Examples Of Personification In Virginia Woolf

The Ramsey Summer House remains abandoned during those ten years, decaying slowly, groaning and weeping as it remembers the tenants it once possessed and the movements they made “how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again” (Woolf 1927, 339). The house bore witness to every breath and every argument; it absorbed fluttering eyelashes, clapped hands, and footsteps; drowned in laughter and in tears; the house was enraptured by the Ramsey’s and remembers them fondly as their images haunt its halls (Wisker 2011, 6).

    I chose to compare and contrast two women authors from different literary time periods.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) as a representative of the Victorian age (1832-1901) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) as the spokeswoman for the Modernist (1914-1939) mindset.  Being women in historical time periods that did not embrace the talents and gifts of women; they share many of the same issues and themes throughout their works - however, it is the age in which they wrote that shaped their expressions of these themes.  Although they lived only decades apart their worlds were remarkably different - their voices were muted or amplified according to the beat of society's drum.

Throughout her essay, Woolf never once describes to us her immediate surroundings. By describing only what is outside, Woolf isolates herself from the rest of the world, instead of embracing it as Dillard did. She is chiefly concerned with describing where she isn't. Her focus is on the world outside of her window. She describes the field that is being plowed, the black, net-like flock of birds flying together. These images engender a rather unpleasant feeling of dreariness.

The next stylistic device is personification. By definition personification is to think of or represent as having human qualities or life. Woolf applies this device to

Back in the day almost everyone viewed woman to be the person who cleans, cooks, has children, and obeys her husband. Even woman themselves had this view hammered into their minds at such a young age, the views that women are inferior to men. This stigma of woman can be found traced throughout Virginia Woolf’s essay of two meals, a meal for men and a meal for women at a college. She uses numerous composition techniques and effectively disperses them throughout her narrative. By doing so, she accurately demonstrates her views on society’s stigma of a woman's role in an eloquent manner.

“When you got to the table you couldn 't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn 't really anything the matter with them, -- that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.” (Twain, 1)

As the first paragraph is introduced, Roald Dahl develops an image of Mrs. Patrick Maloney as an idle housewife. Description of the living room reflects

Power Struggles are very common is many marriages. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, the relationship or marriage between George and Martha is based in power. The power struggle between George and Martha has become the basis of their relationship. Their love has turned into hate. The only connection they have is through their insults and the series of games they play. The power struggle between George and Martha develops is reveled and is resolved through out the play.

The author tries to convey this message mainly through writing this piece in first person while using the literary style of stream of consciousness. Periodically throughout the piece, the author shows his

In "London", William Blake brings to light a city overrun by poverty and hardship. Blake discards the common, glorifying view of London and replaces it with his idea of truth. London is nothing more but a city strapped by harsh economic times where Royalty and other venues of power have allowed morality and goodness to deteriorate so that suffering and poverty are all that exist. It is with the use of three distinct metaphors; "mind-forg'd manacles", "blackning Church", and "Marriage hearse", that Blake conveys the idea of a city that suffers from physical and psychological imprisonment, social oppression, and an unraveling moral society.

Woolf in Time Passes lets Mrs Ramsey slip away in her sleep, gives Prue Ramsey a wedding, then tears her from the novel screaming and bloody as she dies while giving birth, and obliterates Andrew Ramsey in the barracks of France during World War One (Groover 2014, 223). The Ramsey Summer House remains abandoned during those ten years, decaying slowly, groaning and weeping as it remembers the tenants it once possessed and the movements they made “how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again” (Woolf 1927, 339). The house bore witness to every breath and every argument; it absorbed fluttering eyelashes, clapped hands, and footsteps; drowned in laughter and in tears; the house was enraptured by the Ramsey’s and remembers them fondly as their images haunt its halls (Wisker 2011, 6).

  Clarissa Dalloway, the central character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, is a complex figure whose relations with other women reveal as much about her personality as do her own musings. By focusing at length on several characters, all of whom are in some way connected to Clarissa, Woolf expertly portrays the ways females interact: sometimes drawing upon one another for things which they cannot get from men; other times, turning on each other out of jealousy and insecurity.

Woolf again construct a contrast between fiction and reality by expressing “Imaginatively she is of the highest

In many of her novels and especially in Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf tends to stray from directly attacking an issue such as social unjust by using symbolism. She often “detested what she called ‘preaching’ in fiction” and instead, strategically “scatters fragments of images for the readers to gather up and to piece together as to form [their] own, maybe individual, understanding of the character” in her stream-of-consciousness

essay in interestingly different ways. Bennett states that Woolf’s essay is not a feminist work, rejects the idea that Woolf’s discussion of women and