So we have studied five novels, but more importantly we have tried to develop our approach to reading literature.
The object of the course has been to extend our appreciation of literature by learning some techniques for reading and some theories about literature.
This week's lesson will try to consolidate that learning. You will find watching these two videos on this site useful and hopefully inspiring when you next open a book...
Illustration of Bertha Mason by Edmund H. Garrett, a renowned American illustrator, for an 1897 edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
I just found this marvellous page on the British Library website. So well worth reading inthe context of what we have been studying:
Mysticism, degeneracy, irrationality, barbarism: these are the qualities that came to define the non-western ‘other’ in 19th-century Britain. Here Professor Suzanne Daly explores the ‘Imperial Gothic’, examining the ways in which ‘otherness’ and Empire were depicted in Gothic novels such as Jane Eyre, The Moonstone, Dracula and Heart of Darkness. - See more at:
This week we are going to return to Mrs Dalloway and we are going to examine the book from the point of view of Empire.
Remember that we discussed how there has been a change in the attitude to Empire over the course of the 19th Century. When The Sign of Four was written the British Empire still seemed invincible and the role of the British was accepted broadly as one that was civilizing. However, by the time that Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness the whole project of Empire was being questioned. World War I was a violent end to the illusion. Although the British and their allies technically won the war, the extent of devastation England suffered made it a victory in name only. Entire communities of young men were injured and killed. In 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, Britain suffered 60,000 casualties—the largest slaughter in the nation’s history. Not surprisingly, British citizens lost much of their faith in the empire after the war. No longer could Britain claim to be invulnerable. Citizens were less inclined to willingly adhere to the rigid constraints imposed by the class system, which benefited only a small margin of society but which all classes had fought to preserve.
In 1923, when Mrs. Dalloway takes place, the old establishment and its oppressive values are coming to an end. Upper class citizens, including Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, feel the failure of the empire as strongly as they feel their own personal failures. Those citizens who still champion English tradition, such as Aunt Helena and Lady Bruton, are old. Note how Aunt Helena has a glass eye, perhaps a symbol of her inability or unwillingness to see the truth. Anticipating the end of the Conservative Party’s reign, Richard plans to write the history of the great British military family, the Brutons, who are already part of the past.
This week we are going to move from Joseph Conrad to Virginia Woolf and we are going to look for similarities and differences in these two novels.
There are a some very obvious differences between the novels, in fact they are so very different in so many ways that you may find it difficult to see past them and find any similarities at all. Nevertheless there are some.
Don't forget also to look for the theme of empire. How does it present itself in Mrs Dalloway? What is the context in which this novel was written? What events in history have passed between the writing of this novel in the 1920s and the writing of Conrad's in the 1890s? How might these events have altered the general view of the world?
We are studying Joseph Conrad this week and will be going on to read Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in the following two weeks.
You may find Mrs Dalloway tough going at first, but please persist. Do use Spark notes or any of the other guides to help you. Remember, the modernists, as we discussed last week, were interested in rendering not a representation of reality onto the page but rather a sense of the feeling of the experience of life.
If Mrs Dalloway seems disjointed and confusing it is because we are being invited into the consciousness of the characters. We are being given a rendition of their thought processes rather than any rational description or explanation of their actions.
To get an idea of what Virginia Woolf was trying to do. Read her essay MODERN FICTION to be found here:
