing A Notebook," Didion recalls various single moments throughout her life that she captured in her journal. Those moments are not explained with the help of length anecdotes, but random phrases, years and names. Woolf’s "If you don’t think I’m worth a penny stamp," is Didion’s, "So what’s new in the whiskey business." Didion writes:

"So what's new in the whiskey business?" What could that possibly mean to you? To me it means a blonde in a Pucci bathing suit sitting with a couple of fat men by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Another man approaches, and they all regard one another in silence for a little while. "So what's new in the whiskey business?" one of the fat men finally says by way of welcome, and the blonde stands up, arches one foot and dips it in the pool, looking all the while at the cabana where Baby Pignatari is talking on the telephone. That is all there is to that, except that several years later I saw the blonde coming out of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York with her California complexion and a voluminous mink coat. In the harsh wind that day she looked old and irrevocably tired to me, and even the skins in the mink coat were not worked the way they were doing them that year, not the way she would have wanted them done, and there is the point of the story. For a while after that I did not like to look in the mirror, and my eyes would skim the newspapers and pick out only the deaths, the cancer victims, the premature coronaries, the suicides, and I stopped riding the Lexington Avenue IRT because I noticed for the first time that all the strangers I had seen for years - the man with the seeing-eye dog, the spinster who read the classified pages every day, the fat girl who always got off with me at Grand Central - looked older than they once had."

One hotel, one scene, one passerby Didion overhears, creates the very "fabricated lifetime" Woolf’s narrator is speaking of. In both passages there’s the men in conversation; there’s Kate and there’s the blonde. There’s capitalist and feminist undertones. There is the judgment. But more than that, there is the answer to Woolf. In "Street Haunting" there is too much visual stimulation to stop and ask questions with regard to what one is witnessing. Perhaps we can only ask the questions later on. Didion is writing her rereading of the notebook. She's had many of these "walks" and is now in a position to ask questions, to reflect on why she noticed the things she did or continues to. Both the narrator and Didion are affected by the same sights and remake the same sights. In a small way, Didion’s sad spinster is the narrator’s dwarf; her mink coat, the narrator’s diamond pins; her whiskey business, the narrator’s wire from Newmarket. And the reader is left to form their own opinions about the two women judging them.

More importantly, both authors are living in the mind frame of war. As a progressive woman and writer, Woolf is a form of counterculture in her own right, and in effect, the narrator of "Street Haunting" owns a small part of that. Didion happens to be a woman who embodies those qualities as well. She lived during the era that defined counterculture, the time to ask questions and demand answers. Whether it is the unique conditions these women worked under that is responsible for the minor resemblances, is something to think about. Whether Didion was influenced by Woolf, I do not know. Still, in essence, buying a pencil and writing a notebook can be one in the same.

Let's Do the Time Warp Again... A Review of "The Hours"

2009-02-12T09:55:00.000-08:00

The first time I watched Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” was a few years ago when I had absolutely no knowledge about Virginia Woolf or her work. Back then, I had really enjoyed the movie, mostly because I love almost any book or movie that threads together multiple story lines and time periods. Now that I have acquired much more knowledge (and by “much more” I mean “more than not having any”) about Woolf and the novel Mrs. Dalloway, I have a new-found appreciation for the film the second time around.
Throughout the movie, the audience follows the intertwining lives of three different women, one of whom is Virginia Woolf herself. The other two women add interesting depth to the story; one an unhappy housewife living in the 1950s, the other a woman throwing a party for her writer friend in the present day. Part of what makes the movie so complex and so enthralling is the way these two women reflect Woolf’s protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, for a modern audience. Clarissa Dalloway felt that her life had become trivial, and thus felt a certain kind of despair that her contribution to society had amounted to throwing parties for fellow socialites.
This kind of deep-rooted dissatisfaction for the direction her life had taken is seen in the women of “The Hours” as well. Just as Virginia Woolf feels confined and imprisoned by her life in the country, Laura Brown (the aforementioned housewife) feels imprisoned in her suburban environment. Laura lives a quiet, desperate life and consoles herself through reading; her current papery companion being Mrs. Dalloway. Although Laura Brown makes bolder choices than Clarissa made, her similarities to Clarissa are undeniable. Through her, we see that people like Clarissa can be found in the real world—and in a fairly modern world as well. The film does an excellent job of showing that the same sort of emotions Woolf may have felt while creating the character of Clarissa can translate into the emotions felt by a severely depressed housewife living just a few decades before our time.
Clarissa Vaughn obviously shares many qualities with Clarissa Dalloway, seeing as Vaughn is her present-day counterpart. What makes Clarissa Vaughn so fascinating is that although she is leading an alternative version of Clarissa Dalloway’s life (ie. living with Sally and reminiscing about her past with Richard) she is still the woman throwing parties, feeling a persistent sadness for her lost youth and happiness. This is seen mostly through her relationship with Richard in the film, and it appears that the characters of Richard and Peter are oddly combined within a single character in “The Hours.” Although, the character’s name is Richard, it seems that the kind of passion he feels for Clarissa Vaughn and the way she clings to Richard and their past is more reminiscent of the original Clarissa’s relationship with Peter. In any case, Clarissa Vaughn is the staggering reality that Woolf’s protagonist is just as likely and just as relevant a figure in our time as in Woolf’s time.
Overall, I would highly recommend watching the film because it offers very intriguing portrayals of Woolf’s life and the lives of alternative Clarissa Dalloways. If that isn’t convincing enough, there are also some plot twists you might want to check out that I shan’t give away for the sake of first-time viewers. = )

Close Reading, Street Haunting, A London Adventure

2009-02-09T15:18:00.000-08:00

Virginia Woolf's "Street Haunting, A London Adventure" provides a unique and detailed perspective of city life in London. As our narrator walks along the cobblestone streets, we are given glimpses into flower shops and book stores, bursting with light, and energy. Our narrator actively interacts very little in the story, but rather, interacts with everything, letting even the smallest moments of her evening walk wash over her. Woolf uses her extensive imagery to describe a snapshot of a city in the precise moment that our narrator is observing it. It is a winter evening in London and the flowers "burning" in the window, the woman trying on shoes, the blind men on the street, are all part the moment that Woolf attempts to capture. While the delicate and effusive language of the essay may lead one to believe that description is overly rosey in it's depiction, the portrayal of the street and it's people offers, instead, a realisticand truthful portrayel of the city and it's "haunters."

While reading this, I was reminded of a Truman Capote essay that I had read before called, quite simply, "Brooklyn." Like Woolf, Capote conducts a thorough observance of the streets of Brooklyn and the small things that make city life on this street and in this city what it is. I don't know if Woolf had any influence on Capote or if both writers simply shared the desire to put into the writing the mish- mash of people and things that they experienced everyday, but many of their descriptions are similar in how they examine the city they live in. In particular, both writers write prolifically on the general appearances, sounds, and smells of their neighborhoods. Woolf and Capote also masterly resist getting overly sentimental about their cities while maintaining a certain admiration for those with whom they share these busy streets. Woolf describes her fellow "haunters" as "men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph." Like Woolf, Capote also appreciates the "shabby" but undeniable pride of his fellow Brooklynites, describing his aging neighbor with ironic awe as she stands "shrouded in a sleazy kimono , her sunset colored hair falling Viking-fashion" (Capote 19). Both Woolf and Capote create reverent tributes to their respective cities without shielding the reader from reality but, rather, embracing the tattered people and things that populate them.

Like Woolf, Capote uses his essay to freeze a moment in a city before it changes. Both authors write about city life in an honest way, depicting for the reader the regularity of beauty if one takes a moment to notice it, especially in the people who bustle by you.

A Rose by Any Other Name...

2009-02-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

Excepting the commonality of the name, I could have been named Rose…rose, that gorgeous flower.

As I was going a little crazy trying to make sense of the flower images in Mrs. Dalloway, I decided to look up what other people thought about it. I was shocked but I was not at all satisfied by my research. From the deciphered meaning that “Woolf uses flowers to signal that an erotic experience between women is immanent” (p.60)in Communication and Women's Friendships: Parallels and Intersections in Literature and Life by Ward & Mink to the meaning from Quamar Naheed’s D. H. Lawrence: Treatment of Nature in Early Novels that “flowers and green fields in the novel again and again symbolise peace and contentment" (p.13), I didn’t feel like these interpretations spoke for Woolf’s obsession with flowers. Therefore, I abandoned my search on flowers and focused on roses. I specifically looked at Septimus because I like him.

After Rezia is disturbed by Septimus trying to throw them under an on-coming omnibus or train, both Rezia and Septimus ponder their miseries. Septimus wonders why his life has been spared and “his weakness” (p.68) pardoned. He and Rezia are on an outing to Regent’s Park and he listens while slowly becoming lost in his thoughts.

"Now he withdraws up into the snows, and roses hang about him—the thick red roses which grow on my bedroom wall, he reminded himself.” .” ~ p. 68

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. USA: Harvest Book and Hogarth 1981

The image of the blanketing, enveloping cold clashes and enhances the red rose image. The snow is white, frigidly enveloping, while the roses are described as a red comfort. The roses protectively cushion Septimus from the snow with their red amassing presence. Yet, the roses with soft petals and searing red warmth appear to be protective but also to be harming. Sure their beauty is reassuring but roses do have thorns. They can hurt the unwary who tries to grasp their beauty.

I think this might reflect the reality of life. Life can be beautiful and damning. Some people reflect more on the bad side of life and others on the good side of life. For Septimus, the balance of the good and the bad became skewed. We see him tortured by life and looking forward to death but we also see the dead making his life agonizing to live. He could have focused on the comforting aspects of flowers while displacing danger from the thorns to the snow. He could also be trying to ignore feeling by blocking out the prick of the thorns. His apathy to the thorns and coldness of the snow might be his way of realizing life’s dangers but protecting himself with a weak, snow and rose barrier.

It brings new thought to stop and smell the roses; Septimus envelopes himself in them.

Darkness and Being Alone

2009-01-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

"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.

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.

The Stifling of the Soul

2009-01-27T07:52:00.000-08:00

“The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be. The candle was half burnt down and she had read deep in Baron Marbot’s Memoirs. She had read late at night of the retreat from Moscow. For the House sat so long that Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. And really she preferred to read of the retreat from Moscow” (Woolf, 31).

I felt compelled by Virginia Woolf’s own reading tactics to lightly research General Baron de Marbot and the historical influence of his Memoirs, in order to get a clearer sense of its literary purpose in Mrs. Dalloway aside from its War-oriented connotation. Why a Memoir? Why Baron’s? Why does Woolf mention that Mrs. Dalloway “preferred to read” at all? And what does it mean for the rest of the novel?

According to the words of the translator, Oliver C. Colt, the Memoirs “are merely reminiscences of an old soldier, […] who came from a family which might be described as landed gentry. His father served in the bodyguard of Louis XV and later in the Republican army. Marbot himself was a soldier from the age of 17 and fought in the wars of the Republic and the campaigns of Napoleon. His memoirs were written for his family and his intimate circle, without thought of publication, and it was not until after his death in 1854 that his family were persuaded to offer the manuscript to publishers” (The Memoirs of General Baron De Marbot).

At this point, Mrs. Dalloway isn’t reading about Napoleon’s domination of Austria or Britain’s continuous fight against the new French Empire, but she is reading the retreat from Eastern Europe, a very self-defeating and inglorious moment. Mrs. Dalloway rather read than sleep undisturbed. Perhaps she is more disturbed when she isn’t reading. She rather read the lines of someone else’s awful life, a soldier who experienced multiple deaths in his family, than turn inward. There is this sense that Mrs. Dalloway’s greatest fear might just be looking at herself only to find nothing, the complete nothingness of Clarissa. She rather read De Marbot’s “Crossing of the Ukra” or the “Death of [his] Brother Felix.” There’s this emphasis on the memoir, the reading of life, as long as it’s someone else’s.

The passage shows us that Mrs. Dalloway reads for leisure. Subsequently, we learn that Sally Seton played a great role in the fashioning of her literary preferences. And we are now aware that Mrs. Dalloway used to read, and she still does.

Peter Walsh’s recollection of Mrs. Dalloway provides a background and characterization of the protagonist that we couldn’t know without his historical eye. Peter begins to criticize Richard Dalloway, and like their mutual old friend, Sally Seton, feels that Richard has indeed stifled Clarissa’s soul. He says, “But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How could she let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes …” (Woolf, 75).

Shakespeare is yet another literary reference that manages to create a deep divide between Mrs. Dalloway and her husband. While Richard detests Shakespeare, Clarissa chooses to use a line in Shakespeare’s Othello to describe, what appears to be, the most majestic moment of her life: coming to the realization that she is in love with Sally Seton:

“But she could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling- Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it all, all because was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton” (Woolf, 35).

The literary references in the novel help demonstrate how little soul is left in Mrs. Dalloway, how little she recognizes Clarissa, who might be seen as responsible for that casualty, and how important she feels it is to her living, to avoid the opportunity of self-examination.

On the Potential of Limitations

2009-01-27T05:18:00.000-08:00

Whether an author structures his or her work in a traditional manner or diverts from an established format to experiment with its boundaries, a novel must begin in some way. Seeing as I can't even decide how to begin a post, I imagine that deciding on an opening sentence must be one of the most difficult, and intimidating, parts of writing a novel.

Woolf begins Mrs. Dalloway in a striking way: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." This opening sentence is short, crisp and assertive; there is an action and a specification that "the" flowers will be bought. It's also a very powerful way of introducing the actual body of a novel entitled Mrs. Dalloway and its title character. However, the magnitude of the declaration seems to shrink when the reader realizes that Mrs. Dalloway just declared that she would buy flowers, which seem rather trivial and easy to acquire. There is a discourse in the opening sentence that makes the reader linger; the content of the opening doesn't reflect the potential for achievement that is portrayed through the assertive tone of the declaration.

This opening immediately reminded me of the first sentence of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, which begins with the assertion, "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day." Perhaps this is a strange parallel since it's negative, but, seeing that Woolf was heavily influenced by the female writers of Victorian Literature, a sense of similarity exists. The opening of Jane Eyre seems to allude to the weather, but, upon closer examination of Jane's situation, the short sentence becomes remarkably dense; rather than simply not going for a walk that day, Eyre doesn't even have the possibility of going outside. This limitation upon possibility reflects Jane's lack of mobility in Victorian England due to her low position in the social hierarchy as an orphan and a woman. Bronte's choice of opening her feminist novel is effective because the extent of Jane Eyre's immobility is introduced in the initial sentence as a theme that will challenge Jane Eyre throughout the novel.

Mrs. Dalloway seems indebted to the Victorian tradition of female authors, such as Bronte and Austen, who have their heroines assert themselves within the social limitations of their society. However, Woolf seems to challenge her title character further than Bronte since the novel is entitled with the social salutation for Clarissa as a married woman. Her limitations seem to exist in relation to the bounds of marriage and the act of losing one's maiden identity when a woman accepts her husband's social label.

However, something is achieved through Mrs. Dalloway's declaration that she will buy THE flowers HERSELF. This initial line declares a goal that the character will attempt to carry out throughout the novel. While Mrs. Dalloway completes her task of buying flowers well before noon, the larger task at hand, or her party, seems to be the goal symbolized by the flowers. Perhaps throwing a party is rather trivial, but its an action that Mrs. Dalloway carries through. Clarissa Dalloway seems strong because she acknowledges the limitations that British society places upon women, takes what she can, and becomes dedicated to stretching the potential of these limitations. The opening line emphasizes the active element of Mrs. Dalloway; while the other major characters of the novel are haunted by their past, Mrs. Dalloway actively prepares for her party.

Philosopher Robert Audi, who developed the Theory of Action, proposes that people actually utilize their choices more when they have fewer options to choose from. Perhaps this concept can be applied to a reading of Mrs. Dalloway, who, limited by her role in society, regards throwing a party as a way to assert herself within her time. While today's social mindset is that subdued women in past patriarchal societies should be pitied because of their lack of possibilities, perhaps Mrs. Dalloway encourages one to celebrate those women who took their limitations and found new potential within the boundaries.

My hands are small I know...

2009-01-26T21:33:00.000-08:00

My cousin subscribes to a peculiar and aggravating kind of feminism. (He calls it feminism anyway.) He says he judges women harshly because they are made of better stalk than men. He is jealous of them because they are morally superior and more capable. Apparently, if you worship women, you can blame them. If they can save you, they are responsible for your demise. I've encountered this attitude elsewhere, mostly in emo music and emo boys. I was surprised to find it in two of Woolf's characters, Septimus and Peter. Of course, they are not feminists (much like my cousin), but they invest women with the power of salvation--an oppressive expectation to lay on a mere mortal. A lovely hand motif helps illustrate my point.

Septimus marries Lucrezia so that she will cure him of his inability to feel (86). One night it caused him to panic and "he asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the gay, the frivolous, with those little artist's fingers that she would hold up and say 'it is all in them.' Silk, feathers, what not were alive to them" (87). Poor Lucrezia didn't know she was volunteering to bring Septimus back to the land of the living. Her hands could make hats, not cure PTSD, depression, or madness. The weight of this expectation leads to the symbolic undoing of their marriage. Her hand becomes too thin for her wedding ring and with that, Septimus declares himself the lord of all men and free from his marriage (67). So much for Lucrezia’s lively hands.

As Septimus gives up on his marriage, Peter is nearby dreaming of women. He invests the trees with womanhood and notices how they then dispense charity, comprehension, and absolution (57). Continuing the revelry, he imagines a female shape being "sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands compassion, comprehension, absolution” (57). Even the hands of a fantastic woman can cure! Earlier he had seen a woman and imagined that her cloak was opening like "arms that would open and take the tired" (53). For Peter, femininity and sainthood are one and the same. We’ve seen what those expectations did to Lucrezia. Poor Daisy seems headed for a similar fate…unless she takes one of those hands and gives Peter a good slap.

The faith that these men put in women is oppressive but the bit about the water woman and her magnificent hands is emo-tastic. Couple that with Peter’s lament about Clarissa’s ability to make him suffer and we’ve got a hit. But if girls rule and boys drool, why are girls oppressed? I think Woolf is trying to say that girls are people too and canonizing them doesn’t do anyone any good.

I forgot my keys--a review of "Virginia"

2009-01-26T21:08:00.000-08:00

I knew I was going to be late. My miscalculations about subway times, Google’s microscopic map on my phone and the frequency with which I am usually on time (zero.), made me sure that I would be late leaving (forgetting my coat, my keys, my lip balm), have to go back twice, wait forever on a local train, get lost walking five blocks in the wrong direction and probably fall down a couple of times for good measure only to arrive at the Drama Bookshop just as "Virginia" was wrapping up. This did not happen. I was on time and the Bookshop had been situated conveniently, obviously for sillies just like me, so that I could see it from the sidewalk in front of Port Authority.

I have a soft spot for staged readings and workshopped plays. Usually in small spaces, most of these plays don’t even get produced and, for the ones that do, there’s a selfish satisfaction in being able to say, “I saw it first.” It also lets the audience share in the creative exchange happening between the playwright, the writers and the actors. "Virginia" isn’t new at all--it was first produced in 1985-- so there was a different sort of dialogue going on. This one was between the actors, the directors, and Virginia Woolf herself.

With four people and three chairs, the cast of "Virginia" was able to create an entire world. I knew exactly who was who (as some have mentioned before me, two of the actors were multi-cast) and where the characters were. It would have been so easy for the actors with multiple roles to play each the same way and rely on the text of the play to speak for them. Instead, they changed their voices and bodies for each character—the high, tense voice of Virginia’s mother became the sultry flirtatious one of Vita Sackville-West. I could see that everyone had done an incredible amount of research, but especially Kris Lundberg, who had taken up the daunting task of playing Virginia Woolf. I can’t imagine how taxing it would be to play someone so complex—and so real. Everyone knows about Virginia Woolf’s mental illness and suicide, there are expectations, but to go inside her head takes bravery and to do such a character justice takes true talent. Lundberg did an amazing job.

I wish I had more, or anything, to criticize about the performance or direction, but I just don’t. Some of the other reviewers have mentioned that the play didn’t make Virginia, or the audience, choose between Virginia’s love for Leonard and her love for Vita. Virginia loved them equally, but differently. At the Q & A after the show, one of the speakers (probably Dr. Fernald) mentioned that Leonard is probably the reason why Virginia lived for as long as she did. This doesn’t discredit her relationship with Vita who, in the play, seemed to bring out a different side of Virginia—one that was more carefree, but also more reckless.

"Virginia" was a beautiful way to honor Woolf’s birth, and to shed some light on the complexities of Woolf’s life and loves. It gave me a fuller appreciation of Woolf, but also made me desperate to get inside her head, to read all her diaries and letters and novels and to know as much as possible, to get the entire story. I look forward to the day when "Virginia" is made into a full production and I can experience the play in its full glory.

The Flame and the Flower

2009-01-26T20:53:00.000-08:00

Fresh off her morning shopping jaunt through the streets of London, Clarissa Dalloway returns home to further prepare for her party. She scales the stairs of her home and makes her way up to the room of her own for her afternoon nap. Woolf describes her ascent and consequent restlessness:

“Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she
went upstairs,paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There
was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was
an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must
put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe…” (31).

Woolf chooses to describe Clarissa as retreating to her attic room as a nun would to her cloister. It seems to be a perfectly appropriate comparison for our rigid and prim heroine as we are able to imagine her reverently roaming the corridors and stairwells of the Dalloway estate. Then, Woolf throws the reader a curve-ball as she goes on to further compare the protagonist to a “child exploring a tower.” This simile seems to be the anti-thesis of the first. The mention of the exploring child evokes a sense of lighthearted deviance and mischief. The child exploring the tower embraces his or her curiosity; he or she indulges the urge to discover something previously unknown. Dissimilar to the child, the image of the withdrawing nun suggests repression of irreverent impulses and obedience to convention. To liken Clarissa to both is to illustrate her central conflict, her struggle with the duality of her personality. The reader gets the sense of her constant struggle to compromise her inner desires with her outward appearance.
While the adventurous child and the quiet nun are wildly different in their behavior, they share the unifying characteristic of intact virtue. Both battling sides of Clarissa are represented as virginal and sexually innocent. Woolf goes on to describe Clarissa’s late morning nap: “So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet” (31). Mrs. Dalloway lays on her “narrow” bed tossing, turning, and ruminating about her sexual dissatisfaction. She struggles to kick off the claustrophobia of the virtue that she believes clung to her long after she left the marriage-bed.
As she has a daughter, Mrs. Dalloway is most certainly not a virgin; however, it is likely that while she physically let go of her virginity, she feels emotionally unfulfilled by her previous sexual experiences with Richard. She goes on to think about her long-ago relationship with the wild and sassy Sally Seton and has a sudden “illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed.” Is the enlightened vision of the fiery perennial Clarissa’s way of vividly expressing her lesbianism in terms that she can fully comprehend with regard to herself? Is it a way of articulating her vague yet passionate feelings towards other women? Is Clarissa truly tormented because of her unfulfilled lesbianism, or is she just generally dissatisfied with her life as a married woman? After all, she feels the same excitement after her surprise visit with Peter Walsh in her attic room: “she heard a hand upon the door. She made to hide her dress, like a virgin protecting chastity, respecting privacy” (40). When he leaves her, she thinks that if she had married him, she would have been privy to the “gaiety” (47) she felt during their brief meeting everyday. The wide-eyed child and the hushed nun come together on the field of innocence, yet somehow manage to clash on the front of Clarissa’s mind. She is neither, but she remains both. She desires to explore the tower, but she requires her withdrawal into subdued snobbishness.

"Mrs. Dalloway"

2009-01-26T20:43:00.000-08:00

Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs.Dalloway” focuses on Mrs.Dalloway’s day as
she prepares to host a party. Mrs.Dalloway is a middle-aged woman who looks back at her youth and romances in this novel set during WWI.

When we read Mrs.Dalloway we can see the effects of WWI with the character Septimus Smith, who suffers from depression. But we can see that high society isn’t as affected by the war as much as others: throwing parties and gossiping.

At the beginning of the book Clarissa sees her old flame Peter on the street and reminisces about their romance. Although she is 52 years-old, she sounds like a giggly teenage girl with a crush when she thinks about him. On page eight it says, “that he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the matters of an English gentleman, that was only her dear Peter at his worst; and he could be intolerable, he could be impossible but adorable to walk with on a morning like this.” This shows that she still has feelings for Peter but also a deep feeling of animosity towards him as well. Clarissa was upset that he married an Indian woman, but she felt sorry for him since he never did any of the things he dreamed of doing. But when she compares her husband with Peter, it’s almost as if she regrets marrying her husband. When it says that she would still find herself arguing with herself in the park over whether or not she did the right thing by not marrying Peter, it’s almost as if she’s having a midlife crisis. Like when a middle-aged man, who is having a midlife crisis, leaves his wife and finds a woman half his age.

In the book Septimus, who suffers from depression, is painted as a mentally-ill, helpless man who needs the constant assistance of his wife. His wife is very loving and helpful. On page 31 it says, “For Dr. Holmes had told her to make her husband (who had nothing seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside of himself.” But Septimus did suffer from depression and that is evident when he commits suicide.

The Car

2009-01-26T19:44:00.000-08:00

Woolf’s works always leave me with the impression that a path has just been lighted for me. Yet, I am not exactly certain of the path or its end(s). For example, the mysterious car appears to me to be an emptiness and disconnection of the post-WWI society. The people watching the car pass are not certain who is in the car yet their interest is immediately drawn to it. They circulate rumors and begin to revere the car, the imagined passenger, and the relation to the British Empire. Their uncertainty is universal in that no one is certain of the identity of the passenger; “But nobody knew whose face had been seen…Nobody knew.” They, nevertheless, argue about their failing certainties, trying to assert their evidence as greater than that of another’s.

Furthermore, the spectators grasp the empty and intangible to fill the malformed voids that the war crafted. Woolf writes, “passing invisibly, inaudible, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon the hills…mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide.” The spectators experienced an irreligious and, perhaps, nonspiritual reverence for their empire. I would equate their reverence with nationalist blind faith or awe. They saw the car as a representation of the British Empire. Perhaps, the Empire is the lasting impression of grandeur, seemingly untouched by the hardships and difficulties of regular life.

However, while the spectators are united in their wonderment and uncertainty they are also divided in their inability to communicate or experience the car passing as a whole. While the mysterious car passes them by with closed blinds, Clarissa and her fellow onlookers are described as straightening themselves. They try to present an image of austerity and “extreme dignity” but stand as disconnected individuals. As I pointed out earlier, everyone has their own ideas as to who might be the passenger and Woolf does not mention that anyone voices any agreement. They only agree that the car is transporting royalty based on fleeting perceptions because few saw the face and they disagree on the sex of the individual, as well as the identity. Clarissa’s knowledge that the car contained British royalty was even based on a guess, “Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she had seen something.” Though they could not quite make sense of it, all the spectators felt something. They were all at a standstill and suspended in the moment but not in time. The readers are told, “Clarissa was suspended.” We know that Septimus’s paranoia places him at the center of the event and that the “tall men, men of robust physique, [and] well dressed men” position themselves awkwardly to receive the passing car “for reasons difficult to discriminate.”

Nonetheless, the descriptions transcend the explanations of the moment to capture the conflicting and confusing feelings of the spectators. I interpret the descriptions of the spectators reverence and awe as empty tradition, serving only to remind one of the former years of grandeur and current decadence. The reader is given the impression that the whole procession (the straightening and attentiveness) was performed “as their ancestors had done before them.” Also, the car or the Queen as the representation of the British Empire appears as a relic (“the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time”). The car creates a nostalgic haze, “The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple.” It seems to call on better times when the Empire held more global prestige and a better grasp on its imperial endeavors.

Defenestration

2009-01-26T19:16:00.000-08:00

"Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping indeed from foot to foot, he considered Mrs. Filmer's nice clean bread knife with "Bread" carved on the handle" (149).

This is easily the most heartbreaking sentence I've ever read. Unlike Bradshaw and Holmes, who never seem to show any humanity or empathy from their high perch, just before Septimus leaps from his, he cannot help but spare Mrs. Filmer's grandmotherly cutlery from sharing his gruesome fate. The contrast here is frightening; these doctors can neither understand nor care about the patient entrusted to them, but the supposed mad man can, in the final seconds of his life, show nothing but compassion for this stranger and concern for affects.

Holmes rushes up the staits, never doubting that he knows best as he pushes Rezia aside and barrels into the room. He never considers that his violent and unwelcome entrance may cause rather than present Septimus' death. He also does a lot of talking, and everything he says is false; he does not "come as a friend", and Septimus is neither "In a funk", nor a "coward". Despite all of his pronouncements, his words contain not a single morsel of truth; rather, after all his speech, he can only say to himself that he has no idea "why the devil [Septimus] did it" (150). Holmes is, thus, either lying to himself or exceptionally stupid.

Unlike the doctors, Septimus and Rezia are able to move throughout the scene and think correctly without speaking; Rezia does not say anything, rather, "she saw; she understood". Septimus does not need to speak, but rather is able to make a series of rational and empathic decisions in the moments before his suicide. Whereas Holmes has nothing but bluster and ignorance, coupled with the need to pronounce his thoughts on the world, Rezia and Septimus' quiet manner allow them insight and agency. By giving up the ability and conquering the need to conquer and colonize with speech, Septimus has gained a greater empathy and agency than the quacks who drive him out the window.

I see signs now all the time*...

2009-01-26T18:23:00.000-08:00

When I was a little girl, I thought my mother created the world for me.

She died a few months after my first birthday, so I didn't remember her at all. I relied instead on the stories of my family to know my mother. Perhaps it was a result of their firm Catholic upbringing or maybe it's just what you tell a young child who is missing a parent, but my family taught me to believe that she was in Heaven, looking down from above, still helping me and guiding me, from all the way up in the clouds. I was certain she was an angel and no one corrected me.

After much deliberation and examination of scholarly texts, namely my children's Bible, I concluded that if my mother was indeed an angel, she could communicate with me, like the angels in the Bible who brought messages to Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds. So I waited for my mother to appear in a blaze of light and glory, with wings and a halo and a long white robe, with a message for me. But she didn't come and I was puzzled, because I had been so certain she had a lot of things to tell me: about how nice it was living in Heaven, what God was like, whether Jesus still had the holes in his hands and feet, if the angels sang everyday or just on Sundays, how to be good--you know, the things that mothers tell you.

I remained puzzled until one cool summer night. My father and I had just driven out to the house in Long Island for the weekend--it was dark when we arrived and I was half-asleep. My father pulled me gently out of the car and set me on the driveway. I was too tired to move, so I just stood there and looked at the stars and then it hit me. "Daddy," I said, "Daddy, look at the stars. Mommy put them there for me. She made the stars like that. She's saying hello." I don't remember what my father said to this, only that he smiled and lifted me up so I could get a better look.

From that point on, I was convinced that my mother left unspoken messages for me, hidden in the fabric of everyday life. To other people, they were ordinary things, but to me, they were extraordinary. Only I knew that the bird that sang outside my window in the early morning was a song from my mother. Only I knew that my mother communicating with me by the way the world smelled after the first April rain. Only I knew that the warm sunlight which fell through the trees was her way of embracing me. Only I knew that her bright orange tiger lilies against our white picket fence meant something more. I realized that my mother left signs for me everywhere, in everything. I just had to see them.

I don't remember when I outgrew this way of thinking, when I stopped living in a world where everything was loaded with meaning. But I haven't thought about this for a long time. Mrs. Dalloway has reminded me of my convictions about my mother's signs as a little girl. More specifically, Septimus Warren Smith has reminded me of this strange aspect of my childhood, in his lucid insanity, where he interprets everything as a sign:

So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intentions to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! (212)**

Septimus notices the extraordinary in the ordinary. Everything is of significance to him, everything has a message which needs to be communicated to the masses. The smoke letters in the sky, an ad for toffee, are beautiful to him, and are signs that promise to "provide him" with more beauty forever. He understands the meaning behind the smoke letters, even though he can't read the language yet (whether this is in reference to the fact that the smoke letters have not finished spelling out the word "toffee" yet or whether Septimus simply believes it is written in a language he cannot understand I do not know)--he sees significance in them that the sane people around him don't. They are too busy straining to spell out the word, instead of "looking merely" like Septimus, who perceives he understands "their intentions."

In his altered mental state, Septimus experiences revelations, which he notes "on the back of envelopes" (215). These revelations include, "Men must not cut down trees. There is a God...Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known," (215). Septimus hears messages from singing birds, he sees the wickedness of people by simply walking past them in the street, he learns profound truths by the voices rustling above his head. The world of Septimus Warren Smith is a world where everything is charged with meaning; it is the world of the insane. He sees signs and messages and profound truths in the mundane.

As we discussed in class, Mrs. Dalloway examines how people who never meet can be connected and have the same thoughts--but at the same time, Septimus Smith is a testament to the fact that people can look at the same world and come away with vastly different conclusions. What his wife sees as a toffee ad, Septimus sees as a promise of enduring beauty. Mrs Dalloway offers a world viewed from the sane and the insane, juxtaposes and contrasts these two points of view.

I for one, find the world of Septimus Warren Smith to be a good deal more beautiful than that of Mrs. Dalloway's, of Peter Walsh's--a good deal more beautiful and a good deal more terrifying. Being able to see signs in the most prosaic things, in ordinary nature, lends an air of purpose to the often random universe we seem to inhabit; yes, you can find truth in this world, if only you'd sit and listen.

Yes, you can find truth, beauty, messages from lost mothers, and meaning, if only you'd sit and listen. If only you'd sit and look.

*The title of this blog is taken from a line in the Bloc Party song "Signs"

**Professor Fernald, this quote absolutely refuses to be block-quoted--it won't stay tabbed, so I bolded it out of desperation.

"...this question of love... this falling in love with women."

2009-01-26T16:29:00.000-08:00

As I watched the staged reading of, Virginia, the portrayal of Woolf’s relationship with Vita reminded me of the love between Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton. I believe that in this instance of, Mrs Dalloway, Woolf’s voice is most clearly heard, as she, herself, experienced a relationship quite similar to the relationship of Sally and Clarissa. It was through the performances that I could grasp the importance of Vita’s and Virginia’s relationship, that I could further understand that, “something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.(34)”

Undoubtedly, the fictional relationship between Clarissa and her friend, and Woolf’s love affair have their differences. One might assume that Woolf’s real life affair was more sexual, that Clarissa’s and Sally’s relationship was hardly an affair. Still, in the play, Virginia, there was certainly allusion and ambiguity when portraying the relationship. Were they sexual lovers? Were they simply very close friends? I found the same allusion in the descriptions of Sally and Clarissa’s relationship. When the moment finally comes along, when, “Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips,” the women are interrupted by Peter. It’s unclear whether or not this is the most it comes to. We can make our own conclusions about what these relationships consisted of, but none the less, this love for Vita, for another woman, is imbedded in Woolf's writing, and therefore could certainly be the inspiration for the relationship between Clarissa and Sally.

The brilliant portrayals of Virginia and Vita revealed Virginia as more timid around Vita, certainly in awe of Vita, possibly even more attached than Vita was to Virginia. Woolf writes, “…all that evening she could not take her eyes off of Sally.(35)” While reading, I could not help but imagine Woolf in the same position, surrounded by potential husbands, and pressures, and expectations, and oddly not being able to take her eyes off of a woman. In the play, Vita was portrayed as more flirtatious than Virginia, who seemed less in control of herself when Vita was around. In these moments, Virginia didn’t argue, didn’t quarrel. Instead, she blushed and seemed incredibly affected by Vita. With this said, Vita seems similar to Sally, who’s, “power was amazing, her gift, her personality.” Additionally, in, Virginia, Leonard is shown acting jealously, at one moment telling Vita to stay away from Virginia- that Virginia is ill and Vita is not helping. Vita is insulted and says that he can not take Virginia away from her. We find this jealously of a man when Peter interrupts Clarissa’s and Sally’s moment alone. Woolf writes, “She felt not only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated; she felt his hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their companionship. (39)”

It seems plausible that, “this question of love… this falling in love with women” is found in Mrs. Dalloway because of Woolf’s own experiences, her own questioning (35). Clarissa’s love for Sally sprung from a deep connection, wildly different from the attraction of a man to a woman; instead this love is based upon “purity… integrity”, “a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up”, and we can assume this is how her own love affair began as well (37). These moments where Woolf describes Clarissa’s love for Sally seem especially genuine, especially personal, as her love for Vita was undeniably strong and influential. “Had not that, after all, been love?”

Synchronicity is Not a Coincidence

2009-01-26T15:41:00.000-08:00

“They always had the queer power of communicating without words. She knew directly he criticized her. Then she would do something quite obvious to defend herself, like this fuss with the dog—but it never took him in, he always saw through Clarissa. Not that he said anything, of course; just sat looking glum. It was the way their quarrels often began” (60).

Woolf focuses a large part of her literary endeavor in Mrs. Dalloway on describing the mental states of her characters. In order to convey how deeply World War I has wounded humanity's collective consciousness, its understanding of itself and of morality, she details what occurs in her characters' minds, as much as in their worlds. (Indeed, it is interesting to count the instances of the word “thought" on a single page, especially in Peter's passages.) However, Woolf often emphasizes a particular element of these descriptions-- the instances when characters seem to telepathically share a thought or mental perception. In these moments, it is almost as if the characters have a sort of supernatural power, like Darl in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, who sees in his mind events that occur in distant places. I initially thought of two terms to describe this phenomenon: coincidence, and synchronicity. I then realized that the two words that had chosen me were opposites, rather than synonyms. Does Woolf simply mean to emphasize the characters' similarities, or even suggest that this is a commonplace and unremarkable occurrence (coincidence), or does she mean to write that these thoughts occur in the characters experiencing them as a result of the same external forces acting upon them (synchronicity)? Woolf confirms that she undoubtedly intends the latter.

Woolf extends this synchronicity to the characters' interactions. As she writes of Clarissa and Peter, "They always had this queer power of communicating without words" (60). In the midst of Woolf's challenging prose, this device almost seems to serve as an apology for the novel's lack of dialogue. More importantly, though, Woolf communicates that the characters are able to convey their feelings to one another, to determine whether to be empathetic or not, through the force of sharing a mental wavelength. This is a very unusual form of action for novels, even modernist novels, which usually develop relationships using dialogue and/or action, rather than description. "She knew directly he criticized her," and "He always saw through Clarissa" (60). Woolf emphasizes the characters' different points of view, but uses vague verbs to indicate that Clarissa and Peter have a common understanding—they share a discourse that exists outside of language. Woolf does not explain how Clarissa knew this, “directly.” Does Peter say it to her directly?

Woolf writes of Clarissa, "Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct" (4). Similarly, in Peter's passages, Woolf builds a character with an extraordinarily keen sense of perception, who deconstructs the social pretenses of Clarissa's world with aplomb. Septimus, too, shares in this heightened sensitivity, perceiving "inexhaustible charity" in a toffee advertisement (22). Though his observation seems to be a humorous aberration of the theme, Woolf nonetheless uses it for the same higher purpose-- to convey that this is a shared "power," a shared experience—at least it is so between the characters Woolf cares about.

However, Woolf includes an ominous detail about Septimus that makes this power seem more like a curse than a gift--"He had fought," she writes, "he was brave" (23). Similarly, when Peter pursues a woman in the streets, she seems to whisper, calling him "You," a "private name," which was formerly limited to "his own thoughts" (53). And so, as in As I Lay Dying, with this hypersensitivity comes an increased susceptibility to mental corruption, to obsessive compulsive tics and sublimations like Clarissa’s fussing with the dog, and indeed to mental illness. Woolf's synchronicities have endless significance, but at their core, perhaps, is a human psyche disturbed by something which we might now call post-traumatic stress disorder, except in this case on a grand, civilizational scale.

There's a War On

2009-01-26T15:11:00.000-08:00

Being young in a dynamic city with days full of things to do, I rarely stop and read the front section of the Times from cover to cover anymore, something I used to enjoy every morning in high school. Even worse, I sometimes forget that our country is at war.

One evening last spring, as I was making my way home for Easter, I decided to pick up an issue of Rolling Stone to occupy me as my flight out of JFK was delayed. I stumbled upon Jenny Eliscu's piece entitled "The Troubled Homecoming of the Marlboro Marine." Before then, I followed the war as it was developing in Iraq, but I hadn't contemplated things like Stop Loss or PTSD. I became quite angry as I read the story of Blake Miller, a man who has become something of an icon for striking up a cigarette during a brief respite at the battle of Fallujah. The distant, forlorn look in Miller's eyes, Eliscu writes, has been misconstrued by the American public as a triumphant gaze. Miller came home burdened by what he was forced to do in Iraq, and he now occupies his time in a motorcycle club, drinking, and smoking packs of cigarettes a day, having given up on his counseling for PTSD.

As I read Woolf's portrayal of the shell-shocked Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, I was reminded of the Marlboro Marine. Although Miller has to deal with the red tape of the VA, I suppose he is fortunate that he has some means of obtaining medication or therapy. This isn't the case for Septimus. In my reading, I found an oscillation in the narrator's depiction of the relationship between Septimus and Lucrezia, which I do not believe is sympathetic to Septimus' plight. He comes across as insane, though "Dr. Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him," while Lucrezia's melancholy in England seems justified because of his psychosis (65).

"Every one has friends who were killed in the war. Every one gives up something when they marry. She had given up her home. She had come to live here, in this awful city. But Septimus let himself think about horrible things, as she could too, if she tried. He had grown stranger and stranger."

(64-65)

This passage illustrates the lack of understanding of the emotional burdens that soldiers carry. To Lucrezia, Septimus "let himself" be haunted by the memory of the war, and of his dead comrade, Evans. In spite of her Italian heritage, Lucrezia ironically comes across as quite British in her perspective; she is stoic and pragmatic. It is as if she says to Septimus, "Buck up. This is an ordeal we've all been through." She too could "think about horrible things," but she knows that this mindset is fruitless. Perhaps this is why she finds Septimus odd; in her view, he freely gives himself over to his delusions.

I don't blame Lucrezia for her view of Septimus. In fact, because she experienced the war as closely as he did, I see her as strong, courageous, and admirable. Her feeling of "suffering" is justified, I think, by her ignorance of the real psychological trauma in her husband (64). Yet, because of the times in which we live, I couldn't help but read Septimus in a more sympathetic light, not "strange," but damaged. His delusions are understandable and heartbreaking. The fictional Septimus, or the real-life Blake Miller ought to remind us that, for those involved, a war doesn't really end with a ceasefire.

The Hours & Mrs. Dalloway

2009-01-26T11:13:00.000-08:00

I have read Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" many times and its treatment of "Mrs. Dalloway" was one of the reasons that I took this class in the first place. While I have head Mrs. Dalloway before, it was a long time ago and I'm realizing now, as I re-read it, all the different ways that Cunningham reinvented and utilized Woolf's text for his own book. Since it has been so long since I read Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," the characters and plot lines of "The Hours" had become much realer for me, however, in re-reading it, it's been extremely interesting to see the different ways that Cunningham interpreted certain characters, and if that really made a difference in the way the story is told.

The main characters that Cunningham borrows for his own book are, of course, a revised Clarissa (a lesbian in a long term relationship with Sally) , Richard (a gay novelist with whom Clarissa was once in love and constantly alludes back to), and Peter (both Clarissa and Richard's ex-lover, named Louis in the book). These three characters, who Cunningham also follows throughout a day that ends in a party, echo Woolf's melancholy for Clarissa's past, the complex relationships that exist between them and their own unhappiness with the way things have turned out. While the relationships are clouded and mismatched in Cunningham's novel, he retains Woolf's message through Clarissa and her ex-lovers, and just switches up the players a little bit. He sets Clarissa up with Sally instead, a relationship that Woolf implied, while retaining the weight of her past relationship with Richard, the same way that Woolf's Clarissa cannot ignore her past with Peter. Peter (Louis), who despite being essentially replaced by Richard in Cunningham's novel as Clarissa's great past love, is consistent in his relationship with Clarissa. Though he is no longer cast as someone she once really loved, he is a reminder to her of a happier time, as well as someone that causes her to sharply criticize and herself and her lifestyle.

The changes in Woolf's original work to Cunningham's is not limited to these three main characters. In fact, Septimus, a main character for Woolf, is never mentioned in "The Hours." However, he is not entirely dismissed as his suicide technique is re-used by Cunningham for one of his own characters in "The Hours." Similarly, while Elizabeth is fought over between her mother and her teacher in Woolf's version, Cunningham's Clarissa also battles for influence of her daughter, Julia, with Julia's older and overbearing girlfriend.

Therefore, while Cunningham has, in my opinion, created a successful and revised version of Mrs. Dalloway for a modern audience, the changes he made were simply on the surface. His work is adapted to a different time and a different set of readers, as well as to the role it plays with the other two stories in "The Hours." However, despite all the seemingly drastic changes between Woolf and Cunningham's interpretation of Woolf, many of the general themes remain the same. The story is still about a women unhappy in the life she is leading and living, essentially, haunted by the people of her past. Her relationships with her daughter and her lovers, present or past, still evoke a certain sadness from the reader and a compassion for Clarissa Dalloway/Vaughn. Therefore, though my re-introduction to Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" was, at first, a little overwhelming due to what seemed to be some fairly big changes done on the part of Cunningham in "The Hours," when both stories are looked at more closely it is clear that Woolf's voice is still the one telling the story.--Kathleen Kane

[How can I explain why I love you so?]

2009-01-26T10:31:00.000-08:00

[Sally] came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.

Just look at how long that last sentence is—that last justification. Peter Walsh is, and always will be, it seems, a little bit in love with Clarissa. He cannot explain it; when he tries to, he fails to find anything that stands out about her. In comparison to Sally she is, allegedly, plain in every way. Sally immediately attracts and maintains everyone’s attention, but Clarissa is seared into Peter Walsh’s memory. And there she was.

For some reason the lyrics of an unpublished Sherman brothers (composers of many a hit tune) song just popped into my head:

The winter snow

Only hides the flowers below

Every face and every day place conceals

The beauty in reveals

Through the eyes of love

Reading on in Mrs. Dalloway, I found that Clarissa and Peter had so much in common in regards to their world outlook; their literal way of looking at the world. They see the beauty underneath. In the beginning of the day, Clarissa is so taken with the beauty of her city awaking. And walking around in the afternoon, Peter goes so far as to muse that he “scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun…was enough.” And yet they are captivated by each other.

Clarissa may very well be as plain as Peter makes her out to be. (And his insistence on her plainness is all the more intriguing, as he can’t stop loving her and thinking of her, as he tries to explain his feelings away.)

……maybe that’s it, then.

Either everything is extraordinary, or nothing needs to be in order to capture one’s heart. We assign meaning to things, to places, people, events, smells, sounds, memories. OR… being open to everything, the most ordinary time or place or person can completely overwhelm your senses, your memory, your heart.

Without any outward sign. It’s the (nearly) imperceptible underneath of things that you can hear buzzing when you stop and listen………..

There she was.

Nothing cool ever happens in MY basement... (A Review of "Virginia")

2009-01-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I traveled down to The Drama Book Shop on 40th Street without any idea of what to expect from a staged reading of “Virginia.” What I saw was a small theatre, three chairs, and three people; what I experienced was something entirely amazing.
In a small space inside the basement of a book shop, I watched three talented actors (not to mention one awesome English professor) bring Virginia Woolf to life on her 127th birthday. Because there was no use of props or scenery, everything was stripped down to just the words, the actors, and the audience. For me, this made the experience particularly special because I had never gone to a staged reading before. I was impressed by the talent of the actors, because they unfailingly held my attention and created Woolf’s world for me with just their voices and actions. Two of the actors played multiple roles, but it was never confusing; it was easy to follow the transformation into each individual character.
What I found to be most intriguing about the event was that it made Virginia Woolf a real person in my mind. She isn’t just a dead literary genius, separate and apart from us, only to be found within the pages of her novels. I got the feeling that Virginia Woolf was just like me (granted, a more intelligent, worldly, and impressive version of me) and the people sitting next to me because we share the commonality of being human; of making mistakes and getting disappointed and feeling insecure. During the Q&A session, the topic of Woolf’s sexuality was brought up because—to borrow a phrase from Professor Fernald—there was “no vote taken” in terms of whether Woolf was a straight woman or a lesbian within the context of the play. Rather, she was just a person who loved different people for different reasons, and neither love was dishonoring another. This complication is not unique to Virginia Woolf—but to the people in her life as well, like Leonard Woolf. Well...I mean in the sense that he was a complex person too, not that he was possibly a lesbian.
What I mean to say is that people can argue over whether Virginia Woolf was heterosexual, or whether Leonard was a disciplinarian, or whether Woolf’s father was a cold, unfeeling Victorian. But essentially, what “Virginia” shows is that every person can seem one way, and just when you think you have them figured out they can change completely—perhaps within a single line of speech. When watching the performance, there were times when Woolf seemed absolutely crazy, but then she could have a conversation that made absolute sense; Leonard could seem like a bit of a control freak, but there were many instances where he proved to be a very nurturing person; Vita seemed not to have a care in the world and in turn, not to care about anyone, but it is evident from the end of her relationship with Virginia Woolf that Vita loved her and needed her.
This kind of complexity is found within all people, and the fact that we share this can serve to unite the brilliant writer with the common readers.

Freshwater at The Women's Project

2009-01-22T06:39:00.001-08:00

You can see a video preview of Woolf's play here, thanks to a report on NY1.

Clearly--blessedly--Anne Bogart got the message that "Freshwater" is meant to be funny!

Cue the Garden

2009-01-20T08:08:00.000-08:00

In Virginia Woolf’s, “Kew Gardens,” the narrator immediately drops the reader onto a stage of oval-shaped flowerbeds, only to realize he or she will be leaving the flowerbed shortly, perhaps blithely unaware he or she will return. The reader never leaves the scene that Woolf has written; still, he or she is in constant movement from that flowerbed forward.

In order to do this, Woolf plays upon the transfer of energy: between characters, in the flow of the short story itself, or in a single descriptive word. She uses concise sentences to remind the reader that the energy is just palpitating, waiting to disperse. The narrator notes, “All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew […] the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe [italics mine]”.

She uses the transfer of energy to change perspective throughout the piece; a flick of the umbrella or a passing dragonfly are used as guiding suggestions, telling the reader, let’s look down here right now:

“Pressed the end of her parasol deep down in the soft earth.” (And the mind goes down with the umbrella.)

Or we leave the grounded, earthly perspective of the soft brown earth for the life outside the flowerbed, though by using light, Woolf writes them as connected. The reader receives a signal that something interesting may be circulating in the mind of that gentleman up there; let’s leave the snail for a bit. Moreover, because of this transfer of energy, the landscape is taken in through multiple gazes, not just the one passerby, the snail, or the narrator. The transfer of energy also allows for the displacement of emotion, which is marked by the gentleman whose focus changes from person to object and object to person. Although there is something jolting about this zoom in and out effect, it is written in a way that there is nothing jarring about it.

Woolf brings us to a natural place, but reminders of the urban environment make their way into the piece, especially toward the end. These reminders manage to disrupt a peaceful world that caters to unpeaceful thoughts, something that readily occurs in city life:

“And in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul.”

On "How Should One Read a Book?"

2009-01-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

In “How One Should Read a Book” Virginia Wolf talks about how she views reading a book as a personal experience for everyone. She views reading as a thing of liberty and freedom, where you can escape and not be bothered by what everyone else thinks. I think Woolf’s feelings about reading influenced her writing: she wrote whatever she wanted and never censored her thoughts. She also wants to change the way we see certain literature: we see fiction as mere amusement and poetry as false. She describes poetry and biography extensively and uses examples from other writers. This reading is teaching us, what Woolf thinks, is the proper way to read a book. But she believes that even if we read something a hundred times we will never be able to truly criticize or understand it, because literature is so deep and profound.

In the first paragraph Woolf says, “the only advice indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.” I think she is trying to say that no one views and imagines a book the same way. We don’t even imagine a book the way the writer intended us to. So maybe in a way we are also the writers since we come up with our own conclusions. It’s like when a book becomes a movie: the director shows the way that he viewed the book, he may even change certain events and characters for the movie. The writer may argue against this but they can do nothing about it, since the director has made it his own. She also argues that one cannot truly say that one book is better than another. “Romeo and Juliet” may be viewed as one of the greatest books of all time, but to whom? We all see it a certain way and Shakespeare certainly isn’t around to discuss it with us.

I also found it ironic that Woolf is saying that we shouldn’t be told how to read a book since it takes away our freedom, but later on she is telling us how we should read a book. She tells us not to dictate the author but to try and become him. I think she is trying to say that we shouldn’t say, “Why would the character do that? I would’ve made them do so and so.” We should respect the author’s choice and try to understand why they wrote that. She also thinks that takes away from us truly enjoying the novel. She thinks that when we read we are in a different world, and when we read we shouldn’t let things from our current world influence the way we are seeing the book. It also seems like Woolf is questioning the intelligence of the readers. She seems to believe that one must be an intellectual and college-educated person in order to fully appreciate a book. I don’t agree with her, if a five-year old can read ,they can enjoy and appreciate a book. Maybe even more so than an adult, since their imagination is less limited.

I think the end of the essay shows how much Virginia Woolf loved and valued reading. She looks at it as a kind of holy thing that will get you into Heaven. She thinks that the people with books under their arms will get into Heaven, before the lawyers and the statesmen. She thinks that we not only read for pleasure but because it is a good thing to do. Woolf is right, I don’t think she’s right about reading getting us into Heaven, but about it being a good thing to do. Reading strengthens and influences the mind.--Baha Awadallah

Wordless Voices

2009-01-19T15:42:00.000-08:00

While the setting of Virginia’s, “Kew Gardens” is that of lush beauty, her narrator- who lives within the minds of every character we meet, every passing stranger, woman, man , or even snail- reveals the dissatisfaction that settles quietly, or in some cases, noisily in the thoughts of each mind. I found, while reading, the theme of the past, the struggling with the present, the desire to relive the past, as the present has become dull, monotonous, and they have become like robots.

Some of these robots, like the first man and women, whose conversation we overhear, are stuck on repeat, and I found desperation in their voices. Virginia also keeps a kind of ambiguity or mystery about these two characters, as their relationship isn’t explained. We’re left wondering, “Why is this man telling his wife of his old love, of his Lilly?” If in fact she is his wife, this introduction to the essay is an especially striking and compelling one, the most obvious portrayal of the dissatisfaction of the characters. Both characters seem a bit crazy, a bit mad, as they frantically talk of their past loves. When I read the woman’s response to her possible husband’s ranting of Lilly, I wasn’t surprised at her odd, panicky response. Of course, she is a bit insane if her husband continuously speaks of Lilly. His walking ahead of her also suggests that she is not something he is too proud of, as if he would rather run from her, run to the past, if I may. She, on the other hand, lazily, yet responsibly looks back to the children.

I found many quotes of the characters, as well as of the narrator, to poignantly describe what the piece is about, including the woman’s asking, “…Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees… one’s happiness, one’s reality?”
Soon we meet the elderly man who, “talked almost incessantly; he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking about spirits- the spirits of the dead…” This again carries the theme of the past, and while deeming these spirits, “the spirits of the dead,” Virginia implies a deep regret, a sadness.

Parallel with this regret of the characters is a sense of exhaustion with life, of the mundane routine that they’ve settled into. The two elderly women find amusement in the elderly man’s signs of eccentricity or madness. “Then she suggested that they should find a seat and have their tea.” Virginia’s language is so simple at times, but also so revealing, so telling. Here, I found this feeling of boredom, of tiredness. Later, a conversation between a young couple is, “in toneless and monotonous voices,” and it seems in this relationship, the woman wants to be excited about something, wants her companion to be excited, passionate perhaps.

Soon after, another quote resonated in me as it seemed to summarize the story. The young woman’s hopeless desires are described as, “wishing to go down there and then down there, remembering orchids and cranes among wild flowers, a Chinese pagoda and a crimson-crested bird; but he bore her on.”

In this story, Virginia brilliantly and beautifully reveals the common loss of excitement, of luster in one’s life, in one’s relationships, and the failing solution of looking back towards the past, going through the present almost completely numbly.

Being an English Major Is Getting in the Way of My Reading

2009-01-19T10:36:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make: While I love to read, I do not always like to study literature (pronounced "lit-tra-tuure" by those few pretentious dons who wear pipes and mustaches).

I am jealous of those people who Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson call "common reader[s]." He or she, being "worse educated," is not bound by the same "literary prejudices" that have been taught to me over and over again for the past four years at university.

For instance, there are times when I read a particular part of a novel, verse, or story and I cannot wait to explore the beauty of it in class. However, upon arriving to class, I am informed that the professor is only interested in discussing theory and its applications to the work. I am horrified when faced with the perversity of this practice. Before my very eyes, as if with an iron pole, a passage, line or word is sufficiently beaten and rendered near-death. Unable to wriggle away or defend itself, I want to scream on its behalf, but I am unable to because I am drowning in theory terms- supplement, deconstruction and ideology.

For the sake of my own sanity, it helps to acquiesce to the common reader still stubbornly holding on within me. I often entertain the idea of cheating on my school books (sometimes with three or four books at a time). During class, I am prone to anticipate the last day of the term when I can look forward to a holiday of reading. Mostly though, I dream about when I will get another opportunity to visit those marvelous places "to humble to be called libraries" and simply pick a book on a whim. I long for the freedom to be, as Woolf describes, "hasty, inaccurate and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it..."

On Fascination with the Ordinary and the Curse of Reading Between the Lines

2009-01-18T23:02:00.000-08:00

As a Joyce fan, any mention of Joyce is bound to grab my attention and Woolf's mention of Ulysses in "The Pastons and Chaucer" did exactly that. However, the context to the mention rather surprised me: "Nor can we believe, with Mr. Joyce's Ulysses before us, that laughter of the old kind will ever be heard again," (p.15). Wow. That statement, regardless if the laughter that Woolf is alluding to is tasteless or moral, declares that Ulysses could be the definitive end to any sort of continuation of Chaucer's humor. It also emphasizes that Ulysses, and, thus, much of modernist literature, is too self-conscious to treat life realistically and approach humor in a natural way. Being an animated reader, this surprised me so much that I physically frowned and pouted.

I can think of numerous instances in Ulysses where the mundane and everyday is presented in such a way that most people wouldn't call it self-conscious. Wasn't it Joyce's own mother who, upon receiving one of the few original copies of the first publication of Ulysses, refused to open it due to its profane accounts of gorging on food and (gasp!) details of its digestion? Ulysses is shocking because it presents the everyday with all its natural functions as an Epic. Also, depending on one's sense of humor, it can make you laugh: Bloom, passing by a Church, decides that the Latin inscription "INRI" is an English acronym for "Iron Nails Ran In."

However, I have to admit that Woolf is right.

All of Joyce's accounts of the everyday do not exist as they are. Rather they are metaphors or integral parts to some larger metaphor; Ulysses, in itself, is an allusion to the Odyssey, which about as far from human reality as literary prototype can get.

To Chaucer, a bar maid is a bar maid. Perhaps she goes to church everyday, perhaps she is promiscuous, but Chaucer's bar maid is definitely not some device inserted into a literary work to represent a Siren. Chaucer is considered the father of vernacular literature and "The Canterbury Tales," along with the Bible, were illuminated with gold thread, yet he definitely did not shy away from blunt potty humor. A friend of mine who recently took a Chaucer class dedicated his final paper to an analysis of flatulence as key plot-changing device. Perhaps it wasn’t the most profound topic but he managed to write ten pages on it and earn an "A-."

Woolf, fascinated with people's ordinary and mundane habits, sees a truth in Chaucer's work that modernist experimentations do not capture. Instead, one must read in-between the lines to see that a rustle of bushes and a disapproving glance from a priest are meant to allude to copulation. Perhaps implied humor and witty allusions actually distance a writer from reality. Perhaps some writers want to distance themselves from their, or any, reality. Woolf, however, does not. She seems to almost long for the ability to write without self-consciousness.

"The Pastons and Chaucer"

2009-01-18T22:38:00.000-08:00

I found "The Pastons and Chaucer" fairly baffling and deliciously Woolfian. The title instantly confused me. I could not imagine what the Pastons and Chaucer had to do with each other. After about 7 pages of what I would call historical commentary, she transitions almost seamlessly into literary criticism. It was then that I realized that this essay has the same structure as Woolf's fiction.

She takes a minor detail, Sir John's reading of Chaucer, and uses it as a wormhole, jumping through time to an entirely new subject. On page 11, she leaves Sir John sitting and reading Chaucer while the smoke stings his eyes, and returns to him 9 pages later, exactly as she left him. Meanwhile she explore the merits of the Canterbury Tales. The essay moves through subjects as the mind does, seemingly randomly. It drops a sunject for another only to return to the former. It's only after reflection that the two subjects become relevant to each other. In the second to last paragraph, she points out that Chaucer would have loved the language from the Paston letters and that that sets him apart from the other great British poets.

This point seems so casual and haphazard but is keen and illuminating. It has a far greater effect than it would if it were stated as a thesis at the end of an introductory paragraph. I actually uttered, "whoa," when I read "it is easy to see, from the Paston letters, why Chaucer wrote not Lear or Romeo and Juliet, but the Canterbury Tales." I'm an English major and a history minor and I hardly ever have a visceral reaction to the essays I read on those subjects. I do, however, have a moment of pure joy when I make a discovery in literature. She captures that feeling in this essay. It's structured more like one of her pieces of fiction than like an essay but that just makes it so much cooler.

It's Just Greek to Me

2009-01-18T21:01:00.000-08:00

No one knows Greek anymore, at least not the Greek of Euripides, Sophocles and Aristotle. When I was in high school, I remember asking my drama teacher about how ancient Greek worked and how to pronounce it and make words. I came out of the conversation with nothing really cleared up. There remains this vague, semi-pretentious cloud around Greek and Greek culture. And it doesn’t help that it is impossible to translate Greek perfectly into modern English.

Woolf touches on this point, and the case could be made with translation between any two languages, but it only makes it more difficult to do with a language that no one actually speaks anymore. Translation is rife with misinterpretation and miscommunication. That is why “we bruise our minds upon some tremendous metaphor in the Agamemnon instead of stripping the branch of its flower instantly as we do in reading Lear.” (35) One great historical misinterpretation was when during the period when Neo-Classical was the preferred architecture of choice; buildings became flanked with all sorts of white columns and pediments in a testament to the Greek culture that inspired. Little did they know, the Greeks’ buildings were actually painted in a marvelous array of colors and the white color that endured on the Parthenon was only due to the durability over time of the marble versus paint.

Woolf again emphasizes the problem of getting the meaning correct when she says that even the most skillful of scholars cannot translate everything perfectly. She gives the example of the original Greek and a translation, stating simply that they are not equal. (36). Try as we may, the Greek language has many subtleties that do not have English equivalents. Yet, the Greeks have always held an appeal for us that we crave and cannot fully explain. Perhaps it is the same way we cannot fully translate, there is something that we need: the rawness of Euripides’ plays or the cleverness of Plato’s dialogues. The fact that so many of them are still relevant today is only a sign the civilization in which they lived in has endured so well, even if we cannot fully understand or imagine everything as it once was.

Slipping from society to thoughts & Woolf’s “Kew Gardens”

2009-01-18T20:54:00.000-08:00

Ok, I must first open this “blog”—the word is unreal to me, it’s not even part of my vocabulary and I won’t own it. Writing a blog and at points posting on forums or boards is odd to me. So, yes, this is a big deal. I will mark it with how I feel Virginia Woolf’s work “Kew Gardens” can reflect the occurrences of my life—perhaps everyone’s life.
Anyway, life has taken a weird change since my nephew has returned to NYC. He is just 6 years old. Among other things, he is vivacious and outwardly social but surprisingly very introverted. He never wants to go to sleep or nap for he says “I want to stay awake for the rest of my life.” ODD!!! Unless you have a complex condition (narcolepsy…), who doesn’t like to sleep?
So … outwardly social but introverted. He can repeat whole episodes of Spongebob or Dora or any of the cartoons he watches when you and he are in the midst of conversation or when he does not feel in the mood to talk to anyone. During these episodes, he is alone with his thoughts and is free to reenact the scenes from the shows. He can mimic the facial expressions and body language, on top of the lines, of the characters. He can retreat into the protection of his thoughts in a flash. He will introduce himself to a stranger, “Hey there, Buddy! My name is ---- What’s up,” pause to portray a feeling of genuine interest, and then undertake a circuitous path of escape from the intruder(s) to reenact his scenes.
Now, that brings me to “Kew Gardens.” I find that in this short story voices and one’s presence are tangible but ethereal. People come and go in the gardens:

[men, women, and children] wavered and sought shade beneath the trees,
dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it
faintly with red and blue […] but their voices went wavering from them as if
they were flames lolling in the thick waxen bodies of candles. Voices, yes,
voices, wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth […]
breaking the silence? But there was no silence […] one within another the city
murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads
of flowers flashed their colours into the air.

Voices emit from waxy husks to dissolve in the air or hang languidly over the city. The snail has “veins” and a clearer and simple aim, which is to cross, but the trotting humans are described with less vigor and likeableness than the snail. The humans imprint a “stain,” a presence that touches the garden but is washed away with time and the colors of nature like the red, blue, or yellow flowers and the penetrable sunlight. The visitors have a dissoluble presence that lingers mostly in their thoughts while transmitting to the outside world as an indistinguishable gesture. The secrets the old man gathers from the flowers as he stoops to listen or the young man’s decision to take tea elsewhere are examples of gestures that remain mysterious to the outside world, to their companions. The humans seem to retreat into nature and away from the “motor omnibuses” and mechanical turns of their city as we retreat, today, into technology, our ipods or iphones or blackberries or TVs and in the case of my nephew, our TV shows. We are constantly escaping the outside world. I listen to my ipod to escape having people talk to me in the train station or boredom because I would rather not converse or be too involved in people’s weird conversations with one another—I also read a book to avoid these things. However, this is my way of escaping for my nephew the preference is to reenact shows and, still yet, other people have other preferences. Right?

Mini mini mini

2009-01-18T20:46:00.000-08:00

It wasn't long before Woolf's Kew Gardens brought me to Paris, specifically Paris of 1966 and Jacques Dutronc's song Et moi, et moi, et moi from his self-titled debut album. The song is a response to the self-important windbaggery of mid early 60s lyrics wherein the fate of the universe seems to hang on the outcome of the singer's relationship (or the kind of hubris that would make Simon think the Dragonfly had anything to do with him). Dutronc challenges such an egocentric outlook by putting his problems squarely in the context of the life on the planet as a whole, as in the song's first verse:
Sept cent millions de chinois
Et moi, et moi, et moi
Avec ma vie, mon petit chez moi
Mon mal de tête, mon psi
J'y pense et puis j'oublie
C'est la vie, c'est la vie"
In English:
Seven hundred million Chinese
And me, and me, and me
With my life, my little home
My headache, my Persian cat
I think about it and then I forget
That’s life, that’s life
Dutronc and Woolf seem to share an idea about how the troubles of individuals fit into the context of the gigantic struggles between major world forces. Dutronc sees how greatly the pains of his headache and the comforts of his cat pale in comparison to the experiences of the "seven hundred million" Chinese. Likewise, Kew Gardens is a story of being dwarfed. The snail and the obstructions in its path are dwarfed by the Garden visitors, who are themselves dwarfed by the "murmur" of the city in which their voices are lost. And, let's not forget, everything in London, the greatest city of the world at the time, was dwarfed by the number of men and women fighting and dying in the Great War; no one in the story seems to realize how small they are as compared to the goings on in the world about them.
Yet, regardless of how small their subjects are, both the short story and the song exist; though minor as compared to the fate of nations, Simon still thinks about the dragonfly and the two elderly women still wonder about Williams and his companion. Jacques Dutronc has a home that shelters him and a life that he has to live. Despite the murmur and the 700 million Chinese, the voices of the individuals, small though they may be, are still worthy of attention and documentation.
Both Dutronc and Woolf feature an ambiguous "it". We're not sure what the "it" is that Dutronc thinks about, nor what the young woman's "it" is that's worth sixpence. And I think the ambiguity and the universality of that humble pronoun is terribly important: no matter what it is, it's worth the time of writer to document, the reader to read, and the person to live. No matter how small the snail's quest may be, it is important to the snail; no matter how intensely private Simon's recollections are, they are worth thinking. The smallness of life leads neither reader to reject its value; for Dutronc, "c'est la vie"; that's just how it goes, and for Woolf, the voices and lives are not subsumed into the din of the city, but rather they find themselves atop the cacophony and "cried aloud [as] the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air".

"Lucky it isn't Friday."

2009-01-18T20:35:00.000-08:00

While reading “Kew Gardens,” I could not help but envision The New York Botanical Gardens on the first beautiful Sunday in the late spring that heralds the start of summer. That day of the long-awaited and much-craved balmy temperature marks the time of year when I, like the flowers, come back to life. Like a Lazarus who suffered from January chill, I’m happy (for once) to dust the cobwebs off of my Asics and run across Southern Boulevard to take advantage of the free admission to the garden for exercising Fordham students. Because I hate running with an iPod, I usually evade the tedium and defer the pain of a long run by imaginatively eavesdropping on the other people enjoying the weather by trading the cement stress of the city for the soft, earthen trails of the Botanical Garden. Jogging past them, I am privy to snippets of their discourse; I can hear a word or two of the argument between the old couple, the mother chastising her small child, the lovers making plans. I can synthesize their history and their present from these fragmented syllabic over-hearings.
Exactly what Virginia Woolf meant by “Kew Gardens,” I do not know. By the end of the short work of fiction, which reads more like a painting or a dream, it seems that she means to portray the garden as an isolated oasis, an island whose visitors are allowed melancholy musings of regret and reminiscence amidst the swirling violence of a World War ocean. In a London where residents are forced to constantly face their present plight and look forward to a frightening and uncertain future, Kew Gardens acts as a momentary reprieve. “Voices,” muses Woolf. “Yes voices, wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of contentment, such passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such freshness of surprise; breaking the silence? But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear” (89). Despite the serenity offered to Londoners by strolls in Kew Gardens, they must ultimately, like Woolf’s laboring snail emerges from his shell, leave behind the safety of the garden walls and face whatever uncertainty the reality of the city presents them.
Even while running through the deepest and thickest part of the Botanical Garden, I can still hear reverie-breaking sirens.

Voices and Colors in "Kew Gardens"

2009-01-18T19:29:00.000-08:00

What follows may be a rather simplistic analysis of "Kew Gardens"--quite honestly, I am finding it difficult to articulate my thoughts on the piece (this may be due to the fact that I am watching Rome simultaneously and Brutus has just been stabbed a billion times but I KNOW HE COMMITTED SUICIDE, HBO WRITERS, STOP TAKING ARTISTIC LIBERTIES WHERE YOU DON'T NEED THEM) but I do know that I really liked this piece for Woolf's signature stream of consciousness style and her always startlingly clear insights into the human condition. With that said, here we go.

Fittingly, "Kew Gardens" begins and ends with flowers.

In her opening paragraph, Woolf delineates the flowers of Kew Gardens intricately and exhaustively:

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.

But she closes simply with: "and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air."

Woolf heavily emphasizes the colors of the flowers--in the first paragraph, we see red, blue, yellow, gold--but she also describes their shapes and their surrounding environment. Yet in the end, for all the other details Woolf has given us, the flowers are merely reduced to their colors. This reduction of form of the flowers parallels the reduction of form of the humans in "Kew Gardens."

Like her attention given to the flowers, Woolf comprehensively sketches the human figures in this story. They are brief sketches, as we jump from conversation to conversation, but they are thorough nonetheless. With the humans, Woolf emphasizes their voices--we learn about them from their dialogue, but we learn more from their "wordless voices" (their thoughts, their actions)-- as she emphasizes the colors of the flowers. Woolf also describes the physical attributes and the environment of the characters, but she concludes with a focus on the voices ("Voices. Yes, voices. Wordless voices...on top of which the voices cried aloud").

With the conclusion of "Kew Gardens", the humans are reduced to voices and the flowers reduced to colors. Interestingly enough, Woolf uses the vocabulary of human anatomy to describe the flowers, with words such as "heart-shaped," "tongue-shaped," "throat," "flesh." Perhaps then, the flowers can stand as a metaphor for humans--the world as a garden, humans as ephemeral things of the earth--in the end, what are we but voices? What are our voices, our thoughts, but colors which serve to distinguish one individual from another? And in the end, what remains?

*Professor Fernald, my Rome digression is completely relevant because it is a true-life imitation of Woolf's stream of consciousness style: "Kew Gardens" to "difficulty" to "Rome" to "artistic liberties, abuse of" to "Kew Gardens" again, and so forth. I confess to not being able to shake off old blogger habits of going off on a tangent, ranting, rambling, etc.

Okay, okay--so this may or may not be absurdly long. Apologies.

2009-01-18T18:13:00.000-08:00

I cannot quite get a handle on this strange little story. I’m intrigued, for sure… although I’m not entirely sure why, or about what. What I’m absolutely certain of, however, is that I do not fully understand what it’s about. That said—I’m going to give this whole thing a shot.

What struck me most in reading this was Woolf’s depiction of age throughout the three or so pages in which the story takes place. Particularly towards the end (on page 88 specifically—in her description of the couple “in that season which precedes the prime of youth”) I get the overwhelming sense that she’s trying to (no no… I’m sorry: Virginia Woolf doesn’t TRY to do anything. She DOES things. Sort of like Chuck Norris) make a point about the various stages of maturity and development that people go though while traveling throughout the world—much like our narrator is (literally) doing in the story, itself. While the story is, strictly speaking, told from a single person’s perspective, the exposition of people in various periods of life – the children of the narrator, the quasi-prime -of –youth- power- couple and the trashy old ladies who sound vaguely like my Nana on a week long Whiskey bender, among others—all in the same geographical location makes me wonder about… well, a lot of things.

I find it interesting that on a very basic level, this piece is somewhat retrospective—at least initially. Our hero Simon, who is reminded of an erstwhile, youthful love interest seems to marvel at the extent to which fate (ostensibly) or just good old fashioned luck played a significant role in the way his life turned out—inasmuch as it did not dictate the outcome, completely: “I’ve been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married,” he frankly admits to the woman he actually did marry (presumptively years later). More than anything, I believe, Wolf is emphasizing the complete arbitrariness of this outcome as represented by Simon’s belief that his life’s most significant events lay contingent to the volition of…um, a dragonfly.

So, okay— how does this relate to my “age-claim?” Perhaps it doesn’t, save for in my own head. BUT. I guess what I’m maintaining is that Woolf is pointing out a) the speed with which our lives pass us by—making reference to children, the elderly, and everyone in between in such a small space (both in the geographical confines and decided “smallness” of the story) and b) the fact that as we grow older, things seem to…lose significance? At least smaller, more mundane (more benign?) things. I don’t really know how else to put it. It seems to me, though, that as the characters in this story progress in age, they become less concerned with the importance and meaning of individual moments.

For example—the young couple moseying about with a parasol is preoccupied with the subtle underlying meanings of individual words such that they take on more significance than they may have in actuality, and are arguably hyper-focused on the minutia of their language. Simon recalls his fixation on Lucy’s shoes, and as stated before on the significance of the actions of the dragonfly swarming around his head. Conversely, the older people that we see (both the two old women speaking gibberish and the old man speaking with a seeming disregard for the meaning or significance of his words) are not at all concerned with the meaning of individual moments, or individual words.

All things considered, what I got most out of this story was the idea that it’s somewhat foolish to ruminate on small things to a great extent… because doing so, as demonstrated by this story (for the reasons outlined above) seems to be an exercise in futility.

And now I'm officially rambling. So I'm going to quit while I'm ahead (inasmuch as I was, ever). Sorry for the length though--brevity and I are not friends.

"Kew Gardens" and the (Un)Importance of Words

2009-01-18T17:14:00.000-08:00

While I was reading "Kew Gardens," I must've listened to at least fifteen different songs. I can't tell you what any of them were, except that "I Am the Walrus" is coo-coo-coochoo-ing its way into my ears right now. The words don't matter, they just provide a backdrop for my thoughts.

In "Kew Gardens," several different couples go by. They all have something in common--they aren't there for the words, but they're not there for the flowers either. I don't imagine that anyone really goes to Kew Gardens for the flowers, though they are quite spectacular. Unless you're a botanist, the Gardens themselves simply provide a pretty background for whatever conversation or introspection you might be engaging in that day. Woolf seems to be suggesting in "Kew Gardens" that the words passing between the couples are as unimportant to them as the flowers themselves.

The first couple, a husband and wife, are so preoccupied with "thinking of the past," (85) that even their children don't warrant any attention other than an occasional head-turn from the woman (84). The man thinks back to another time in the Gardens, where one of the most important decisions of his life was made. Lily's answer to his marriage proposal, the actual "yes" or "no," isn't what Simon notices or remembers. Instead of the words, he hangs all of his hope on the wanderings of an aimless dragonfly who "went round and round: it never settled anywhere." (85) His wife, Eleanor, lost in thoughts of her past, recounts a time when an action, a kiss from an old woman, affected her more deeply than words ever could--"the mother of all my kisses, all my life." (85) The words that pass between the couple, these "falling words," (87) between all the couples, seem to have all the importance of strangers exchanging small-talk about the weather. They're the soundtrack of a walk through Kew Gardens, but the important things are the ghosts of the past--all the might-have-beens and actions of the moments that really affect us. Woolf is suggesting that words, though a necessary aspect of life, prevent us from fully reflecting on our thoughts, and jar us awake (87) to remind us of the canyon that exists between "one's happiness, one's reality." (85)

What's with the Snails?

2009-01-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

One particular aspect of Kew Gardens that I was curious about was the distinction made between two very different worlds: namely, the world of the snail versus the world of the people wandering about the flower bed.
Woolf used a snail as the catalyst for her story in The Mark on the Wall, and once again, a snail plays a role in her prose. In Kew Gardens, Woolf leads the reader through the conversations and behaviors of various couples passing the flower bed as well as the progress of a snail within that same flower bed. While the people pass by with the same, “irregular and aimless movement,” (89) the snail appears to, “have a definite goal in front of it... objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal.” (86) In fact, it seems like the only character in the story who has any direction is the snail itself, plodding along in a flower bed surrounded by couples who are caught up by past memories and pointless conversations.
I was left to ponder the purpose behind telling the story from these two different perspectives, and I cannot say that I’ve reached a definite conclusion. By the end of the story, Woolf has brought together the two worlds of nature and people into a churning, swirling mixture of voices and colors and sounds. In the end, the two worlds are not separate entities, but a single—rather chaotic—mass. I am not really sure what to make of the story’s finish, and I was particularly stunned by the fact that my first reaction to the ending was, “But what happened to the snail?!” when obviously, I should be more concerned about the fact that the people in the story are lead astray by their own banalities and their struggle to sort out the implications of past decisions and present absurdities. I suppose the only contribution I have to offer are a few meager questions: What does it say about people if a snail in a flower bed seems to have more purpose and determination in a story than the humans? Was Woolf even considering that point, or have I missed an essential part of her message? Why does she seem to have such an affinity for snails?
Conclusively, all I can say is that whether it was Woolf’s intention or not, Kew Gardens made me wonder about the human condition to revel in the past, to say things that don’t really say anything at all, and to put great stake in things that are not worth much more than sixpence anyway.

2009-01-18T13:56:00.000-08:00

Reading "Kew Gardens" made me think of Leopold Bloom, as this story resembles a "stream of life." Woolf cleverly sets the reader among the "hundred stalks" in the flower bed, giving a fixed vantage point that allows only glimpses of humanity as the various characters pass through the garden (84). It is the story's first passerby, Simon, that I found most congruent to Bloom, as his mind wanders back to his life fifteen years prior. Simon's train of thought evolves into him speaking to his wife, Eleanor, but the transition is strangely punctuated. Thinking back to his old flame, Lily, makes Simon realize that if he had married her, he wouldn't be in the garden with his family. This leads him to ask Eleanor, "d'you ever think of the past?" (85). But in the text, Woolf does not distinguish where his thinking ends and where his speech begins, other than with a dash: "I shouldn't be walking here with Eleanor and the children -- Tell me, Eleanor..." (85).

Now, it may seem as though I'm making too much of this, a small piece of punctuation missing from a passage. But the manner in which this utterance to his wife leaps forth from his train of thought betrays a strange moment of omniscience on the part of the narrator. I decided to reread "Kew Gardens" twice more to make sure that, in fact, Simon's account is the only specifically omniscient moment for the narrator, by which I mean to say that the character's literal thoughts are given to the reader verbatim. For the rest of the story, the narrator acts in a much more spectatorial role, picking apart the other characters' thoughts and dispositions mostly from their facial expressions: "The younger of the two men wore an expression of perhaps unnatural calm; he raised his eyes and fixed them very steadily in front of him while his companion spoke" (86).

Because of this backgrounding on Simon's previous visit to the garden with Lily, I felt a closeness with him that was lost with the other characters; I understood his plight more than, say, the two "elderly women" who "piece together their very complicated dialogue" (87). Other than my own feeling toward Simon, I certainly can't draw any conclusions about Woolf's work on the whole, so I'm going to hope that pointing out this anomaly may lead to someone else picking up the baton.

Woolf on the Street!

2009-01-18T13:08:00.001-08:00

I'm sure if anyone wanted to, they could find out where this is and who decided to spray paint Virginia Woolf on the side of a building in the first place. For me, though, it's a lot more fun to imagine some English majors (the opposite of a "typical" graffiti artist) painstakingly stenciling the photo of Woolf and sneaking out in the dead of night to make their own "Mark on the Wall." Pun obviously intended.

I'm not sure how to tag this as it's obviously not meant to be graded...Unless I get an A.