The first time I read a Virginia Woolf novel, I was a senior in High School, suffering severely from senioritis. I was practically bed ridden. And Virginia Woolf was not helping me. We were reading To The Lighthouse and I remember almost nothing about it except for nodding in and out of sleep and something … Continue reading Virginia Woolf and The Art of The Pixelated Portrait Read more →
Post 2: Finding Meaning
In the first day of class, we discussed the primary objective of English professors: to help students find meaning and explain how they arrived at such conclusions. As an anthropology… Read more →
Mrs. Dalloway (3-64)
It’s difficult to dog paddle the stream of consciousness that is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Trying to map where characters are geographically proves a difficult task because of this. While the story jumps around in time and space, it is consistently focused on… Continue Reading → Read more →
Clarissa Dalloway – the Loneliest of Characters
My first thought on reading Mrs. Dalloway was how confusing it was to comprehend. The constant change from past to present forced me to read and re-read certain sections in order to fully understand what was happening. Once I got a better grasp on the reading, I realized how sorry I felt for Clarissa Dalloway. The book starts off by showing Clarissa walking around aimlessly in London in search of… Read more →
The Relatability of Mrs. Dalloway
This is my second reading of Mrs. Dalloway, and in my first encounter with Virgina Woolf’s novel my professor made a point to present a mapping that was completed in 2011. Therefore, I am well aware of the long and confusing physical journey that each character takes around London and where they intersect after witnessing […] Read more →
“The War was over, except for some.”
The novel takes place after World War I. The War has ended, or perhaps more accurately, shifted. It is important to note that almost every single character that our troubled heroine introduces us during the first third of the book suffers from some kind of conflict. The conflict is not against another figure, country, or nature. The War has instead… Read more →
Mrs. Dalloway’s Extraordinarily Mundane Life
The approximate one third of Mrs. Dalloway that I’ve read so far has reminded me that there is no topic too mundane or boring for a writer to adopt as the focus of a work of literature. At first, I struggled to understand why a reader would be interested in this story. I’ve liked the other stuff we’ve read up… Read more →
Woolf’s Depiction of Mental Illness
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, we are introduced to many characters and given very interesting, brief glimpses into their thoughts. This stream of conscious style is unique in that it gives a very honest and candid vantage point of the characters from the story. One of the facets of the novel that grabbed me was […] Read more →
Poor, Old Clarissa Dalloway and Everyone Else
The first time I read Mrs. Dalloway I hated Clarissa. Her self-important mind-wanderings about how old she is and looks and feels drove me crazy. This time I felt the same but sympathized more with the overall sadness of not only Clarissa’s thoughts, but Peter’s and of course Septimus’s as well. The contrast between the things the […] Read more →
Sexy Response
From the first page of the story, I predicted that Miranda would be a love-hungry, lonely woman, and despite her romance with Dev, my theory ultimately remains true by the ending. There were many aspects of the story that contribute to Miranda’s development, or perhaps lack thereof, as a character. The contrast between Laxmi’s cousin’s … Continue reading Sexy Response → Read more →