Week three notes - Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown PDF

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Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway
Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown...

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Twentieth Century Experimental Literature Week Three Lecture Notes Virginia Woolf Lecture Outline ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’ - What are the main claims? - How can we read these across into Woolf’s fiction? ‘Mrs Dalloway’ - Narrative form: o ‘stream of consciousness’ o Free indirect discourse o Multiple point of view o Time Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown Post-Impressionists and 1910 - In or about December 1910, human character changed. Is her essay an attempt to describe human character? - Why December 1910? Why then that Woolf thinks human character changes? Reference to the exhibition of Manet and the Post-Impressionists? - An alteration of impressionist ideas. What you were trying to paint was what it felt like to perceive the thing that you were painting. Sense of what you were trying to capture was the artist. Reproduce what it was like to be the artist sitting and looking at the scene. - Post-Impressionism is a new set of art practices which are developed and experiments in representation. Emphasise aspects of painting that weren’t simply what the thing they were looking at looked like. - Matisse- much more interested in using colour to be expressive, using colours as a response to what he saw. - The sense of the world the artist has is more important than the objects external to the artists. - What we are moving towards is an idea of abstraction- something that needs to be expressed and taken out rather than capturing the whole scene. - Often that literary critics look to this exhibition that signals a significant change into what art is and what it can do. Gives us an aesthetic view of Woolf’s essay. - Exhibition was considered shocking. Context - Death of Edward VII. He succeeded Victoria at the start of the 20th century. Edwardian Period. Backward looking figure. By the time he comes to the throne he is already an old man. Outlook on life often regarded as being quite conservative. That he belongs to the 19th century more than the 20th century. Change that we see is a more modern and youthful one. - Liberal party formed a Government in two elections in January and December. Reforming government that the liberal party of this period which was trying to

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unpick the influence of some of the significant institutions of the British state. Trying to democratise British politics within reason. Liberal party as an instrument of change. Woolf in her later years was a member of the labour party- her own personal politics may be seen more left than the liberal party. Assumes a correspondence between the personal and the social. Changes in married life, religion, politics, have a large impact on society. Social changes also change the personal as well, you cannot change one without the other. 1910 is the year that Woolf volunteered to work for the Women’s Suffrage movement. Often identified as a proto feminist. She begins to write in the defence of the right for women to vote. This moment of change is not just about art, it’s also about big social and political questions. Importantly questions to do with gender. Some critics of Woolf claim that she is very attached to her class.

If the characters are real the novel with have a chance - What does it mean for a character to be real? - The point of fiction is not to preach doctrines or not to celebrate the British empire, that the purpose of fiction is not political. - The way that the character inhabits the world in the text allows us to see something about society more genuinely than blatantly. - Woolf wants us to see the characters effect upon the writer. - Mrs Brown produces sensational affects that makes Woolf want to write. - It’s about the mind of the character rather than how they appear. - From Bennet- for us to know the character and understand them, we describe the world in which they inhabit. - Realism is about a singular fixed view and what Woolf is trying to say is that doesn’t get you to the character, it only describes the world in which the character exists. - Crucial distinction here from what she claims is going to and the person whose voice we cannot hear. - In ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ Woolf analyses the state of modern fiction by contrasting two generations of writers. - Woolf’s discussion revolves around an anonymous woman she has observed on a train carriage journeying through London, whom she names ‘Mrs Brown’. She examines the various literary methods that could be employed to capture Mrs Brown’s character and the world she inhabits. - Using a man and woman she sat near on the train (whom she calls ‘Mr Smith’ and ‘Mrs Brown’) as her test-case, Woolf asks: how would Arnold Bennett respond to this real-life woman sitting opposite Woolf on the train, this ‘Mrs Brown’? How would he rework her as a fictional character? For Woolf, the problem is that Bennett and his fellow Edwardian writers go about establishing how ‘real’ a character is by very materialist means, as mentioned above. For Woolf, there is something dissatisfying about such a method, and readers must not assume that writers know more about ‘Mrs Brown’ than they do. For Woolf, everyone experiences a myriad thoughts, feelings, and impressions in their day-to-day life, and this is real life, the stuff of which ‘real’ characters should be made, rather than the flesh-and-blood materialism (and focus on economic factors) which a writer like Arnold Bennett uses to make his characters ‘real’

Mrs Dalloway Stream of Consciousness - The term was first used by William James, a philosopher and psychologist. - Wrote an essay on principles of psychology. - 1890 he proposed these ideas for stream of consciousness. - He argued that consciousness is: o Personal o Under constant change o A reconstruction of gaps of time and association. - Commonly used to describe the narrative method of Mrs Dalloway. - Its use is a metaphor, so what does it refer to? o Interior monologue o Narrative point of view- whose view of the world is the narrator describing? o Narrative structure

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Seminar Notes Woolf challenges the concept of reality and what it makes to create a character. Authentic and believable characters 1922 Arnold Bennet reviewed Woolf’s work Jacob’s Room; he accuses her of writing about characters which couldn’t survive. Specific retort to her accusation of him not writing characters with characterisation. In Mr Bennett and Mr Brown, December 1910 is quite a significant date that Woolf refers to. Woolf fighting back to say that experiments in literature can happen. Georgian Era vs Edwardian Era literature...