Two Triangles In Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse

Margaret Elliot is “beautiful, talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four” (Great Short Works, 8). Engaged to a man she has no feelings for, life feels bleak and without purpose. She feels true love once with Eric, but just for a moment. For her whole life, Margaret “had searched the faces of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She knew that look had never shone before, would never shine for her on earth again, that such love comes to one only in dreams or in impossible places like this, unattainable always. This was Love’s self, and in a moment it would die” (Great Short Works, 29). For Willa Cather this is how love exists. Happy relationships are plentiful, but the enchanted, all encapsulating love of dreams only exists in glances. For Eric this glance is enough. He does not regret his decision or the damnation he is sure it will cause. For him “a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day” as his love lives on.

Throughout Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the symbols of fire and water shape the novel and support the novel’s main theme. Jane Eyre continually struggles to find a middle ground between ‘fire’ and ‘water,’ as she is both aggressive and submissive. In Eric Solomon’s critical analysis, “The Symbolism of Fire and Water in Jane Eyre” Solomon accurately describes this struggle. It is important to note that Jane conflicts with authority, defeats the struggle by her inner confidence, and progresses into separation. Although Solomon clearly describes Jane’s struggles in her journey to find an equal balance between ‘fire’ and ‘water,’ other examples highlight crucial moments in the novel, by adding symbolism that enhances the struggles that Jane faces.

In the excerpt from the First Betrayal, Patricia Bray creates a mood of suspense through the use of menacing diction, light and dark imagery, and nightmarish detail. The thought of being all alone in a lighthouse that is trying to withstand the violence of a terrible storm is quite frightening. Provoked by the patterns of diction, detail, and imagery used by the author; a mood of suspense is created by the reader’s uncertainty of whether Josan will be able to survive the vicious storm. In addition, the irony of the lighthouse not being able to produce light emphasizes the feeling apprehension.

The traditional Gothic taste for “portraits” is frequent in many novels and short stories that follow the conventions of literary mode making it present in these both texts; House of the Seven Gables by Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Oval Portrait. Often the characters in such Gothic romances are haunted by the tyranny of the past, which make it inescapable. It often leads to the destruction of their loved ones. Others motive of escape is often pulled back by a curse that the character creates upon himself. According to The Art of Terror by Maria Antonia Lima she says, “These portraits are usually a source of terror, with the past presented as something alive, like a ghost that haunts the present with its terrible mystery. Many authors consider this kind of literature itself as an example of modern art because it can become an anti-realist protest and a rebellion of the imagination against the reduction of fiction to the analysis of contemporary habits” (Lima 80). The painter introduces the “portrait” in the Oval Portrait by Edgar Allen Poe as overwhelming to him. The painter changes his behavior by no longer seeing his wife as his wife rather as an image through the lens of his painting. This idea of a “portrait” can be signified as a curse. A curse that plays with the Pyncheon’s and the painter’s emotions. In The House of the Seven Gables the “portrait” of Colonel Pyncheon is presented as an everlasting reminder of its dark past and the

Jeanette Winterson in her preface to Nightwood remarked “The language [in Nightwood] is not about conveying information; it is about conveying meaning.” It is hard to disagree with Winterson, especially taken in the context of Barnes not being able to communicate her feelings with people directly; it makes sense that she would communicate her feelings indirectly via her writing. In my attempts to explain Nightwood as a whole, that is its language, and the meaning that one can take from such a book, I find what draws me to this piece of literature aside from its complexity and richness are the way in which its characters, Felix Volkbein, Robin Vote, Dr. Matthew O’Connor and Nora Flood seek out one another in hopes that the one will fulfill the other’s desire. For the analytical discussion of the novel I would like to read the character Robin Vote, examine the locus of her abject, which is that place where the meaning between Object and Subject collapses the construction of the “I” (read: ‘identity’) and allows the character to experience and occupy the space of symbolic terror as she sleepwalks in and out of Felix and Nora’s

In the Stories of Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” there are many themes the two works have in common. The main one is how the two stories revolve around tragedy. Other topics to discuss are the roles and expectations of women in marriage. The authors describe marriage as a role that prohibits women from being free to think for themselves . Another common theme in both stories is how the author shows us the the day to day life of a woman and how she should act. The helps us to see how women have experienced sexism.

Through both “The Fall of the House of Usher” written by Edgar Allan Poe and “A Rose for Emily” written by William Faulkner, we see common themes of a gothic genre filled with rhetorical twists and turns. The dynamics in each work are elaborately depicted through the eyes of two narrators who are watching these pieces unfold. Many similar themes experienced in both Poe and Faulkner’s work deal with the ideology of death and preservation in regard to the one’s loved and lovers. Roderick Usher is the main character in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Emily Grierson is the main character in “A Rose for Emily”. In a thorough examination of both short stories, it is

Danielewski uses the Freud’s uncanny concept to create the feeling of unsettled mystery within the walls of the expanding house. Freud’s definition of uncanny implies that “some things must be added to the novel and unfamiliar if it is to become uncanny.” [insert citation #3] Not only is the house uncanny, but the complicated multi-layered narratives, footnotes and the book itself are just as uncanny. The core story in the House of

To contain a life, or even some fraction of it, in a single book is certainly a tall order among tall orders. But Jane Erye is so thoroughly and immersively suffused with the minutest realities of adolescence and early adulthood that I can’t help but see every life in it. The eponymous heroine’s story is mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, anyone’s, everyone’s. Analyzing the novel via Virginia Woolf’s literary catechism, however, yields something of an oddity. For all its banal but tangible plausibility, which was so many pages and episodes and humanities in the making, Brontë’s novel does not accord with the ideals Woolf crusades for, namely concepts that the latter refers to as “integrity” and “incandescence.” Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Though “A Rose for Emily” and Psycho have two different plots, they have similar themes and characteristics. Both stories have a murderous theme, with eerie abandoned looking houses. In both Faulkner and Hitchcock’s stories, the houses looked as is no one was taking care of them, but there were still at least one person that came out of each one. Within the two houses were secrets unimaginable to anyone outside of the home with a cloud of mystery hanging over them. This comparison essay will cover the main characters, Ms. Emily Grierson in “A Rose for Emily” and Norman in Psycho, who have similar themes of mystery, loneliness, and secrets.

In Virginia Woolf’s “Night and Day”, we, as the reader, can examine various feminist themes throughout the novel. Even though, “Night and Day” is one of her more conventional novels, many of the issues fly in the face of traditional values and capitalizes on the female oppression that was present in that time era. Even though, this was one of her earlier works, I believe that her conventional structure was an intentional creation, as she was trying to make a point on literary tradition and feminism. In contrast to many of her later novels, like “To The Lighthouse”, which had much anti-structure and stream of consciousness, “Night and Day”, is full of carefully written

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).

In gothic literature, the architecture that inhabits a story can go a long way not only in establishing the mood, but also in establishing the story’s characters. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1839, readers are introduced to a dreary house that is falling apart, while in another story by Poe published in this same year, “William Wilson,” readers are introduced to a school that, although not in disrepair, is labyrinthian and similarly dreary. Moreover, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, published in 1847, showcases a house, the size of which would normally reflect the wealth and high class of it’s owner, and yet the grounds are overgrown, indicating a lack of attention to maintenance while the house itself only features sparse furnishing. In all of these stories, the buildings that inhabit their pages are more than merely settings. Instead they are fragments of specific characters, representations of some form of wellness, while almost being characters in their own right. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the house represents the physical wellness of both Roderick and Madeline Usher; whereas in “William Wilson” the school reflects the mental wellness of the lead character; and in Wuthering Heights, the titled building represents the emotional wellness of its owner.

Woolf portrays the character of Mrs. Ramsay as a self sacrificing woman and mother as defined through her interactions with men: Charles Tansley, Mr. Carmichael, Paul, Mr. Bankes, Mr. Ramsay, and James. During Mrs. Ramsay's lifetime she is admired by most of these men, and is continually striving to be esteemed by all of them, at any sacrifice to herself. Although there is goodness in Mrs. Ramsay, not unselfishly given, there are also rising questions of this representation of mother by Woolf, primarily put forth through the characters of Lily and Mrs. Ramsay's daughters.

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