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VIRGINIA WOLF
Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 in London, of a well-to-do (=benestante) family. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, a well-known essayist and the editor of A Dictionary of National Biography; her mother was a beautiful and sensitive woman, who too belonged to the aristocratic world. Virginia was the third of four children; they all received their elementary education mostly at home, from their parents, or from Swiss and French governesses. Their father had a talent for drawing (which Virginia's sister, Vanessa, inherited), and was able to tell enchanting adventure stories and recite poetry (and this was Virginia's inheritance). The unforgettable paradise of Virginia's youth was Talland House, a big house at St. Ives, in Cornwall, "at the very toenail (=all’unghia del dito del piede) of England". The family went there every summer, with several relations and such friends as Meredith and Henry James. Virginia adored the ocean, the sound of the waves, the ebb and flow of the tides. All this provided a treasure-house of reminiscences, from which she drew for such works as To the Lighthouse, Jacob's Room or The Waves. But this happy period was soon to end. In 1895 Virginia's mother died, and her father, unable to bear the idea of going to Talland House without her, sold it. Virginia was thirteen, but she was deeply affected by her mother's death, and for a long period she suffered from depression , becoming shy and moody; it was the first sign of how frail (=fragile) her nerves were. In these years she used to read for long hours in her father's library, and began writing articles and essays. In 1904 Sir Leslie Stephen died; Virginia went through a period of feverish and morbid grief (=lutto, dolore); she felt isolated and afraid , and later, in 1913 , in a moment of mental anguish, she attempted suicide by taking drugs. The Stephen children abandoned their house at Hyde Park Gate, and settled in Bloomsbury , in Gordon Square Virginia was now writing for literary reviews, and for a short time she gave lectures in English history to young students at Morley College Their spacious Bloomsbury home became the centre of the famous Bloomsbury Group , a circle of intellectuals such as the biographer Lytton Strachey, the art critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry, the economist J.M. Keynes, the writer E.M. Forster and the publisher Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married in 1912. This group was an expression of the new tendencies of the first half of the twentieth century, in which manners and morals were drastically changed. Strict Victorian moralism, which had permeated the early life and education of Virginia Woolf, was
being replaced by a new vision of the world. The old taboos were falling away; the Bloomsbury 'apostles', as they called themselves, were anti- monarchist in politics, sceptical in religion, intellectually free and open- minded, and refined in art and Iiterature. They had, according to Clive Bell, "a taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality, and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery (=perbenismo), a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self-expression and for liberal education. ". In this period Virginia also worked as a volunteer in the movement for women's suffrage, and she always felt the subordinate position of women in society to be an injustice. In 1917 the Woolfs founded the Hogarth Press, which was to publish most of Virginia's works, as well as the works of talented young writers, such as Katherine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot. Notwithstanding her recurrent mental instability, Virginia Woolf liked to live in a cultivated environment, to be listened to, to feel the effect of her words on the people around her. When she was alone, she was overcome (=travolta) by anxiety and insecurity, by terror of the brevity of life. The Second World War increased her terrors; in the London streets, devastated by the bombs, she saw the disintegration of her world, and isolation from her friends. Aware of her mental fragility, and obsessed by the fear of madness, she decided to put an end to her life. She drowned herself in the river Ouse on the 28th of March 1941. She left a note for her husband "Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel l can't go through another of those terrible times again. And I shan't 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 till 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.
- Orlando: A Biography (1928), a peculiar book, unlike the others. Set in Elizabethan England, in the second half of the 16th century, it is the story of a nobleman, Orlando, who eventually turns into a woman and lives all through the 18th and 19th centuries till the first years of the 20th. The work is a kind of grotesque phantasy on metempsychosis. In Orlando, Virginia Woolf represents her intimate friend Vita Sackville- West, a modern emancipated woman of London high society, a writer herself, who lived her life indifferent to the moral code of the time.
- The Waves ( 1931 ), a kind of poem in prose, a desolate vision of life, an invocation of death.
- The Years ( 1937 ). This marks a partial return to the traditional technique, with the story of a generation and of their vision of life.
- Between the Acts (1941). This was published posthumously. It is a kind of interlude, half-way between novel and lyrical prose, which revolves around the performance of a pageant.
- Kew Gardens ( 1919 ). a sketch.
- Monday or Tuesday ( 1921 ), a collection of short stories.
- Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown ( 1 924). literary criticism.
- The Common Reader, First Series ( 1925 ), Second Series ( 1932 ): two volumes of literary criticism.
- A Room of One's Own (1929). a delightful, ironic account of the position of women and their right to live their own lives.
- Flush: a Biography ( 19 33), on the love story between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, seen through the eyes of the latter's dog.
- Three Guineas (1 938 ), an essay ridiculing male pomposity.
- The Death of the Moth and Other Essays ( 1 942).
- A Haunted House and Other Short Stories ( 1 943).
- The Moment and Other Essays ( 1947 ).
- The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays ( 1950 ).
- A Writer's Diary (1915-1941). written over many years and published by her hushand in 1953. In May 1 9 24 Virginia Woolf delivered a lecture entitled Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown in which, stating that the basis of good fiction is in "character in itself", she launched an attack on the Edwardians, i.e. those realistic "materialist" writers like Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy who still used "conventions and tools" that meant "ruin and death" for the modernists (i.e. Eliot, Joyce and herself, of course). She said that, though both groups shared the same concern with the problem of characterization and tried to be as accurate and realistic as possible,
the Edwardians contented themselves with presenting their characters from the outside, i.e. they gave the reader a sort of external "house" in the hope that he (the reader) might "be able to deduce the human beings who live there". But, since the "human beings" inside the "house" are not only what they do (actions, dialogues), but above all what they are (feelings, thoughts, memories), the novel, in order to be a faithful analysis of human nature, had to turn inwards and explore man's mental experience and his complex consciousness. What became all important for the writer, therefore, was what she called "the moments of being", that is to say the moments of utmost intensity, of perception, of vision in the "incessant shower of innumerable atoms" that strike our minds every day, as she wrote in her much-quoted statement: "Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance comes not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, ... there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love, interest or catastrophe in the accepted style ... Life is not a series of gig lamps (=lampioncini) symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo (=bagliore), a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration and complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it. Later, she continues: "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness". Following what Joyce had already done in England and Proust in France, and what, in a way, Sterne had attempted as early as two centuries before, Virginia Woolf therefore abandoned the traditional
One of her most successful "experiments" in this sense, and no doubt her best-known work, is To the Lighthouse (Gita al faro). The novel is divided into three parts Part 1 ("The Window") opens on a mid-September evening in the Isle of Skye, among the Hebrides, where the Ramsay family are on holiday. There are eight children and a little group of intellectual guests (all modelled on Virginia's own family and friends). Mrs. Ramsay, a beautiful, sweet, receptive woman, has promised her youngest son James to let him go on a trip to the lighthouse (=faro), but the trip does not take place owing to bad weather. Part 2 ("Time Passes"), covers a span of ten years, which are virtually compressed into one dark night. Mrs. Ramsay suddenly dies; we come to know that her eldest daughter Prue and her son Andrew are dead also. Part 3 ("The Lighthouse") is set in one day, ten years later. The Ramsays return to the old house with some friends and, at last, James can take the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse. But everything is changed; only the lighthouse is still the same, together with the surviving memory of Mrs. Ramsay. The three parts are constructed in such a way that, "since the second part serves as a link between the other two, the structural pattern which underlies the book might be represented by the simple formula A-B-A." [ 1 ] Moreover, they also obey a precise design according to which, it has been pointed out, in their subdivision, they graphically reproduce the beams of light of the lighthouse: a first long one (Part 1), followed by a pause of darkness (Part 2) and then by another flash (Part 3). Inside this particular structure, therefore, the lighthouse and the journey themes work as unifying factors between the initial and the final scenes of the novel In compliance with (=in accordo) the "stream of consciousness" technique, the work is rich in symbols and imagery. Besides the lighthouse and the journey, which in turn may stand for the themes of the quest, of the alternation of light and darkness in the flow of life, of the
transition from innocence to experience, and even of death, the third main symbol is that of the sea, so much loved by Virginia Woolf who, while inventing the novel, wrote in her Diary: "the sea is to be heard all through it". Skye being an island, the sea is present both visually and aurally; the journey to be taken is a sea journey; it is usually along the sea shore that the Ramsays' and their friends' private "journeys" occur and interweave. With its ebbing and flowing tides (=gli alti e bassi della marea) and its waves lapping on the beach, the sea, now consoling and protective, now menacing and destructive, stands therefore for life itself and for the inexorable flow of time. The way "time" has been dealt with in the novel has already been underlined. Inside the macro-structure of the work, however, there are a number of micro-structures which show Virginia Woolf's ability to compress "the moments of being" into minimum time units, as we can see, for instance, in the passage from Part 1. It is in her prose style that Virginia Woolf's peculiar qualities are most evident. The use of a highly figurative language, the delicacy of her imagery, the subtlety of her symbolism, the richness in metaphors, similes and other figures of speech, and the attention paid to the rhythm and musicality of words tinge her prose with poetry. The range of Virginia Woolf's characters is quite small; they more or less mirror her own unusual personality or are modeled on people from her own close set of friends; they all belong to the upper middle class and almost share the same way of thinking. What is peculiar in them, however, is that they do not exist as actual characters, but only as a projection of the author's mind. Unlike all traditional novelists and even the so-called "psychological" ones, Virginia Woolf focuses her analysis no longer on the character as a whole, but on his/her "moments of being". It is therefore impossible to speak of individual analysis, but of "the analysis of the interplay (=relazione) of persons and things and atmosphere within a moment, as apprehended by an individual mind - the author's - in a phase of heightened perception. So the characters become mere projections of the author ... "
them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans - his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried. But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were very beautiful, she thought. She would tie them up (for she had no envelope) with a piece of silk. Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They could not separate them against their wills, she said. Shuffling the edges straight (=raddrizzando i bordi), she did up (=riordinò) the papers, and tied the parcel almost without looking, sitting close, sitting beside him, he thought, as if all her petals were about her. She was a flowering tree ; and through her branches looked out the face of a lawgiver (=colui che è mandato dalla legge = i medici), who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest. Staggering (=barcollando) he saw her mount the appalling staircase, laden (=caricata) with Holmes and Bradshaw, men who never weighed less than eleven stone six", who sent their wives to court", men who made ten thousand a year and talked of proportion;" who differed in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing, Bradshaw another), yet judges they were; who mixed the vision and the sideboard;" saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. Over them she triumphed. "There!" she said. The papers were tied up. No one should get at them. She would put them away. And, she said, nothing should separate them. She sat down beside him and called him by the name of that hawk or crow" which, being malicious and a great destroyer of crops, was precisely like him. No one could separate them, she said.
- Then she got up to go into the bedroom to pack their things, but hearing voices downstairs and thinking that Dr Holmes had perhaps called, ran down to prevent him coming up. Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on the staircase. "My dear lady, I have come as a friend", Holmes was saying.
- "No. I will not allow you to see my husband", she said. He could see her, like a little hen (=gallinella), with her wings spread barring his passage. But Holmes persevered. "My dear lady, allow me ... " Holmes said, putting her aside (Holmes was a powerfully built man).
- Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the door. Holmes would say, "In a funk, eh?"" Holmes would get him. But no; not Holmes; not Bradshaw. 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. Ah, but one mustn't spoil that. The gas fire? But it was too late now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might have got, but Rezia, who always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury lodging- house window; the tiresome", the troublesome", and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia's (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill(=davanzale).) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die.
- Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. "l'Il
give it you!'(=te la faccio vedere io!)' he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs Filmer's area railings (=ringhiera)". (from: Mrs. Dalloway) On October 14, 1922, referring to the characterization of Septimus, Virginia Woolf wrote in her Diary "I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side. " She was obviously drawing on her own mental illness and on her suicide attempts, as we learn them from her husband and from Quentin Bell, her nephew and best biographer. The points of similarity between her and Septimus are in fact evident not only in their common progression from depression to madness and suicide, but also in their common distrust of doctors (whom Septimus calls "the brute(s) with the red nostrils ... snuffling into every secret place ", Il. 1-2). Moreover, they both "hear voices ". Virginia wrote about this in the note she left for her husband before dying , and Septimus hears "the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes" and "the messages from the dead" from his dead friend Evans (Il. 12-14). Like Virginia, Septimus "is not always able to distinguish between his personal response and the indifferent universal nature of external reality. .. The distinction between self and external reality is as blurred, in his mind, as the distinction between different forms of physical response: sight, sound, touch." He actually sees Evans coming to him through the trees; when he looks at the little men and women in the designs, he overlaps images of danger and menace ("brandishing sticks ", "zigzagging precipices ", "knives and forks") with others that are more friendly and reassuring ("wings ", "the sun and ster:", "se a pieces", "litt!e faces laughing", "waves" (Il. 6-11), as if these were unconscious metaphors for his changes from moments of sanity to moments of insanity (which also links him to Virginia Woolf). While the language of the first long paragraph (Il. 4-18) is uneven (=irregolare), urgent, mostly made up of short, apparently incoherent sentences, that of the second (Il. 21-33), all focused on Rezia, Septimus's wife, changes both in imagery and register. The sense of comfort and protection that comes from her is transfigured, first into the image of the flowering tree, then into that of a sanctuary up whose "appalling" staircase Rezia (the "Iawgiver") ascends, "Iaden with" and "triumphing over" his enemies, the doctors. But one of these is at the door by now. "Holmes was coming" ... "Holmes would butst" ... "Holmes would say".. "Holmes would qei": The obsessive repetition (one of the devices most frequently used by Virginia Woolf) of his name echoes the repetition of the other name, "Evans, Evans, Evans ". (I. 13) as if both men, Evans and Holmes, belonged to the same nightmare, inside which there is nothing left but death. The last long paragraph (Il. 50-66) revolves around the description of the suicide and is one of the most concrete and touching pages in the novel. Connected to the other paragraphs by descriptive sentences and dialogues, it provides another perfect example of interior monoloque, and is the part of the book in which the close connection between the author and her character is most evident. /n fact, if by an act of arbitrary (but not so arbitrary, after all) superimposition, we replace Rezia with Leonard (a/ways so "entirely patient"), Holmes with the "enemy", in the broadest sense of the term (the war, the Nazis, madness itself) and Septimus with Virginia, we may even read the suicide scene as a sort of unconscious rehearsal, though the novel was written in 1925 and Virginia killed herself only sixteen years later. We know, on the other hand, that she had a/ready attempted suicide as ear/yas 1913 , and that her fina/ tragic decision was hastened by the fear of the war, which provides another /ink with Septimus's fear of the nursing home. We know that Virginia's death was "death by water"; no weapons, no blood (death was to be c/ean), no indecorous fuss. But we a/so read that Septimus, too, discarded the "nice c/ean bread-knife" and soon abandoned the idea of using a razor (Il. 54-57). We know that Virginia never considered jumping out of a window, a "B/oomsbury" window. But we a/se read that Septimus was, like her, aware of "the tiresome, the troubtesome and rather me/odramatic business of opening" it, which probably stopped her from jumping oft. What we don't know, instead, is what she actually thought just before killing herse/f, whether she had any hesitation before "flinging" herse/, down into the river (or did she s/ow/y wa/k into it?). The on/y possib/€ answer to it may perhaps once more come from Septimus, who "waited til the very /ast momento He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. ' Shakespeare 's Sister (from a Room of One’s Own) Here am l asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and l am not sure how they were educated;' whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children before they were twenty-one; what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night. They had no money evidently; according to Professor Trevelyan they were married whether they liked it or not before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen very likely. It would have been extremely odd', even upon this showing, had one of them' suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare , l concluded, and l thought of that old gentlernan, who is dead now, but was a bishop, l think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past , present , or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a
together with their eight children and some friends, spend a holiday on an island of the Hebrides. They decide to make a trip to the lighthouse, but they have to give up the idea because the weather is bad. In the passage below Mrs Ramsay is inside the holiday house knitting a stocking to bring the lighthouse keeper's child, and James, one of her children, is sitting on her knees. In the first part titled "The window" the novel is about Mr and Mrs Ramsay, who, together with their eight children and some friends, spend a holiday on an island of the Hebrides. They decide to make a trip to the lighthouse, but they have to give up the idea because the weather is bad. In the passage below Mrs Ramsay is inside the holiday house knitting a stocking to bring the lighthouse keeper's child, and James, one of her children, is sitting on her knees. But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them; he hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence of his head; for his exactingness (=esigenza) and egotism (for there he stood, commanding them to attend to him ); but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father's emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. By looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his mother's attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped". But no. Nothing would make Mr. Ramsay move on. There he stood, demanding sympathy (=comprensione). Mrs. Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely", folding her son in her arm, braced herself", and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak(=becco) of brass", barren IO and bare!'. He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said. Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles". Mr. Ramsay repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure. She blew the words back at him. 'Charles 'Tansley!' ... ' she said. But he must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed(=confortato)!", to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life - the drawing-room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must be filled with life. Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said. But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only, but all over the world. Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all aglow"; bade him take his ease there'", go in and out, enjoy himself. She laughed, she knitted. Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength flaring up!" to be drunk and quenched (=to quench the thirst = spegnere la sete)" by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote-" mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy. He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing" round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious' child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climbed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shelf" of herself left for her to know herself by; alI was so lavished'" and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy. (from Part l, Chapter 7). 1.Look at lines from the beginning to “demanding sympathy”. James is thinking of his father and of his feeling of hatred towards him. List the reasons for his hatred. Which one is the most important? Why? 2.James tries to intrude into the relationship between his father and mother using two different devices for two different aims. Find them. With his father: device_________________ aim______________________ With his mother: device_________________ aim_____________________. What is the result?
3.Decide what his father’s demand is. Look at the lines from “Mrs Ramsey, who had been…” to “”filled with life” and say how Mrs Ramsey answers Mr Ramsey’s demand. 4.Mr Ramsey, like a beak of brass, seems to drink voraciously from Mrs Ramsey, who is seen as a sort of fountain. Decide what the beak of brass and the fountain symbolize. 5.What is the opinion Mr Ramsey has of himself? Mrs Ramsey offers her husband another opinion of himself by quoting Charles Tansley, who is an intellectual. Explain why she quotes Charles Tansley. 6.However, Mr Ramsey is not satisfied with the quotation: he wants sympathy. State what this word implies. 7.In this paragraph there are two points of view. Decide whose they are and where the lines are. 8.In the whole passage the two contrasting personalities of Mr and Mrs Ramsay emerge. Choose, among the following, the adjectives that suit the two characters. responsive demanding insecure strong protective encouraging self- pitying sympathetic pathetic negative energetic positive self-centered weak arid warm Mr Ramsay:. Mrs Ramsay:. Part 2 is titled "Time Passes" and the darkness of one night merges into the darkness of ten years in which Mr.s Ramsay dies, Prue, her daughter, dies in childbirth and Andrew, her so n, in the war. The house in Scotland is closed and, though a charwoman tries to keep it in order, it seems ravaged (=devastated) by the passing of time. However, at the end of the war, the family decide to return and the house is restored for the occasion. Lily Briscoe and Augustus Carmichael, two of the previous guests, come back with the family to stay with them as visitors. In part 3 , "The Lighthouse", Lily wants to paint a picture which she started ten years before, when she was invited by Mr.s Ramsay for the first time. Augustus Carmichael; whose volume of poems has been a great success, is together with Lily in the garden. Mr. Ramsay, with his children Cam and James makes the expedition to the lighthouse planned ten years before. 'What does it mean? How do you explain it all?' she wanted to say, turning to Mr.. Carmichael again. For the whole world seemed to have dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool (laghetto) of thought, a deep basin of reality, and one could almost fancy that had Mr.. Carmichael spoken, a little tear would have rent the surface of the pool. And then? Something would emerge. A hand would be shoved up (would be moved up), a blade would be flashed". It was nonsense of course. A curious notion came to her that he did after all hear the things she could not say. He was an inscrutable old man, with the yellow stain (=macchia) on his beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles", sailing serenely through a world which satisfied all his wants", so that she thought he had only to put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything he wanted. She looked at her picture. That would have been his answer, presumably - how 'you' and 'l' and 'she' pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say, even of this scrawl!", not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it 'remained for ever', she was going to say, or, for the words spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful (=audaci, che si vantano)' , to hint!", wordlessly'; when, looking at the picture, she was surprised to find that she could not see it. Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself - Oh yes! - in every other way. Was she crying then for Mrs. Ramsay, without being aware of any unhappiness? She addressed old Mr.. Carmichael again. What was it then? What did it (=life)mean? Could things thrust their hands up!" and grip!" one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping' from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? - startling!", unexpected, unknown? For one moment
had wanted to give him, when he left her that morning, she had given him at last. 'He has landed', she said aloud. “It is finished!” Then, surging up", puffing" slightly, old Mr.. Carmichael stood beside her, looking like an old pagan god, shaggy (=untidy), with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a French novel) in his hand. He stood by her on the edge of the lawn, swaying" a little in his bulk", and said, shading his eyes with his hand: 'They will have landed', and she felt that she had been right. They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything. He stood there spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly, compassionately, their final destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion, she thought, when his hand slowly fell, as if she had seen him let fall from his great height a wreath of violets and asphodels!' which, fluttering' slowly, lay at length upon the earth. Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was - her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred(=sfocato). With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (from Part III, Chapter 13). Questions:
- Look at lines from the beginning until “…given him at last”. Sat what Mr.. Ramsay has reached. How has Lily taken part in Mr.. Ramsay’s enterprise? How does she feel now and why?
- Look at lines from “He has landed’…..” until “…upon the earth”. Once again Lily and Mr.. Carmichael seem to enjoy a perfect communion. Find the lines where this is evident. Who does Lily compare Mr.. Carmichael to? Explain why Lily in this moment feels comforted and relaxed.
- Look at the rest of the passage. The last paragraph of the novel is concentrated on Lily’s picture. Identify the moment when Lily is able to finish her painting, having her epiphany. What allows Lily to see the picture “clear for a second”? In this passage two events are parallel: the reaching of the lighthouse and the finishing of the picture. Explain what they have in common. In the novel two women are contrasted: Mr.s. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Fill in the chart about them: Mrs. Ramsay Lily Briscoe housewife insecure stays inside doesn’t have a family she’s the symbol of the male and the female together protagonist fo the first part of the novel looks for comfort has moments of vision is the new free woman of the 20tgh century By looking at the chart, what idea does Virginia Woolf have of the artist? Commentary Virginia Woolf is one of the writers who express their dissatisfaction with the form of the traditional novel, its treatment of time, space, characters and plot. She experimented with a
new kind of novel in which time, influenced by Bergson's theories, was no longer chronological, but was reduced to the characters' time of the mind, made up of different strata according to how the mind operated, overlapping elements of the past, the present and the future. Her aim was to reproduce the inner reality of her characters, which, in her opinion, was much more important than the exterior, objective reality. She used the technique of the interior monologue in order to create a direct contact between the reader and the workings of the minds of her characters. She generally adopted third- person narrators, which gives an impression of great detachment and makes narration more objective. For her, life is incoherent and people are the mirror of such incoherence, however, each person has a pattern, which can be traced in spite of the apparent contradictions, and according to this pattern each mind receives and selects the impressions relevant to it, so that the only perspective offered is internal and subjective. Everyone has the opportunity to give form to the surrounding chaos thanks to his or her own epiphany. An epiphany is a momentary, sudden revelation, as it is for Joyce, but, while for the Irish writer it has a spiritual and intellectual meaning, for Woolf it has an emotional connotation and is limited in time. It is a vision which shows us the meaning of life, but, when it passes away, chaos and uncertainty return. As she is a writer who insists on the subjectivity of the perception of the external world, the ambiguity and uncertainty of symbols are an obvious attraction to her. In fact each symbol can take on a different meaning for the person who looks at it, thus emphasizing the uniqueness of each individual and the distance that can exist between one individual and another even when gazing on external and shared reality. Together with symbols her fiction is also rich in imagery and sound devices, which contribute to the musicality of the style and to the creation of a highly poetic atmosphere. Woolf considered writing fundamental to her existence, she affirmed herself through the pages she wrote, and her mental breakdowns were due essentially to the impossibility of expressing her own self on the page. Her obsession with others' approval or disapproval of her works was strictly linked to the obsession of her existence as an artist. She realized that to be an artist meant to have a perfect combination of masculine and feminine qualities, so she tried to solve the problem by adopting two different styles: one for her pieces of criticism and essays (A Room of One’s Own), which was clear, logical, concise, 'masculine'; the other (To the Lighthouse, Mr.s Dalloway) for her works of imagination, which was poetic, transparent, flexible, rhythmic, 'feminine' It is in To the Lighthouse that the masculine and feminine are deeply analyzed and there is a concrete example of the perfect union between the two. The structure of the novel reflects a particular idea of time: the first part, The Window, is set on a late summer afternoon and evening; the second part, Time Passes, is set during a night, but it is a night in which ten years are evoked; the third part, The Lighthouse, is set in the morning. So the novel practically covers one day, but time expands to a much longer period. In the first part a happy family is described with Mr.s Ramsay as the main character, who is able to harmonize and influence all the people around her. In the second there is a poetic description of the forces of darkness and of the chaos caused by the war. Mr.s Ramsay and two of her children are dead, but these events seem to be insignificant: compared with the vastness of eternity individual lives seem meaningless. In the third part there is a rebirth: Mr. Ramsay and the children are united in a feeling of communion and they reach the lighthouse, while Lily has a vision. Because of the fact that the structure of the book is based on the interior monologue, the consciousness of the individual is particularly highlighted. Each character struggles for a purpose in a world that is always changing and discovers what is meaningful from a myriad
