The Window 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.

Ernest Hemingway developed his own style of writing and follows it in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”. Hemingway’s elegance in writing is such that he indirectly gives all of the information to the reader without making any judgment; thus allowing one to create an opinion about every minute detail of the story. Hemingway illustrates his foundations of writing in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by providing small clues that provide an indirect view of the larger meaning.

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

As James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” begins, the reader is introduced to a young woman sitting at the front window in her home, her history and the setting unfolding around her. It is soon revealed that this character’s name is Eveline Hill. Also in the exposition, which spans the majority of the story, two key pieces of imagery are used: a field and a yellowing photograph. At the end of the story, wedged between the crisis and the recognition, is the last piece of imagery -- the sea. One can determine that Joyce’s “Eveline” is about her identity by analyzing these images, and this analysis will also serve to explain how the final sentence indicates who Eveline is.

Good Afternoon Ms Atkinson and fellow peers, as you can see, the texts I have chosen to discuss with you are To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Lullaby by W. H . Auden, all of which have modernist themes, including conforming to traditional gender roles, time and love. To the Lighthouse revolves around the lives of the Ramsay family who are at their holiday house, hosting some guests, including Lily Briscoe (a painter) and Charles. The family are faced with different obstacles throughout the day, Lily with a discouraging comment from Charles and James’ oppositions with his father, but in the end, despite the differences, it is clear the Mr Ramsay heavily depends on Mrs Ramsay. Ten years later, Mr

Through exploring the consciousness of her characters’ with depth and intensity, Woolf creates a world in which she traces her characters thoughts and actions in relation with the world around them. As a result, she enters her characters lives, describing their hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears never once detaching

The triangle is the strongest geometric shape. It cannot physically collapse, and stresses are equally distributed over all three legs. But the triangle, like many things that have roots in the number three, requires a dichotomy of balance and instability. To illustrate this dichotomy, take two triangles, one that sits upright with its single point above its base, and the other that is inverted, with the wide base above the single point, on which the shape balances and teeters. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), the solitary points of these two triangles are personified in Mrs. Ramsay (in the upright, stable triangle) and Lily Briscoe (in the inverted triangle). The novel itself takes on a triad form, separated into three sections: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” Mrs. Ramsay rules in the first section, and Lily Briscoe in the last, with the middle section—a mere twenty pages that covers ten years of time, including the death of Mrs. Ramsay—acting as a transient moment of flux in which the careful balance established during the dinner party scene in “The Window” fades and leaves Lily Briscoe the sole triangle. It is in “The Lighthouse” that Lily Briscoe finally finishes her painting and has her “vision” (Woolf, 209). This vision, and the creation and protection that both Lily and Mrs. Ramsay specialize in, are essential to their queering of their family unit.

In Cunningham’s story of Virginia Woolf, the development of the central idea of how the inability of perfection overwhelms ones soul into considering that death is the only means of freedom is seen almost immediately. Virginia Woolf’s suicide in the prologue of the novel allows us to infer that she could only achieve freedom through death. Virginia’s mind wonders that “she herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric” (4). Cunningham could write this vivid scene of death, because he was able to personally relate to the character. In an interview he proclaims, “Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I’m finishing, even if it’s turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind.” This ability to get on the same level of his character, strengthened his portrayal of the

The narrator utilizes the collective first person in order to draw the reader closer to his story, addressing his audiences with phrases such as “Let us imagine,” as though we can somehow know the narrator in viewing another’s story through the narrator’s mind. The reader ideally feels as though he is one with the narrator in the way that all men are communally “one” together. The very act of the narrator’s writing his own thoughts on the event into a story, however, distances the reader, as we still now read the personal projections of another human being, one who, too, who cannot be known. “We know, each for himself, that none of us would perpetrate such a folly, yet feel as if some others might,” says the narrator, bonding his audience together against the questionable act of Wakefield. But what makes us so different from a man about whom we know so little? We know as much about Wakefield as we know about the narrator, and if we are one with the narrator, we are, naturally, one with Wakefield himself. And so we remain, each one of us, Outcasts of the Universe ourselves.

Have you ever struggled with your self-image? Have you ever struggled with accepting yourself because of the fear of what others will think of you? Then you will be able to relate to and connect quite well to the writings of classic author Virginia Woolf. “Present in her works as a literary strategy and value, the self is at the heart of Virginia Woolf’s exploration of the characters’ and her own patterns of thought, we, the readers, being offered a glimpse at the interior labyrinth” (Nicolae 1). Throughout her career, Woolf wrote around fifteen novels, all of them including the theme of the self and self-image. The theme may have not been predominant in some of the novels, but it was always included, even slightly. It is believed by many that

When the novel was published on 27 October 1922 by the Hogarth Press and printed by R. & R. Clark of Edinburgh, Woolf was terribly anxious about its critical reception because of her radical experimentation in the work (Letters 574) and its departure from the fictional conventions of works by writers like Bennet and Wells, as well as her own previous novels. She was strongly impressed by the Russian writers of the late nineteenth century, who had only recently been translated into English. As a writer always seeking new

It has been said the novel Orlando is the longest love-letter ever written; a celebration of the bond between women. The relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West is well documented and known to have been intimate. That Virginia was passionate and giddy about her relationship with Vita is also known and displayed in Orlando. But Orlando also offers a rare intimate glimpse into the mind of Virginia Woolf. An unselfconscious work, it reveals her mind, talent at play. Orlando offers rich insights into her mind while keeping the rich prose that embodies her other great works. The novel demonstrates several of Virginia's obsessions, the focus here on

20th-century Modernism searched for authenticity in an ever-increasing industrialized world. Feeling alienated from the previously established norms of the Victorian era, Modernists struggled with the significance of the individual at a time of technological revolution. That which was “true” or “real” was no longer straight-forward; the role of the perception of reality pioneered a wave of artistic endeavors in response to this rising uncertainty. In literature, rules of writing were actively defied, as Virginia Woolf did in To the Lighthouse. The novel is written as a stream-of-consciousness, switching amongst inner dialogues of the characters as narration, leaving the reader desperately grasping at straws in order to draw out a plot without a clear sense of time or voice. The mosaic of chronicles seen in To the Lighthouse emphasizes the isolation of the individual. No one is truly able to understand another, not completely. These ideas of disillusionment and fragmentation are the backbone of Modernism, and while some Modernists auspiciously embrace them, Woolf instead questions them. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Woolf demonstrates three distinct perceptions of truth through her characters, Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe provoking thought on social tradition, while cherishing human connection through common emotion.

So, as I mentioned earlier that Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” is characterized with stream of consciousness literary techniques that is in the presence of third-person pronouns and past tense, which correspond with the form of narrative report, and on the other hand, it is also characterized with symbolic methods such as multiple point of view, use of time montage, shift of characters

In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ Virginia Woolf provides an abstract analogy, in order to explain human existence, ‘Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo’. Despite Woolf's intentions being fixed in addressing the centric qualities of life, her comment unintentionally summons a suitable definition for the modernist movement. Modernism is comprehensive- it is a halo. A halo, comprised of many different sub-genres such as, Expressionism, Dadaism, and Vorticism, to mention but a few. This makes defining the movement, in short; arduous. However, Woolf’s metaphor of life as a halo mirrors modernism as her statement is as all-encompassing and open to interpretation as the movement itself. In addition to this, her comment also presents the reality of the modernist movement, for if her employment of life were to be replaced with modernism in her statement, it would still hold true. Modernism is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged. It is instead a fluid movement which begs for symbolic interpretation. A necessity, provided by Woolf in her halo analogy. Despite the range of the movement and the diversity of its sub-genres, there are some discernible traits in the classic modernist text. The aim of this essay is to explore one of the primary traits of the modernist movement; symbolism. Modernist writers, T.S Eliot and Virginia Woolf both employed the practice of symbolism. Furthermore, the fundamental question of this essay with the