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Virginia Woolf
Life and Work
Brief History


Adeline Virginia Woolf (born Stephen; 25
January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English
novelist, essayist, epistler, publisher, feminist,
and writer of short stories, regarded as one of
the foremost modernist literary figures of the
twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a
significant figure in London literary society and a
member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most
famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway
(1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando
(1928), and the book-length essay A Room of
One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A
woman must have money and a room of her own
if she is to write fiction."
Early life

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia
Stephen in London in 1882. Her mother, a
famous beauty, Julia Prinsep Stephen
(born Jackson) (1846–1895), was born in
India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson
and later moved to England with her
mother, where she served as a model for
Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward
Burne-Jones.[1]. Her father, Sir Leslie
Stephen, was a notable author, critic and
mountaineer.[2]
Early life

The young Virginia was educated by her
parents in their literate and wellconnected household at 22 Hyde Park
Gate, Kensington. Her parents had each
been married previously and been
widowed, and, consequently, the
household contained the children of three
marriages. Julia had three children from
her first husband, Herbert Duckworth:
George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth.
Early life

Leslie had one daughter from his first
wife, Minny Thackeray: Laura
Makepeace Stephen, who was
declared mentally disabled and lived
with the family until she was
institutionalised in 1891. [3] Leslie
and Julia had four children together:
Vanessa Stephen (1879), Thoby
Stephen (1880), Virginia (1882), and
Adrian Stephen (1883).
Early Life

Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an
editor, critic, and biographer, and his
connection to William Thackeray (he was
the widower of Thackeray's youngest
daughter), meant that his children were
raised in an environment filled with the
influences of Victorian literary society.
Henry James, George Henry Lewes, Julia
Margaret Cameron (an aunt of Julia
Stephen), and James Russell Lowell, who
was made Virginia's honorary godfather,
were among the visitors to the house.
Early Life

Julia Stephen was equally well connected.
Descended from an attendant of Marie
Antoinette, she came from a family of
renowned beauties who left their mark on
Victorian society as models for PreRaphaelite artists and early
photographers. Supplementing these
influences was the immense library at the
Stephens' house, from which Virginia and
Vanessa (unlike their brothers, who were
formally educated) were taught the
classics and English literature.

According to Woolf's memoirs, her most
vivid childhood memories, however, were
not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall,
where the family spent every summer
until 1895. The Stephens' summer home,
Talland House, looked out over
Porthminster Bay, and is still standing
today, though somewhat altered.
Memories of these family holidays and
impressions of the landscape, especially
the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the
fiction Woolf wrote in later years, most
notably To the Lighthouse
Early Life


The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when
Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella
two years later, led to the first of Virginia's
several nervous breakdowns. The death of her
father in 1904 provoked her most alarming
collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.[3]
Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring
depressive periods, modern scholars (including
her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) have
suggested,[4] were also influenced by the sexual
abuse she and Vanessa were subjected to by
their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth
(which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical
essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park
Gate).
Early Life

Throughout her life, Woolf was
plagued by periodic mood swings
and associated illnesses. Though this
instability often affected her social
life, her literary productivity
continued with few breaks until her
suicide.
Bloomsbury



After the death of their father and Virginia's
second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian
sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46
Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.
Following studies at King's College,
Cambridge,[5] and King's College London, Woolf
came to know After the death of their father and
Virginia's second nervous breakdown, Vanessa
and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a
house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.
Following studies at King's College,
Cambridge,[5] and King's College London, Woolf
came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert
Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant,
and Leonard Woolf, Leonard Woolf,

Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard
Woolf in 1912. Despite his low material
status - Woolf referring to Leonard during
their engagement as a "penniless Jew" the couple shared a close bond. Indeed, in
1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "“Lovemaking — after 25 years can’t bear to be
separate ... you see it is enormous
pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our
marriage so complete.”"

The two also collaborated professionally,
in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which
subsequently published Virginia's novels
along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens
van der Post, and others.[6] The ethos of
the Bloomsbury group discouraged sexual
exclusivity, and in 1922, Virginia met the
writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West,
wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative
start, they began a sexual relationship
that lasted through most of the 1920s.[7

In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West
with Orlando, a fantastical biography in
which the eponymous hero's life spans
three centuries and both genders. It has
been called by Nigel Nicolson, Vita
Sackville-West's son, "the longest and
most charming love letter in literature."[7]
After their affair ended, the two women
remained friends until Woolf's death in
1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close
to her surviving siblings, Adrian and
Vanessa; Thoby had died of an illness at
the age of 26
Suicide

After completing the manuscript of her
last (posthumously published) novel,
Between the Acts, Woolf fell victim to a
depression similar to that which she had
earlier experienced. The onset of World
War II, the destruction of her London
home during the Blitz, and the cool
reception given to her biography of her
late friend Roger Fry all worsened her
condition until she was unable to work.[8]

On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed
suicide. She put on her overcoat,
filled its pockets with stones, then
walked into the River Ouse near her
home and drowned herself. Woolf's
skeletonised body was not found
until 18 April.[9] Her husband buried
her cremated remains under a tree
in the garden of their house in
Rodmell, Sussex.


In her last note to her husband she wrote:
“I feel certain that I am going mad again.
I feel we can't go through another of
those terrible times. And I cant recover
this time. I begin to hear voices, and I
can't concentrate. So I am doing what
seems the best thing to do. You have
given me the greatest possible happiness.
You have been in every way all that
anyone could be. I don't think two people
could have been happier 'til this terrible
disease came. I can't fight any longer. I
know that I am spoiling your life, that
without me you could work.

And you will I know. You see I can't even
write this properly. I can't read. What I
want to say is I owe all the happiness of
my life to you. You have been entirely
patient with me and incredibly good. I
want to say that — everybody knows it. If
anybody could have saved me it would
have been you. Everything has gone from
me but the certainty of your goodness. I
can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I
don't think two people could have been
happier than we have been. V. [10]
Modern scholarship and
interpretations


Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have
focused on feminist and lesbian themes in
her work, such as in the 1997 collection of
critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian
Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and
Patricia Cramer.
More controversially, Louise A. DeSalvo
reads most of Woolf's life and career
through the lens of the incestuous sexual
abuse Woolf experienced as a young
woman in her 1989 book Virginia Woolf:
The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on
her Life and Work.
Modern scholarship and
interpretations

Woolf's fiction is also
studied for its insight into
shell shock, war, class,
and modern British
society.
Modern scholarship and
interpretations

Her best-known nonfiction works, A
Room of One's Own (1929) and
Three Guineas (1938), examine the
difficulties female writers and
intellectuals face because men hold
disproportionate legal and economic
power, and the future of women in
education and society.
Modern scholarship and
interpretations

Irene Coates's book Who's Afraid of
Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of
Virginia Woolf takes the position that
Leonard Woolf's treatment of his wife
encouraged her ill health and ultimately
was responsible for her death. The
position, which is not accepted by
Leonard's family, is extensively
researched and fills in some of the gaps in
the traditional account of Virginia Woolf's
life
Modern scholarship and
interpretations

In contrast, Victoria Glendinning's
book Leonard Woolf: A Biography,
which is even more extensively
researched and supported by
contemporaneous writings, argues
that Leonard Woolf was not only very
supportive of his wife, but enabled
her to live as long as she did by
providing her with the life and
atmosphere she needed to live and
write.
Modern scholarship and
interpretations

Accounts of Virginia's supposed
anti-semitism (Leonard was a
secular Jew) are not only taken
out of historical context but
greatly exaggerated. Virginia's
own diaries support this view of
the Woolfs' marriage.[26]
Modern scholarship and
interpretations



Though at least one biography of Virginia
Woolf appeared in her lifetime, the first
authoritative study of her life was
published in 1972 by her nephew, Quentin
Bell.
In 1992, Thomas Caramagno published
the book The Flight of the Mind: Virginia
Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness."
Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia
Woolf provides a thorough and
authoritative examination of Woolf's life
and work.
To the Lighthouse and Modernism

Virginia Woolf, focuses on the inner
lives of characters. The authors
use differing strategies to construct a
picture of an inner life (such as
representing differing states of
consciousness, or contrasting inner
feelings with external realities).


Modernity is identified with the rise of a
"culture of consumption" in which a
"hegemony of fashion and advertising"
dominated a society defining itself
increasingly in terms of leisure (Nicholls,
253). According to Lewis, a "society
defining itself in terms of leisure is one in
which life becomes increasingly
aestheticised: "art" provides the collective
representations of a "private" life which is
founded in the rituals of imitation"
(Nicholls, 252).
).

Lewis perceived the "one-day
world..(of).. advertisement" as a
"plane universe, without depth"
upon which "time lays down
discontinuous entities, side by
side; each day, each temporal
entity, complete in itself, with
no perspectives, no fundamental
external reference at all" (Lewis,
qtd Nicholls, 252


Woolf responded to the Modernist need to
"reinvent constructive social narratives" to
occupy the spaces opened up by
Modernity (Nichols, 253). "Writing
(came) to occupy a space between
historical memory and imaginative
construction" (253).
Virginia Woolf emphasized the self's
unstable existence in time "where time is
not the time of some objective 'history'
but the rhythm of feeling as it is
scrutinised and overlooked by the
perceiving mind" (Nicholls, 264).



Woolf employs imagery as a strategy to
depict instinctive reactions of her
characters
Woolf makes use of a multiplicity of
narrators to capture the mental processes
of her characters.
A desire for connection between people is
expressed by the depiction of altered
states of consciousness in the two
generations of female characters , which
implies a process of evolvement from
generation to generation.

Woolf depicts the possibility of an
evolved awareness that could
connect people on a conscious level.
The Stream of Consciousness
Technique in To the Lighthouse

In Virginia Woolf's case the exterior
events have actually lost their
hegemony, they serve to release and
interpret inner events, whereas
before her time (and still today in
many instances) inner movements
preponderantly function to prepare
and motivate significant exterior
happenings" (Auerbach 475)

In his 1946 work Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western
Literature, German critic Erich Auerbach
argues that To the Lighthouse
demonstrates author Virginia Woolf’s
ability to invert the traditional causal
relationship between the actions that
make up the plot of the novel and the
thoughts of the various characters (475).


In “The Brown Stocking” Auerbach elaborates in
detail the insignificance of exterior occurrences to
interior processes as established in the narrative
form of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. In the
passage Auerbach quotes from the novel, Woolf
presents a discrepancy between physical and
subjective dimensions – characterizing Mrs
Ramsay by a mode of multiplicity (performing
various tasks enabling the exterior events
without neglecting the more significant inner
events represented by her thoughts,


Woolf creates synchronic dimensions(concerned with events
existing in a limited time period and ignoring historical
antecedents) in a diachronic(phenomena (as of language or
cultureas they occur or change over a period of time)
narrative, a “multipersonal representation of
consciousness” that is evident also in the art of the
modernist period.
Monet’s “Water Garden and Japanese Footbridge”, for
example, portrays a similar multiplicity of reality in that the
emphasis on light and how it changes our emotions and
perceptions is more significant than the external image
itself. Rejecting the idea of one fixed reality, a
characteristic of modern art is it prompts for an
investigation of objective reality by means of subjective
impressions received by various individuals and at various
times. This multiplicity that characterizes the modernist
crisis of representation seems to register the breakdown of
traditional certainties and the attempt to construct
alternative meaning and order.

In general, the works that emerged out of the
period reflect a radical breakaway from
traditional methods of representation. There is no
longer a fixed center, perspective or meaning to
be found, let alone a proper solution or closure to
the proposed issues, hence Auerbach’s
suggestion that “there is often something
confusing…hazy about them, something hostile to
the reality which they represent” (p.551, “The
Brown Stocking”). From Pablo Picasso to Virginia
Woolf, the modernist artists seem intent to
demonstrate an inherent sense of disorder and
disunity in their works.

Mrs. Ramsay’s world is directed
forward by the particular and
concrete, the fragrance of the Boeuf
en Daube and the strength of
another’s arm. Each particularity,
each concrete aspect of life is
unique, with its own history and
distinct relationship with a thinker.13
Even the Boeuf en Daube is not
common, generalized entity.

The aroma and the taste vary with
each person. The preparation and
the memories of other times, other
dinners, and other recipes contribute
to each person’s understanding of
and relationship with the present
Boeuf en Daube.

Even more than the Boeuf en Daube that
Mrs. Ramsay serves to her dinner guests,
there is the concreteness and particularity
of each person, each of the guests, each
of her children as a distinct, concrete
person with a life history, a narrative, with
abilities, dreams and hopes, with needs,
interests, feelings, and desires, with a
preferred way of thinking, with different
vocabularies and texts to enrich his or her
life.


Knowledge of the other, whether person or
object, is not based on fragmented parts, on
some additive process by which separate,
unconnected facts are combined. As Woolf says
elsewhere, “It is no use trying to sum people up.
One must follow hints, not exactly what is said,
not yet entirely what is done.”14
When she sees her children smiling, running, or
playing, when she wonders whether Minta Doyle
will marry Paul Bayley and the suitability of this
choice, Mrs. Ramsay is not analyzing a smile, a
judgment, or an instance of behavior.

A so-called instance of behavior is
akin to William Blake’s epigram “To
see a world in a grain of sand
[and]…. Hold Infinity in the palm of
your hand.”15 However, it is not
Infinity with a capital “I” that Mrs.
Ramsay sees in her child’s eyes. It is
a world that is James, her son.

Though this form of knowledge and
thinking at first seems ephemeral
and unstable, it can be described in a
number of ways, as intuitive
knowledge and tacit knowing. As
with intuition, Mrs. Ramsay does not
lack knowledge

Her knowledge and thinking are not empty
or unexplainable. Though a mother’s
understanding of her infant’s needs and
desires may be called intuitive or a
maternal instinct, this understanding is
based on a form of knowledge and way of
gaining knowledge. There is intense
concentration on and involvement with the
other and with the other’s world.



This concentration is not just hearing
words and interpreting or translating their
meaning into logical, propositional form.
It is listening, the seeing, the grasping,
the feeling, the encounter.
At the same time that this knowing person
remains herself and retains her knowledge
and entering the place of the other while
yet not defining that place.

Relationships form the core of the
world Mrs. Ramsay inhabits.
Problems requiring caring,
responsiveness, communication,
tangled networks of concern,
emotions, and the avoidance of
betrayal or isolation,16 and the
understanding of another’s life
history emerge from these
relationships.

According to Blum, for example
responsiveness involves both cognitive
and affective dimensions. It includes a
cognitive grasp of another’s condition…. At
the same time the altruistic aspect of
responsiveness involves our emotional
natures, in that responsiveness is not a
purely rational willing of another person’s
good.17


Though the language of care and response
requires one to nurture and respond to
the other and not to hurt either the other
or oneself, it also necessitates
demystification, openness, and a rejection
of self-deception.
As we read To the Lighthouse, we
recognize the two ways of thinking about
and relating to the world, others, and
ourselves. We take Mrs. Ramsay’s
perspective and become part of the world
that she inhabits.



We experience the loss and desperation of Mr.
Ramsay after the death of Mrs. Ramsay.
We may wonder whether his loss was the loss of
Mrs. Ramsay or not having everything in its
place, not having someone to take care of his
mundane world, and not having the comfort of
the ordinary.
Mr. Ramsay never searches to know the other
world and way of life that Mrs. Ramsay
personified. Mr. Ramsay never questions whether
at times he too should enter into this other way
of knowing and thinking.

Though men’s language provides a
“heaven of security” for her life, Mrs.
Ramsay does not presume she
should speak this foreign language or
enter men’s world; she does not
entertain the idea that this too
should be her world.

But just as the second and third sections
of To the Lighthouse are fraught with
darkness and foreboding, the resonance of
this feeling reverberates back to expose
the despair and forewarning in the first
section. Even from behind the protective
shield of “The Window,” the melancholy,
frustration, and resentment of “Time
Passes” and “The Lighthouse” are felt.

The foreboding and darkness
emanate from below the surface and
are not just based on the sudden
death of Mrs. Ramsay, the shell that
kills Andrew, the death of Prue in
childbirth, the loneliness of Mr.
Ramsay, and the bitterness of
James.

In the section, “The Window,” we are
often struck by what is not said, by
what is missing. In the either - or
categories personified by Mr. Ramsay
and Mrs. Ramsay, we are led to
recognize the uneasiness that Lily
Briscoe feels and the discomfort of
Bankes at having to dine with the
Ramsays.

Mrs. Ramsay herself poses one of the
problems that bothers us. When
Bankes speaks of friends Mrs.
Ramsay has not seen for many
years, Mrs. Ramsay cannot believe
that they still exist, that they have
led their own life, throughout these
years, a life she knew nothing of.


Maybe, we can even say that she cannot
imagine that there are other voices and
themes, other moral songs and ways of
living beside the one that she knows so
well.18
She never entertains the idea that caste,
social class, and economic system, race
specific experiences, cultural or historical
setting, and ideological differences, like
language itself, may generate different,
equally acceptable ways of living and
thinking.

Even Mrs. Ramsay’s empathy with
the crying chambermaid whose
father is dying so far away, in
Switzerland, is not a case of
universality, but the nearness of the
young maid.


The thinness of Mrs. Ramsay’s visits to the
poor and needy are like the stocking she
knits for the lighthouse keeper’s son. They
are all part of ha goodness, but it is a
goodness that does not have to confront
the realities of these others.
Mrs. Ramsay’s caring for others focuses
on face-to-face encounters with those who
are intimates family, friends, and all of
those who are part of her daily life.

Caring, response, knowledge, and
thinking, for Mrs. Ramsay, focus on a
very limited population, on those
people, events, and occasions when
she can directly affect those who
hear her voice and feel her presence.


There is something equally tragic
about Mrs. Ramsay’s portrayal of life.
Even Mrs. Ramsay herself wonders if
she is too overpowering and
overprotective, whether her caring at
times smothers others, whether her
view of what someone else’s life
should be is mistaken

Do the ones she believes need caring for
really need the care she gives? She
orchestrates the marriage of Minta and
Paul, thinks about whether Lily Briscoe
and William Bankes should marry,
wonders about the fate of Charles Tansley
as a scholar who follows in the footsteps
of ha husband, only imagines ha
daughters’ future in terms of marriage.
But Mrs. Ramsay’s dreams, her caring and
responsiveness, come to naught.

Paul’s marriage does not measure up to
the ideal match it promised to be on the
day Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch
and became engaged to Paul. Lily Briscoe
never marries, but attains ha own identity
in a way Mrs. Ramsay could never
imagine. And Charles Tansley during the
Great War to end all wars gives speeches
about love, not about logic or the
scholarship Mr. Ramsay so revered.


What does this tell us? To say that care, as with
any other moral standard or standard of
rationality, is fallible or that life has a deeply
tragic vein would be to say the obvious. Instead,
there is something else.
With the passage of time, with the transformation
of Charles Tansley and of Lily Briscoe, we also
recognize how time, the vast sweep of personal
and public historical events also requires us to
change and reconceptualize our intellectual
concepts, the way we look at reasoning and
morality.


At present, a few writers suggest that
what some may call masculine reasoning
and a masculine moral language are thus
being reconceptualized to include aspects
of the feminine.
The either/or categories represented by
Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay are now
being shown to be partial and anemic.


If we accept, for example, caring, as a
quality, a virtue that imbues the presence
and life of someone like Mrs. Ramsay,
then we must also think about what other
virtues are required to give that one virtue
breadth and meaning, disclose its inner
core.
Instead, any one moral virtue refers to a
coherent set of other, interconnected
virtues.



For example, caring for someone requires the
virtue of courage since caring for often requires
acts that are out of the ordinary, that encounter
and overcome something someone may fear.
At times, we are distressed at Mrs. Ramsay’s
silence, at her neutrality, in the face of Mr.
Ramsay’s unfeeling response to his children and
we wonder why Mrs. Ramsay’s paralysis, why her
silence, her ina
bility to speak, and to defend her children.
Similarly, justice would be a cold, a frigid virtue,
as unresponsive and austere as Mr. Ramsay often
was, if it did not possess care and compassion.


In addition, feminine theorists need to provide a
richer interpretation of community, instead of
favoring the idea of “concentric circles,”
networks, and webs of relationships.
However, when feminine ethical theory stresses
life history and narrative, it cannot only speak of
a person’s life from the time of birth. Instead,
these theories must recognize as Virginia Woolf
did, that at the time of birth, the infant does not
merely relate to caregivers, family members, and
other intimates. The Ramsay family is not
disassociated from some larger framework.


We recognize this family as the same family
described in the Godless Victorian,the biography
of Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father and the
model for Mr. Ramsay.
This family like any other family is not a selfcontained network or web of interacting
relationships. Rather, in the background and
within its very being, there is an explicit or tacit
community that contributes to the education of
the infant her life history, and the way she
chooses a life narrative.


The content and meaning of our
interlocking system of moral virtues
must then be found in the history,
the memories of communal life.
These communal roots contribute
metaphors, symbols, meanings,
skills, values, excellences, virtues,
and interests to those who nourish
and care for an infant.

These moral virtues acquire
substance and meaning through
being part of a region, a community.
Modernist Style of Writing.

One does not have to read very much of
To the Lighthouse before one realizes that
Woolf has chosen here a very particular
style, a way of telling the story which
exerts a strange and compelling effect
upon the reader in order to consider some
of the ways in which a few very important
aspects of what this novel has to reveal
are directly linked to the author's
decisions about point of view and
language.

One of my major purposes in this
lecture is to offer some suggestions
about why we might consider Woolf
a major modernist writer and link her
to other modernist artists we have
been considering in Liberal Studies,
even to those who, at first glance
perhaps, don't seem to share quite
the same style: Kafka, Eliot, and
certain modern painters.

I shall be trying to establish as my major
point the idea that what does link Woolf to
these other modernists is the way in which
her style compels us to recognize a
fundamental problem of modern life: the
deep and apparently unbridgeable
dichotomy between the fragmented inner
world of the self and any sense of
coherent order to the world beyond the
self, that is, the world of human
relationships, of nature, of society as a
totality.
The Power of Style: An Example

This particular example is part of a
description of Mrs Ramsay :
All she could do now was to admire the
refrigerator, and turn the pages of the
Stores list in the hope that she might
come upon something like a rake, or a
mowing machine, which, with its prongs
and its handles, would need the greatest
skill and care in cutting out. All these
young men parodied her husband, she
reflected; he said it would rain; they said
it would be a positive tornado.
But here, as she turned the page, suddenly
her search for the picture of a rake or a mowingmachine was interrupted. The gruff murmur,
irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and
the putting in of pipes which had kept on
assuring her, though she could not hear what
was said (as she sat in the window which opened
on the terrace), that the men were happily
talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an
hour and had taken its place soothingly in the
scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as
the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden
bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of
the children playing cricket, had ceased;
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach,
which for the most part beat a measured and soothing
tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat
over and over again as she sat with the children the words
of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am
guarding you--I am your support," but at other times
suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind
raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no
such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums
remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of
the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea,
and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick
doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow-this sound which had been obscured and concealed under
the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears
and made her look up with an impulse of terror.

The first thing we notice about this style, I
suspect, is the extraordinary sentence
structure. The second paragraph contains
a sentence of 260 words, a sentence
which, in effect, is a single complex
sentence of 32 words enormously
embellished by parenthetical phrases and
clauses, modifying phrases, and a whole
rich array of various grammatical
constructions


These hold up the full meaning of the sentence
and transform it from something clear and
straightforward into something delayed, qualified,
uncertain, and (for the reader) much more
difficult to assimilate.
If we examine closely the structure of that long
sentence, we see that the main clause begins
with an indication of the subject (the gruff
murmur) but that any further development of
that clause is held up for nine lines, so that we
get a range of associations and modifying
phrases describing that murmur. Thus, by the
time we get to the main verb (had ceased) we
have gone through a range of emotional
associations connected to the initial subject.

The meanings of the words and, most
important, the rhythm of the sentence
establish the extent to which Mrs
Ramsay's mood is dependent upon the
semi-conscious absorption of what is
going on around her. She cannot hear
what people are saying, but the very
presence of the regular activity provides
for her a comforting reassurance of
domestic order.

Thus, the structure of the sentence itself presents
the central issue of Mrs Ramsay's character, that
she is constantly dependent upon the existence
of family rituals all around her, that, although she
may not participate directly in them or even be
fully aware of what is going on, she relies upon
such a background sense of ongoing domestic
order to sustain her tranquil mood. The strongest
word in the entire sentence is the final word
terror. It injects into what has seemed a slow
meandering through a number of quotidian
details a sudden emotional urgency.

We can ask ourselves an obvious
question: Why does Woolf not simply
present the main clauses and thus
deliver the full thought much more
simply? After all, isn't the main point
here that Mrs Ramsay's mood
changes suddenly in an unwelcome
way?


However, what goes on in her mind, from one
moment to the next, is something much more
complex than any such simple declaration would
illustrate. More about this later.
We notice, too, how almost all the details of this
style focus our attention upon what is going on in
Mrs Ramsay's mind. We do learn some external
details about what she is doing and where she is
sitting, but these details are clearly subordinated
to the most obvious content of the sentences:
the details passing through Mrs Ramsay's
consciousness as she sits and stares at a
magazine, half-listening to the children playing
and the men talking nearby.


In other words, there's an interplay here
between the external world and Mrs
Ramsay's inner consciousness of that
world, but the emphasis is very much on
the latter rather than on the former.
Such a style, in other words, forces us to
recognize the preeminence of the inner life
in the ongoing drama of a human
existence.


No one thinks in such superbly polished prose,
taking care, clause by clause or phrase by
phrase, that all the antecedents are appropriately
positioned and the modifiers clear. No, if people
thought like this, then English teachers would be
out of a job.
What Woolf is attempting here clearly is not to
reproduce the thought process itself but to
develop a symbolic equivalent of thought, to use
her command of English prose style to create for
us in the rhythm, structure, and accumulation of
detail in the sentence an emotional illumination
of Mrs Ramsay's consciousness.


A comparison here with symbolist painting
may be in order.
What the symbolist (like, say, Dali) is
doing is using his art to create for the
viewer the emotional equivalent of
dreams, to get us to recognize in the art
something analogous to a dream
experience. But in creating such symbols,
the painter, like Woolf, is doing something
very sophisticated and simply beyond the
world of how people really think and how
they dream.

The structure of the sentence also
characterizes that inner life in a curious
way that is sustained for all of the
characters in the novel. We can
summarize this briefly by observing that
characteristically the people in this novel,
as in the above example, cannot complete
a simple and coherent thought without a
host of other impressions, memories,
feelings, images, qualifications, and
possibilities crowding in upon the mind.


The essential quality of life here is inner, and in
that inner world the emotional changes can be
abrupt, unexpected, and extreme.
There is nothing particularly dramatic in the
external scene; it is about as tranquil and
unthreatening as a domestic scene might be--a
family at play and rest. Yet there is an intense
inner drama amid all this mundane detail. Woolf
does not tell us that the real drama of life is
inner, but the structure of the sentences forces
us to acknowledge that as the major fact of life:
one can go from security to dread in an instant
for reasons one cannot fully comprehend.

This style also indicates that the
succession of thoughts is not in Mrs
Ramsay's control. The style is, of
course, beautifully controlled, but its
effect on the reader is a constant
feeling of surprise, complexity, and
lack of control on the part of Mrs
Ramsay


To appreciate the significance of what Woolf is
doing we might think for a moment about the
relationship in other books we have read between
the inner world of the characters and their
perceptions of the outer world.
In Homer, for example, the characters have a
firm confidence in the external world. It may be
unpredictable and often brutal, but they are
confident that they understand why it is so (the
gods, everyone agrees, are in charge). Hence,
nature and society have a certain stability of
meaning, and human beings can understand
themselves with reference to that natural order.

However, this great confidence in the
congruence of inner and outer sources of
meaning was decisively challenged in the
seventeenth century. In the work of
Descartes, who urges us to distrust all
contact with the external world, to direct
our attentions inward, and to build
whatever we can know upon a ruthless
self-examination. Only if we do that, can
we come to any serious understanding of
ourselves and the world.

Now, this inward turn, as we have
discussed, creates a dichotomy
between the inner self and the outer
world, between mind and matter,
between the thinking, feeling subject
and the perceived objects of
experience, and calls into question
the traditional faith in understanding
the self in terms of a wider natural
order given by God.

The sense of a separation is
alienation, which, in the most
general sense, refers to a feeling
that one's full identity as imagined
inside is not part, or not sufficiently
part of one's real existence in the
given world.
Alienation

Now, one characteristic feature of a good
deal of Modernist art is the recognition
that such an attempt to resolve the
question of alienation is futile. The self has
become so fractured and the world has
become so unknowable or so strange that
the possibilities for connecting a sense of
who I am as a human being with some
wider purpose for life itself no longer
exist.
Kafka's prose in The
Metamorphosis

There the weird and horrific events
are given to us, largely from the
point of view of Gregor's own mind,
in a flat, unemotional, and prosaic
style quite at odds with the
strangeness of the situation.

One effect of this is to underscore
just how inadequate Gregor's mind is
to gain any sense of the reality of
the situation he or any of his family
is in, and, beyond Gregor, a sense of
how language itself cannot capture
the full meaning of these events.
There is no closure.

Woolf is, in a sense, doing the same thing.
Here the events surrounding the
characters are anything but weird--this
novel is full of what should be cozy
domesticity: a family holiday in a beautiful
setting, full of friends, children, communal
get-togethers, drinks, dinners, walks
along the beach.

But the style is wholly inappropriate
to such a view of the events, for the
style insists upon the dramatic
complexity, unpredictability, painful
tensions, and dangers inherent in
every minor social turn



Like Gregor, Mrs Ramsay and others in the novel want
closure. Big questions keep insisting on raising themselves:
What is the meaning of life? But the thought processes, as
revealed in the style, show that no answer to such a
question is possible, since no quiet and complete thinking is
possible.
There are always the interruptions from outside, from the
memory, from associations, from buried feelings. How can
one achieve any form of closure, when the personality who
is asking the questions is incapable of holding onto a firm
sense of itself, of controlling what is going on?
Even Mr Ramsay, famous throughout the country for the
power of his logical mind, cannot control his own sense of
himself and is as subject as everyone else to the sudden
terrors of an unexpected thought or feeling which, as often
as not, is resolved equally unexpectedly





Another way of making this point is to stress that these modernist
characters experience life as a flux, a disordered succession of
inner thoughts, ambitions, hopes, desires, fears, something over
which they exercise no firm control.
In a moment there is time for decisions and revisions which a
minute will reverse.
Having no reassuring sense of a permanent order, they have
nothing to measure themselves against, no firm model of who
they are, socially or individually.
Thus, they are defined by the emotions and memories and
impressions of each passing moment. And they are helpless in
front of the major questions of life, like "What is the purpose of
life?" or "What have I done with my life?" or "What is happening
to me?"
They cannot face these questions because they cannot deal with
life as a totality, since they experience it as a ceaseless flux of
often dissociated impressions, unwelcome memories, desires
(many of which go unsatisfied), and fears.

So we get the sense of characters,
isolated individuals, who endlessly
introspect, wondering about their
identity, the meaning of their lives,
the significance of their feelings.
Often they raise these questions only
on the inside, sometimes in the
midst of the most mundane activities
(like Mrs Ramsay).

Generally, the questions don't get taken
into anything like a community forum,
simply because there isn't such a forum,
and in some cases, as in Gregor's, such
communication is impossible; in others,
like Prufrock's and Mrs Ramsay's, social
conventions stand in the way of an open
confession about one's deepest concerns
before others (who in any case would
probably be incapable of assisting,
because they are wrestling in the same
inner space with the same questions).

The result is that they seem to live much
of their lives picking away at the leaves of
their own psyches, searching for some
final significance. The effect, to borrow a
metaphor from Ibsen's Peer Gynt, is like
peeling an onion. Every layer one removes
reveals another one underneath; and if
one persists to the very centre, there's
nothing there but empty space.
The Fragmented Self

The "fragmented self" is a particular concern of
Modernist writers. It's clear that there is no
possibility in their world of the old social self,
since the shared communal understanding of
value upon which that depends has disappeared.
It's true that Mrs Ramsay devotes her whole life
to a project of conferring social value on people,
seeking always to place people in appropriate
traditional social arrangements, like guests at her
home or table or partners in a marriage.

But her society is too complex, too
transitory, too vulnerable to provide
any more, as it does in Homer or
Shakespeare, a firm grounding for
one's sense of who one is. In that
sense, Mrs Ramsay is clearly a figure
from the past, whose understanding
of life, whose grasp on events, is
shaped entirely by her ability as a
social being to establish meaningful
relationships among people.




Viewpoint one regards life:
Whether the detached philosopher or
housewife (thesis)
One must give up the first
prespective in favour of the other
(antithesis)
Becoming immersed in the waters of
trnsition emerging with a double
vision(synthesis)
Joseph Conrad
Early Life


Joseph Conrad (born December
1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polishborn British novelist, who became a
British subject in 1886.
He is regarded as one of the greatest
novelists in English,[2] though he did
not speak the language fluently until
he was in his twenties (and then
always with a marked Polish accent).
Early Life


He wrote stories and novels,
predominantly with a nautical or
seaboard setting, that depict trials of
the human spirit by the demands of
duty and honor.
Conrad was a master prose stylist
who brought a distinctly non-English
tragic sensibility into English
literature.

While some of his works have a
strain of romanticism, he is viewed
as a precursor of modernist
literature. His narrative style and
anti-heroic characters have
influenced many authors.

Films have been adapted from or
inspired by Conrad's Victory, Lord
Jim, The Secret Agent, An Outcast of
the Islands, The Rover, The Shadow
Line, The Duel, Heart of Darkness,
and Nostromo.

Writing in the heyday of the British
Empire, Conrad drew upon his
experiences in the French and later
the British Merchant Navy to create
short stories and novels that reflect
aspects of a worldwide empire while
also plumbing the depths of the
human soul.
Early life

Joseph Conrad was born in Berdyczów
(now Berdychiv, Ukraine) into an
impoverished, highly patriotic Polish noble
family bearing the Nałęcz coat-of-arms.
His father Apollo Korzeniowski was a
writer of politically-themed plays and a
translator of Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo,
Charles Dickens and Shakespeare from
French and English. He encouraged his
son Konrad to read widely in Polish and
French

In 1861 the elder Korzeniowski was
arrested by Imperial Russian
authorities in Warsaw for helping
organize what would become the
January Uprising of 1863–64, and
was exiled to Vologda, a city some
300 miles (480 km) north of
Moscow.

His wife Ewelina[ Korzeniowska (née
Bobrowska) and four-year-old son
followed him into exile. Due to
Ewelina's weak health, Apollo was
allowed in 1865 to move to
Chernihiv, Ukraine, where wıthin a
few weeks Ewelina died of
tuberculosis. Apollo died four years
later in Kraków, leaving Conrad
orphaned at the age of eleven.
Voyages

Conrad lived an adventurous life, dabbling
in gunrunning and political conspiracy,
which he later fictionalized in his novel
The Arrow of Gold. Apparently he
experienced a disastrous love affair that
plunged him into despair. A voyage down
the coast of Venezuela would provide
material for Nostromo; the first mate of
Conrad's vessel became the model for that
novel's hero.

In 1878, after a failed suicide
attempt in Marseille by shooting
himself in the chest,[6] Conrad took
service on his first British ship,
bound for Constantinople before its
return to Lowestoft, his first landing
in Britain.

Barely a month after reaching
England, Conrad signed on for the
first of six voyages between July and
September 1878 from Lowestoft to
Newcastle on a coaster misleadingly
named Skimmer of the Sea. Crucially
for his future career, he "began to
learn English from East Coast chaps,
each built to last for ever and
coloured like a Christmas card."

In London on 21 September 1881 Conrad
set sail for Newcastle as second mate on
the small vessel Palestine to pick up a
cargo of 557 tons of "West Hartley" coal
bound for Bangkok. From the outset,
things went wrong. A gale hampered
progress , then the Palestine had to wait a
month for a berth and was finally rammed
by a steam vessel.

In 1886 he gained both his Master
Mariner's certificate and British
citizenship, officially changing his
name to "Joseph Conrad." Prior to
his retirement from the sea in 1894,
Conrad served a total of sixteen
years in the merchant navy. In 1883
he joined the Narcissus in Bombay, a
voyage that inspired his 1897 novel
The Nigger of the Narcissus.

A childhood ambition to visit central Africa
was realised in 1889, when Conrad
contrived to reach the Congo Free State.
He became captain of a Congo steamboat,
and the atrocities he witnessed and his
experiences there not only informed his
most acclaimed and ambiguous work,
Heart of Darkness, but served to
crystallise his vision of human nature —
and his beliefs about himself.

These were in some measure
affected by the emotional trauma
and lifelong illness he contracted
there. During his stay, he became
acquainted with Roger Casement,
whose 1904 Congo Report detailed
the abuses suffered by the
indigenous population.

The journey upriver that the book's
narrator, Charles Marlow, made closely
follows Conrad's own, and he appears to
have experienced a disturbing insight into
the nature of evil.

Conrad's experience of loneliness at
sea, of corruption and of the
pitilessness of nature converged to
form a coherent, if bleak, vision of
the world. Isolation, self-deception,
and the remorseless working out of
the consequences of character flaws
are threads running through much of
his work. "Amy Foster."


Conrad's own sense of loneliness
throughout his exile's life would find
memorable expression in the 1901
short story, “Amy Roster”.
In March 1896 Conrad married an
Englishwoman, Jessie George. He
subsequently lived in London and near
Canterbury, Kent. The couple had two
sons, John and Borys.
Style

Conrad, an emotional man subject to
fits of depression, self-doubt, and
pessimism, disciplined his romantic
temperament with an unsparing
moral judgment.

As an artist, he famously aspired, in
his preface to The Nigger of the
'Narcissus' (1897), "by the power of
the written word to make you hear,
to make you feel... before all, to
make you see.

That — and no more, and it is
everything. If I succeed, you shall
find there according to your deserts:
encouragement, consolation, fear,
charm — all you demand — and,
perhaps, also that glimpse of truth
for which you have forgotten to
ask."[13]

Writing in what to the visual arts was the
age of Impressionism, Conrad showed
himself in many of his works a prose poet
of the highest order: thus, for instance, in
the evocative Patna and courtroom scenes
of Lord Jim; in the "melancholy-mad
elephant" and gunboat scenes of Heart of
Darkness; in the doubled protagonists of
The Secret Sharer; and in the verbal and
conceptual resonances of Nostromo and
The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'.