Commerce, Politics and the City in A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway

Addams, Jane. The modern city and the municipal franchise for women. Baltimore, Maryland: National American Women Suffrage Association, 1906. (Jane Addams Article from Moodle Site)

Dickens uses Carton to symbolize resurrection in numerous parts of the book. "I am the resurrection," Carton calls himself. Dickens uses this specific character to symbolize that because of how Carton got Charles Darnay out of prison, and saved him from death therefore he symbolically resurrected him, by saving his life.

The central value connecting Mrs Dalloway and The Hours is an affirmation of life. Although suicides feature in both Stephen Daldry’s film and Virginia Woolf’s novel both texts echo Woolf’s words from her 1922 diary: ‘I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.’ Both Woolf’s modernist 1925 novel and Daldry’s 2002 postmodernist film focus on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their outer lives constrained by the contexts in which they live. The characters are placed in their respective context, to reflect on, or respond to, the consequences of war and AIDS, the difficulties of personal relationships, class, gender and sexuality.

are a force to be reckoned with. This was accomplished and can be seen by looking to

Addams was born the eighth of nine children and lived a very privileged lifestyle. Her father was a successful businessman who was well known by important people, such as, President Abraham Lincoln. Throughout the early stages of her life, Addams struggled with health issues and finding her place in society. She graduated in 1881 from the Female Seminary School in Illinois. After graduating, she briefly attended medical school and she spent her spare time traveling the world.

Jackson stared at his ceiling fan, it was still, collecting dust that fell from the ceiling. He longed for a breeze to cut through the thick August air.If only by some means the universe would turn the fan on so that he may feel some relief. He furrowed his brow in concentration, perhaps if he thought hard enough telekinesis would throw the blades into a whirl.

Eleanor Roosevelt was born in 1884 in New York City to socialites Elliot Bulloch Roosevelt and Anna Rebecca Hall. She was born into a world of immense wealth and privilege that she didn’t really fit into or understand. Her mother died in 1892 and after a long battle with alcoholism, her father leapt to his death from a sanitarium window in 1894. After so much death at a young age, Eleanor was prone to bouts of melancholy and depression throughout her life.

In this time period, it was very difficult for African Americans to succeed. That’s why Ann Petry was important in African American history. She wrote novels, children books, short stories, etc.

Traumatic events draw out everyone’s sense of humanity. When an individual is personally affected by a misfortunate event, everyone is able to see raw human emotion. Their initial reactions are as honest as anyone will ever be. In Anne Bradstreet’s “Here Follows Some Versus upon the Burning of Our House” the reader is exposed to a much more relatable puritan. Bradstreet is able to show the humanity within her rigid religion. Through experiencing the burning of her house Bradstreet is able to display raw human emotion and honest reactions. This display assists her plain style writing into making Puritanism much more applicable.

Bel Canto is a book full of complex characters, who are slowly unraveled throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, the characters are caught up in daily struggles for fame, for money, for power. But once captivity removes these struggles, people gravitate toward art and culture. Yet the transformation of Gen Watanabe, from a gifted individual into a man blind by love, could be considered immoral. He starts off as a very capable and sensible young man and in the end transforms into a foolish lovesick boy who gives in to his passions and forgets to think about the current situation.

“Jane Eyre” is a book centred around female duality. In a time when females were still expected to fulfill their “womanly duties,” Charlotte Bronte wrote a novel dealing with a woman’s view on morality & sexuality, passion & sensibility, and conformity & insanity, among other themes. This motif of duality plays a strong part in the dynamism that makes up the book, and is not limited to the themes, but is also used to relate many of the characters to the titular Jane. In “The Mystery at Thornfield,” Valerie Beattie makes claims that the character Bertha Mason’s insanity is a representation of rebellion toward the limitations of Victorian women. Not only is

“The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions … as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences.”

taxi cabs, of being out, out, far to sea and alone; she always had the

A governess is an educated woman who works for a family by teaching the school age children. It was the type of job that almost all young girls would not want to be but ironically the children of the household most likely admired and were very fond of their governess. Most children were closer to their governess than their own mother. If there was a governess in a home, the mother no longer had to take care of her children but could now devote her life to the church and her husband.

War is an important theme in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a post World War I text. While on the one hand there is the focus on Mrs. Dalloway’s domestic life and her ‘party consciousness’, on the other there are ideas of masculinity and “patriotic zeal that stupefy marching boys into a stiff yet staring corpse and perniciously public-spirited doctors” , and the sense of war reverberates in the entire text. Woolf’s treatment of the Great War is different from the normative way in which the War is talked about in the post world war I texts. She includes in her text no first hand glimpse of battlefield, instead gives a detached description. This makes it more incisive because she delineates the after effects in personal ordinary lives. Judith