aun.ali
08-12-2012, 10:05 AM
I've written an essay on Woolf as follow, though my grammar sucks at time.
On Virginia Woolf
Grief, Hollowness and Death
"How to make her believe in nothing" says Woolf in one of her short stories named " A Society". Woolf set afoot her career in novels with unprecedented styled publication of a compilation of short stories. It is evident in her short stories that she diverges from the writing style followed till the twentieth century, the concreteness of the materiality in the happenings of stories is not restricted by the stop of a pen to think what to make of the story next. This stream of consciousness allows the novelist to plunge into his or her own world and express profoundly the pieces of thoughts as they penetrate the mind. Absence of scaffolding enhances the reality of mind in a way that it is what it is, not what is poured out is in a measured, transformed way.
In Woolf's mind darkness is prevalent. There's no God in Woolf's world. She holds pen to transmit her thoughts caged by the "luminous halo" life. Discussion of life and death is Woolf's favorite business. In "A lady in the looking glass" it is the reflection that speaks for the truth, not that is out of the glass, but in the glass. The separation of vision by the glass is the hedge barring life from death. Glass here speaks for the angel of death. The image is confined by the borders of the mirror, making it improbable to seek beyond the scene, and throughout the story the person looking at the glass doesn't adjust for a better vision. For a moment the vision is blackened to add to the reflection of a pack of letters. In contrast to this darkness is the admission of more light into the glass to make the scenery vivid, but at the expense of an overgrown branch cut down, overgrown like the lady herself, making her sad because she loves life and had to deprive a spray from life. Making her conscious of her own mortality. Whether its reluctance to face life by the lady in "The unwritten novel", because of the misery on her face while she looked at life or contrastingly being unhappy because of cutting a branch dead, grief is effulgent in Woolf's stories. Mrs. Ramsay in "To the Lighthouse" is struck by the radiating light of the lighthouse in a measured way, as the intervals between the darkness and the light are equal, as if making life balanced between troughs and crests on which it sails. Woolf makes different approaches to life through different characters, as in To the Lighthouse the painter Lily Briscoe is on a break from her work and during this time she is struck by a sardonic "simple question", that is "What is the meaning of life?". Making her think that " the great revelation had never come" and then the repetition "the great revelation never did come" imposing the meaninglessness of life. Lily is a painter striving to achieve an image to be put on the easel, and it is not till the end that she is able to paint something, struggling throughout the novel to put the thoughts into colors, in the same way maundering over revelations to find the meaning of life, here speaking as a surrogate author for Woolf, and the purpose of this prosaic exhaustion. In the novel To the Lighthouse even when the purpose of life is achieved as Mr. Ramsay makes that journey to the lighthouse which is contemplated from the beginning, that purpose seems unimportant when fulfilled, as the expedition is undertaken after ten years and now Mrs. Ramsay children do not seem to enrapture the emotions which they had ten years earlier, thus Woolf is conscious to make her reader believe in her conception of life, which is not touched by optimism at all. For Woolf life seems to give everything that is purposeless.
Between the Acts is considered to be the most "quintessential" of Woolf's novels. In her last novel Miss La Trobe is grief stricken because of the inadequacy of the pageant's performers to put into effect the play in the way she wants. But the audience seems to enjoy every moment, even the chaff of malfunctioned machine considering it as a part of the pageant. This gap of communication between the manager and the audience is the void between God and humans for Woolf. There is a strong pun in this miscommunication, Woolf emphasizes more and more on the meagerness of meaning in the old scribbling of "revelations". She was critical of religion that it doesn't provide the path to lead a life on, rather makes it more complicated. Only Miss La Trobe knows that not everything is going according to the plan, not her audience. At the end of the pageant Miss La Trobe is so much despised by the performance that she doesn't come on stage to receive the gratitude.
Often the reader of Woolf's writings is faced with the relentless monotony in her works, to some it feels as if she speaks for the mundane happenings too much and even the novelists of her time and earlier centuries would slash off much of Woolf's consideration for novels as irrelevant to include in reader's mind. But it seems to substantiate Woolf's ideology of life that she tries to present in her novels and short stories. The mechanical spinning of earth creating diurnal and nocturnal perfunctory happenings has been the topic to be enhanced by Woolf as well as her contemporaries like Joyce and Eliot. "Monday or Tuesday" speaks for this topic blatantly, the heron is "lazy and indifferent" regardless of any day of the week, passing over the church as it does every day. Though Woolf is critical of the monotony, but she is trying, in vain, to search for the truth in this prosaic life. "For ever desiring truth" as she says in the short story, but this search is "for ever and ever" like the diurnal "barks, shouts ,cry", put in another words it is impossible to inquire for the truth in this life as it is only the search towards the truth not reaching the truth, or the path is wayward in itself. Woolf wants an exit from this preset way of living, she needs vigor and stimulation enough to make her busy in something productive that would make her comprehend the truth- or rather the meaning of life. The search of "the truth?" in "Monday or Tuesday" and the hindrance to the quest is same as Prufrock questioning "How should I presume?" and then the intrinsic barrier proclaiming "Do I dare disturb the universe?". Both writers of the twentieth century are exposed to the inability to disturb the perfunctory cycle of life, but they hint to the reader to vindicate this cycle as meaningless.
Woolf pays close attention to petty details of daily life, and in this struggle tries to search for the truth. In her novel "To the Lighthouse" the most important and the most symbolic part of the novel is the scene in which the dinner has to be done by all of the members present in the house. The colors, the dishes, the conversation, all these along with the penetration by Woolf in the characters' mind to signify to the reader what is the thing that catches a particular character the most, in this way Woolf defines the selection process going in humans' mind. It is a pity of human mind that it has to choose, Woolf considers this as a fence in human mind that it has to filter out things in order to comprehend, according to what the mind thinks to be correct. In this process what agitates Woolf the most is the loss of the truth, this method of selection is in her short story "Solid Objects". In this story John has an inscrutable attraction towards "pretty stones", which has led him to forgo his political career and now all that is meaningful to him in life is the collection of the mysterious solid objects. On one hand Woolf makes it look like the sole purpose of John's life, and on the other hand through Charles she asseverates the useless looking stones as mere waste of time. John's search is not same Charles', therefore it is this difference of opinion about life that makes Woolf believe that humans will never be able to come up with a unified meaning of life.
John's search continues vehemently until he gathers another object, and still his needs are not vanquished, his quest intensifies after every object that he finds. It is a search which at facade looks like ludicrous but has some meaning in it. These objects are tiny and John searches for these in trash places, and the places where people often ignore to even look. Thus Woolf looks for meaning in petty things, overlooked by the novelists till the twentieth century. She does this purposefully, igniting in reader's mind the need to look after things where human mind doesn't wander normally. She is not able to find anything yet, like John, she imposes (metaphorically) that humans lose more rather than gain anything in this journey of finding meaning. In this thrust to quench the thirst fired by mind to overcome the meaninglessness of life it is not possible to reach a point where this thirst would be fully conquered, rather it would increase and human mind will start choosing objects (situations, relationships, or any such thing that shapes life), which will be useless, and in this process let the meaningful things ( in others' eyes or the searcher's eye) go in vain. This is why Woolf emphasizes more and more on "nothing", as Joyce says in Ulysses "no one is anything", in the same way Woolf tries to make readers come up to the conclusion that the only thing that thrives in this vehemently disturbing world is the thing which has "nothing" as its base.
This "nothing" is the axiom on which Woolf works. "How could any Lord have made this world? She asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor." this passage from To the Lighthouse speaks for the interior condition of Woolf's mind. Absence of a deity is what transfers all the burden of this life on individuals' shoulder, thus there is no bearer of this burden and Woolf decided to pour out her mind turmoil onto the paper. Woolf was hard struck at her early age till she was twenty two years old she had lost her parents, first her mother and then her father. She laughed hysterically when she visited her mother's dead body, and was later treated by the doctors. Not only does the bereavement of these deaths play a major role in her obsession with death, but the years of the world wars that followed. "Suffering" is Woolf's mental illness because of which she took her own life. In Between the Acts there is an interruption during the pageant when a propeller's voice is heard in the sky, approaching towards the audience. This voice stops the play for a second, and diverts the audience's attention for some time. Woolf's novels have meanings and interpretation on different layers, in the same way here she testifies this intervention of the airplane (a symbol of war) as a blockade towards a brighter future for England. The play contains England's progress through the world history, in the form of humans depicting its predicament, but in this way forward the World War has hampered the progress. On a macro level the war not only puts a stop to a single country rather to its onlookers or neighbors as well, harboring a hedge that would make the whole world confined to a place, rather than moving forward, in other words the world, because of the war, is now living in its history rather than in its future.
On Virginia Woolf
Grief, Hollowness and Death
"How to make her believe in nothing" says Woolf in one of her short stories named " A Society". Woolf set afoot her career in novels with unprecedented styled publication of a compilation of short stories. It is evident in her short stories that she diverges from the writing style followed till the twentieth century, the concreteness of the materiality in the happenings of stories is not restricted by the stop of a pen to think what to make of the story next. This stream of consciousness allows the novelist to plunge into his or her own world and express profoundly the pieces of thoughts as they penetrate the mind. Absence of scaffolding enhances the reality of mind in a way that it is what it is, not what is poured out is in a measured, transformed way.
In Woolf's mind darkness is prevalent. There's no God in Woolf's world. She holds pen to transmit her thoughts caged by the "luminous halo" life. Discussion of life and death is Woolf's favorite business. In "A lady in the looking glass" it is the reflection that speaks for the truth, not that is out of the glass, but in the glass. The separation of vision by the glass is the hedge barring life from death. Glass here speaks for the angel of death. The image is confined by the borders of the mirror, making it improbable to seek beyond the scene, and throughout the story the person looking at the glass doesn't adjust for a better vision. For a moment the vision is blackened to add to the reflection of a pack of letters. In contrast to this darkness is the admission of more light into the glass to make the scenery vivid, but at the expense of an overgrown branch cut down, overgrown like the lady herself, making her sad because she loves life and had to deprive a spray from life. Making her conscious of her own mortality. Whether its reluctance to face life by the lady in "The unwritten novel", because of the misery on her face while she looked at life or contrastingly being unhappy because of cutting a branch dead, grief is effulgent in Woolf's stories. Mrs. Ramsay in "To the Lighthouse" is struck by the radiating light of the lighthouse in a measured way, as the intervals between the darkness and the light are equal, as if making life balanced between troughs and crests on which it sails. Woolf makes different approaches to life through different characters, as in To the Lighthouse the painter Lily Briscoe is on a break from her work and during this time she is struck by a sardonic "simple question", that is "What is the meaning of life?". Making her think that " the great revelation had never come" and then the repetition "the great revelation never did come" imposing the meaninglessness of life. Lily is a painter striving to achieve an image to be put on the easel, and it is not till the end that she is able to paint something, struggling throughout the novel to put the thoughts into colors, in the same way maundering over revelations to find the meaning of life, here speaking as a surrogate author for Woolf, and the purpose of this prosaic exhaustion. In the novel To the Lighthouse even when the purpose of life is achieved as Mr. Ramsay makes that journey to the lighthouse which is contemplated from the beginning, that purpose seems unimportant when fulfilled, as the expedition is undertaken after ten years and now Mrs. Ramsay children do not seem to enrapture the emotions which they had ten years earlier, thus Woolf is conscious to make her reader believe in her conception of life, which is not touched by optimism at all. For Woolf life seems to give everything that is purposeless.
Between the Acts is considered to be the most "quintessential" of Woolf's novels. In her last novel Miss La Trobe is grief stricken because of the inadequacy of the pageant's performers to put into effect the play in the way she wants. But the audience seems to enjoy every moment, even the chaff of malfunctioned machine considering it as a part of the pageant. This gap of communication between the manager and the audience is the void between God and humans for Woolf. There is a strong pun in this miscommunication, Woolf emphasizes more and more on the meagerness of meaning in the old scribbling of "revelations". She was critical of religion that it doesn't provide the path to lead a life on, rather makes it more complicated. Only Miss La Trobe knows that not everything is going according to the plan, not her audience. At the end of the pageant Miss La Trobe is so much despised by the performance that she doesn't come on stage to receive the gratitude.
Often the reader of Woolf's writings is faced with the relentless monotony in her works, to some it feels as if she speaks for the mundane happenings too much and even the novelists of her time and earlier centuries would slash off much of Woolf's consideration for novels as irrelevant to include in reader's mind. But it seems to substantiate Woolf's ideology of life that she tries to present in her novels and short stories. The mechanical spinning of earth creating diurnal and nocturnal perfunctory happenings has been the topic to be enhanced by Woolf as well as her contemporaries like Joyce and Eliot. "Monday or Tuesday" speaks for this topic blatantly, the heron is "lazy and indifferent" regardless of any day of the week, passing over the church as it does every day. Though Woolf is critical of the monotony, but she is trying, in vain, to search for the truth in this prosaic life. "For ever desiring truth" as she says in the short story, but this search is "for ever and ever" like the diurnal "barks, shouts ,cry", put in another words it is impossible to inquire for the truth in this life as it is only the search towards the truth not reaching the truth, or the path is wayward in itself. Woolf wants an exit from this preset way of living, she needs vigor and stimulation enough to make her busy in something productive that would make her comprehend the truth- or rather the meaning of life. The search of "the truth?" in "Monday or Tuesday" and the hindrance to the quest is same as Prufrock questioning "How should I presume?" and then the intrinsic barrier proclaiming "Do I dare disturb the universe?". Both writers of the twentieth century are exposed to the inability to disturb the perfunctory cycle of life, but they hint to the reader to vindicate this cycle as meaningless.
Woolf pays close attention to petty details of daily life, and in this struggle tries to search for the truth. In her novel "To the Lighthouse" the most important and the most symbolic part of the novel is the scene in which the dinner has to be done by all of the members present in the house. The colors, the dishes, the conversation, all these along with the penetration by Woolf in the characters' mind to signify to the reader what is the thing that catches a particular character the most, in this way Woolf defines the selection process going in humans' mind. It is a pity of human mind that it has to choose, Woolf considers this as a fence in human mind that it has to filter out things in order to comprehend, according to what the mind thinks to be correct. In this process what agitates Woolf the most is the loss of the truth, this method of selection is in her short story "Solid Objects". In this story John has an inscrutable attraction towards "pretty stones", which has led him to forgo his political career and now all that is meaningful to him in life is the collection of the mysterious solid objects. On one hand Woolf makes it look like the sole purpose of John's life, and on the other hand through Charles she asseverates the useless looking stones as mere waste of time. John's search is not same Charles', therefore it is this difference of opinion about life that makes Woolf believe that humans will never be able to come up with a unified meaning of life.
John's search continues vehemently until he gathers another object, and still his needs are not vanquished, his quest intensifies after every object that he finds. It is a search which at facade looks like ludicrous but has some meaning in it. These objects are tiny and John searches for these in trash places, and the places where people often ignore to even look. Thus Woolf looks for meaning in petty things, overlooked by the novelists till the twentieth century. She does this purposefully, igniting in reader's mind the need to look after things where human mind doesn't wander normally. She is not able to find anything yet, like John, she imposes (metaphorically) that humans lose more rather than gain anything in this journey of finding meaning. In this thrust to quench the thirst fired by mind to overcome the meaninglessness of life it is not possible to reach a point where this thirst would be fully conquered, rather it would increase and human mind will start choosing objects (situations, relationships, or any such thing that shapes life), which will be useless, and in this process let the meaningful things ( in others' eyes or the searcher's eye) go in vain. This is why Woolf emphasizes more and more on "nothing", as Joyce says in Ulysses "no one is anything", in the same way Woolf tries to make readers come up to the conclusion that the only thing that thrives in this vehemently disturbing world is the thing which has "nothing" as its base.
This "nothing" is the axiom on which Woolf works. "How could any Lord have made this world? She asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor." this passage from To the Lighthouse speaks for the interior condition of Woolf's mind. Absence of a deity is what transfers all the burden of this life on individuals' shoulder, thus there is no bearer of this burden and Woolf decided to pour out her mind turmoil onto the paper. Woolf was hard struck at her early age till she was twenty two years old she had lost her parents, first her mother and then her father. She laughed hysterically when she visited her mother's dead body, and was later treated by the doctors. Not only does the bereavement of these deaths play a major role in her obsession with death, but the years of the world wars that followed. "Suffering" is Woolf's mental illness because of which she took her own life. In Between the Acts there is an interruption during the pageant when a propeller's voice is heard in the sky, approaching towards the audience. This voice stops the play for a second, and diverts the audience's attention for some time. Woolf's novels have meanings and interpretation on different layers, in the same way here she testifies this intervention of the airplane (a symbol of war) as a blockade towards a brighter future for England. The play contains England's progress through the world history, in the form of humans depicting its predicament, but in this way forward the World War has hampered the progress. On a macro level the war not only puts a stop to a single country rather to its onlookers or neighbors as well, harboring a hedge that would make the whole world confined to a place, rather than moving forward, in other words the world, because of the war, is now living in its history rather than in its future.