Essays In Idleness By Virginia Woolf

During the Romantic-Era many authors focused on the beauty of life. Although this is the case for many writers, it is not for Edgar Allan Poe, an auhtor fascinated with the irrational, demonic, a grotesque presence within life. Many of his most renowned pieces include “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Berenice”. Both these stories relate to the insanity a human being can experience after a traumatic experience. Through careful examination, we can uncover the darkness within these tales along with observing how authors like Allen dealt with the loneliness that allowed their work to cause unnatural feelings and question what drove them to write sinister tales.

Virginia Woolf’s “To the lighthouse” has many themes that can be discussed, especially those related to art, life, reality and time. Some critics argue that there is a life-art relationship in the novel, “perceived relations of equivalence between emotional experience and aesthetic (con)figuration, between ‘life’ on the one hand, and shape, trope, structure on the other” (Koppen, 375). However, one must analyze the novel in order to find if it can be true what these critics say. If it is true that there is an art’s relation to life in this novel, how did Virginia Woolf express this relation in the novel? Which characters represent better this relationship? In the present essay, it will be discussed if there is such a relationship between art

Pause, reflect, and the reader may see at once the opposing yet relative perceptions made between life, love, marriage and death in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In this novel, Woolf seems to capture perfectly the very essence of life, while conveying life’s significance as communicated to the reader in light tones of consciousness arranged with the play of visual imagery. That is, each character in the novel plays an intrinsic role in that the individuality of other characters can be seen only through the former’s psyche. Moreover, every aspect of this novel plays a significant role in its creation. For instance; the saturation of the present by the past, the atmospheres conjoining personalities and separating them, and the moments

Edgar Allan Poe’s characters within his stories have shown dreary thoughts and actions over the course of time. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” provided a deep feeling of dread and depression within the narrator's friend Roderick and his sister Madeline's

“The Fall of the House of Usher” has been noted as one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous short stories. The story begins when the narrator arrives at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher. Roderick is ill and has been living his life deeply reclusive. His sister Madeline suffers from a sensory disorder and is considered to be dead. The narrator attempts to comfort Roderick and alleviate his melancholy by reading a story that appears to foreshadow later events. In this story, Poe provides his audience with classic themes such as fear, madness, and most important, identity. Through psychoanalytical criticism the reader can explore and gather a deeper understanding of the literary work. A comprehensive analysis of psychoanalytical criticism and the characters mental state in “The Fall of the House of Usher” will provide an in-depth interpretation of the characters and of the work.

Today, the legendary author, Edgar Allan Poe, is harrowed for his macabre tales of the grotesque and terrifying. His name is almost synonymous with the horror genre itself. However, apart from his famously fear-inspiring short stories, Poe also wrote various works describing his time as a youth. An example is the 22-line poem, “Alone”. In “Alone”, Edgar Allan Poe makes an effort to describe his sorrowful and confusing feelings as a child. Staying true to his signature style of utilizing creative dashes and contraptions, Poe transports the reader into the tormented mind of the author in his childhood.

Virginia Woolf spends much of her time straddling the issues in ?A Room of One?s Own.? She carefully manipulates the reader by burying her points in flowery language and assumes the identity of another person so she does not have to take responsibility for what she says. She is very careful not to come off as too forceful or angry because she knows that her ideas will be disregarded if she does. Woolf is terrified of having her words labeled as ?feminist? and of attracting the stigma that the label is surrounded by. She fully understands that ?women?s issues? ignite a deep-seated resentment in the hearts of men and is conscious of the fact that at her particular time in history this resentment is running high due

Throughout the play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the two main characters George and Martha are continuously arguing with one another. It appears they function best when they are insulting and verbally attacking the other. Over the course of one night we see how the two of them battle and play cruel party games with their guests. They are also trapped by the emotional history that they both share. As the play progresses we see a change in their relationship. This change proves that George and Martha really do love each other.

In Albee's play, he reveals the shallowness and meaninglessness of contemporary society, and exposes the falsity of "The American Dream". In doing this he refers to many different facets of society such as alcohol, social conventions, measures of success and corruption on a number of levels. Violence manifested in both language and action, reflect the frustration of the characters in not being able to live up to society's expectations. "The America Dream" is a life lived to, or close to, perfection. In brief, this perfect life is achieved by having a good education, go into a well paying career of which you enjoy, raising a family with the 2.5

Woolf also implements her moment of being technique by shifting the protagonists thoughts of negativity to the cheerful moments of her and her husband when she is left alone on the sofa at the party (Woolf, 1924). This moment of being allows the protagonist to finally conquer these negative moments since she realizes she is forty years old and needs to begin thinking of herself appropriately. This excellently portrays the Modernist mindset of writers within the realm of European fiction by emphasizing inner emotions, consciousness, and alienation. The symbol of the dress represents how this object causes the protagonist to experience complex inner emotions, experience continuous conscious thoughts of inferiority and the alienation of not being good enough. Critical sources on this work by Virginia Woolf have also interpreted the symbol of the dress to represent these distinct Modernist characteristics. Psychologically, Mabel Waring has created an imaginary world where she is continuously inferior, but the reality is the only person critiquing her is herself (Vonepho, 2013). In addition, this relates to the cultural aspect of the early twentieth century in which she seeks the approval from individuals from upper-class since she comes from a poor background (Vonepho, 2013). This supports my analyzation for the existence of stream of consciousness through the symbol of the dress by repeating the cycle of oppressive thoughts (Vonepho, 2013). The critical commentary by

If thoughts on the world could represent an inanimate object in Virginia Woolf’s essays, they would most definitely be of an X-ray. Thus, Woolf’s Professions for Women and Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid are both prime examples from her assortment of works that can be used as evidence, effectively showing her representation of the world. A representation that ends up being very reminiscent to an X-ray in more ways than one. As a result, examining both essays by Woolf would be the only way to show a consistency in her representation, especially because they create the effect in a very similar, but different way. Although hard to believe at first, this representation of the world being similar to an X-ray starts making sense after realizing the way in which Woolf dissects the world by giving deep insight on the unknown, uncovering its flaws, and making the world easy to understand, similar to how a radiologist would describe the results of an X-ray to a patient. The difference lies in the fact that Professions for Women and Thoughts on Peace use different techniques and literary elements in order to create this effect.

Visualize a famous ghost story that is passed down from generation to generation. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is like the spooky tales that are told at a campfire; however, this story has more significance. Poe was an influential author during the Romantic Period. In his short story, he adopts a variety of Romantic elements. Because of the desolate setting, the supernatural components, and the gothic attributes, the reader can decipher the Romantic characteristics.

It is through the element of structure that Virginia Woolf, firstly communicates her outlook in regards to consciousness, speech and speculative thought. Woolf represents consciousness in her structural employment of hyphens, which is used in order to show the mental process behind thought. Hyphens appear mainly in compound words and the joining of prefixes, however, in the paragraph’s inception Woolf uses the hyphen to convey the merging of detached thoughts through the character of Mrs Ramsey. Mrs Ramsey thoughts match her actions as she clearing up her son’s cut-out pictures ‘he had cut out a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress - children never forget’, it is solely through the employment of a hyphenated sentence, that Woolf is enabled to convey to the reader that the latter thought Mrs Ramsey’s conjures is retrospective. The action of tidying the cut-out pictures is interrupted by a recent memory of her husband’s refusal to go to the lighthouse. This sentence demonstrates one of the main aspects of consciousness and thought in To The Lighthouse. The process of thought has no consecutive timeline or chronological order and can interrupt and juxtapose physical actions, which makes the employment of the hyphen an important choice in effectively depicting this often incomprehensible process. In addition to this, the hyphen dually breaks the pattern of rhythmic, perfect, pre-composed speech which is frequent in traditionalist literature, whereas

Virginia Woolf was a very powerful and imaginative writer. In a "Room of Ones Own" she takes her motivational views about women and fiction and weaves them into a story. Her story is set in a imaginary place where here audience can feel comfortable and open their minds to what she is saying. In this imaginary setting with imaginary people Woolf can live out and see the problems women faced in writing. Woolf also goes farther by breaking many of the rules of writing in her essay. She may do this to show that the standards can be broken, and to encourage more women to write. An example of this is in the very first line when Woolf writes, "But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what

As the story so often goes, I was once required to write, and thus I have been writing (largely under mandate) ever since. Although a Grandmother, who I in my childhood stayed with weekly, spoke chiefly in Spanish, I never learned enough of the language to ever properly forget it. This is a decision I’ve come to deeply regret in light of the book sales of Richard Rodriguez. My writing in adolescence was characterized by its being profoundly uninteresting. The highlight was a highly directed poem concerning the creation of chocolate bars, only a poem in the sense that jury duty is a form legal activism. To be resentful of the nature this sort of writing exercise however would be narcissistic to the point of supposing a person who’s sentience spans only two presidential terms would has had anything unique to say about chocolate bars, allowed the proper poetic license. I came to much prefer reading over writing, as somebody had something to gain in that exchange. As it turns out, writing assignments persisted unabated by the logic of this argument. Eventually becoming dissatisfied with the quantity of anachronisms in English, I would later go on to study the Japanese language over 4 semesters. The highlight of this section of writing was a 12 sentence narrative about a thief boy, written by an American college student at the level of a Japanese elementary school student.