Virginia Woolf Research Paper

The next expressive woman known during the renaissance era was Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf was raised in a very educated home with a great privilege to be a freethinking woman. She began writing her own novel very young, and had written many more popular modernist titles such as “To The Lighthouse” and “Mrs. Dalloway.” Woolf had many opportunities available to her that many women of her day were not; she studied many different languages and went to college for four years. Virginia Woolf believed that women had little or no say in their future; she wanted to use her education and social connections to make a voice in the world where women unfortunately had none.

The “rest cure” was a common treatment for depression in women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Women were locked in a room involuntarily and forced to “rest.” The patient was locked in a room and not allowed to leave or function in any type of way. The narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story The Yellow Wallpaper is subjected to this cure. The story is written to expose the cruelty of the “resting cure”. Gilman uses the wall paper to represent the narrators sense of entrapment, the notion of creativity gone astray, and a distraction that becomes an obsession.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus, a supporting character struggles with a mental illness that is most likely Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Similarly, in The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator also struggles with a mental illness which could be related to postpartum depression. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wallpaper struggled with depression and Virginia Woolf, author of Mrs. Dalloway, suffered childhood trauma and was bipolar (McMan). Both story’s views on mental illness are most likely heavily influenced by each author’s personal experience with mental illness. The Yellow Wallpaper and Mrs. Dalloway both reflect society’s negative view toward mental illness during the late 19th and early 20th century as both stories have themes of scarring symptoms, unreliable doctors, shameful therapy and feelings of isolation.

Many people deal with post-traumatic depression and it can have a huge impact on one’s life. In the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the main character, as well as the narrator, is an unnamed woman dealing with post-traumatic depression. The exceptionally imaginative protagonist’s metamorphosis is due to her isolated confinement in a room with “yellow wallpaper” in order for her to recover from depression. This type of treatment is prescribed by her physician and husband, John, whose controlling personality demands the main character to get bed rest in a secluded room and forbid her to participate in any creative

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on the 27of April 1759 in London. Her father Edward could never keep a job so her family moved a lot. Her father Edward was very abusive towards her mother Elizabeth. Mary had to defend her mother when her father was beating on her.Growing up in all that commotion affected her later in life. It made her think marriage was the same as bondage.

Depression is a rising topic nowadays, however it has been present in human history for a long time. It is highly important to treat this sickness properly, since it can have big repercussions in someone’s life and health. In class, we discussed the case of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This story is a clear example of a depression case treatment gone wrong. It illustrated the effects and consequences of negligence in the treatment of depression, centering on patients of the Victorian age. The “rest cure” was the common treatment given to women who suffered from depression or hysteria (Poirier 15). This treatment was not only ineffective but it was prejudicial to their mental health. In Gilman’s story, the narrator is diagnosed with nervous depression by her husband and brother, physicians of high standing. Her husband decides that the best way to treat her is making sure she rests, isolating her from everything that can harm her. She is left alone with nothing to do and no one to interact with, not even her own son. Additionally, the narrator was forbidden to express her emotions, especially through her writing, which ends up worsening her illness. A feeling of loneliness overcomes her and with nothing more than her room’s yellow wallpaper as a source of entertainment, she slowly falls into madness. The Yellow Wallpaper is the perfect example of how the treatment given to mentally ill women in the Victorian age was deficient, and in many cases

Margaret Atwood is one of the most well known Canadian authors of all time. She has countless awards such as the Governor General’s Award, Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and many more all for her terrific works as well as her works in activism.

Jodie Foster is a well known American actress. She is also known for being a director and producer in both movies and television. But not a lot of people know that before she became an acclaimed actress, she was able to get a degree from Yale University.

Throughout history, female artists have not been strangers to harsh criticism regarding their artistic works. Some female artists are fortunate to even receive such criticism; many have not achieved success in sharing their works with the world. In Virgina Woolf’s third chapter of her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf addresses the plight of the woman writer, specifically during the Elizabethan time period of England. Woolf helps the reader appreciate her view on how stifling and difficult this time period was for women and how what little creativity emerged would have been distorted in some way. Through a number of claims, examples and other literary techniques, Woolf is able to

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London in 1882 in a wealthy family belonging to the high intellectual spheres. Her education followed the Victorian tradition: she read classics and major works of Anglo-Saxon literature at a young age. But her life suddenly changed dramatically; her mother died in 1895 when she was only 13 years. Then, Stella, his half-sister, died two years later. Virginia was deeply affected, and had her first depression, which will be followed by many others: in 1904, her father died, and Virginia was institutionalized for a brief period. This dramatic childhood affected her whole life. Virginia Woolf was very emotionally unstable. She committed suicide on March 28, 1941, after completing her final novel, Between the

Post World War I London society was characterized by a flow of new luxuries available to the wealthy and unemployment throughout the lower classes. Fascinated by the rapidly growing hierarchal social class system, Virginia Woolf, a young writer living in London at the time, sought to criticize it and reveal the corruption which lay beneath its surface. Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s fourth novel, was born in 1925 out of this desire precisely. A recurring focus in many of Woolf’s major novels is the individual and his or her conscious perceptions of daily life. Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses this technique, known as a “stream-of-consciousness,” to trace the thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith during one day in London five years after the Great War. It is exactly this narrative technique which allows Woolf to compare the lives of these two characters which belong to different social classes to argue that social placement has a negative effect on one’s life and psychological being.

This was soon followed by the death of her mother and the inevitable estrangement and death of her father. Due to these events, Woolf became close to her sister, Vanessa; whom both shared to goal of escaping the “constraints of Victorian womanhood” (Hussey 377). This mainly stemmed from the sisters not being able to go to traditional school like their brothers. Not being mainstreamed into the school system provided Woolf with few friends and lead to many of her mental disabilities. After the death of her father, Woolf attempted suicide for the first time by jumping out a window. Soon after this event, her doctor and family members deemed Woolf mentally unstable. This led to Woolf’s passion of writing, it allowed her to explore her mania-depression on a deeper level. Her mental issues also led to her feminist tendencies, in which she eventually turned against men completely, even her husband Leonard.

Virginia Woolf, the author of To the Lighthouse is well known for her amazing creativity and past experiences which she is able to mix all together to make a wonderful and engaging piece of writing. Many of her books are inspired by her childhood and the diverse life she has experienced being bipolar. Virginia's inspiration specifically for the book To the Lighthouse, written in 1927, came from the view she had from outside the window of a small Talland house of a lighthouse and The Cornish Sea, once owned by the Woolf’s but now an apartment, she and her family would stay at each summer to run and take care of until her mother passed, which takes a huge toll in To the Lighthouse.

In her own writing on the novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf stated, "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense…“ In this essay, I shall use this quote as a means to examine the theme of love and solitude in one of her most famous novels which follows a set of characters that go about their day. Virginia Wolf was able to illustrate the isolation one experiences within its own mind and the importance of one’s soul and ways in which souls connect through different memories and events. Even though independency is highly valued, the inability for people to communicate and build meaningful relationships is the most important aspect in the novel.

was born in 1882 and was the third child of Julia and Leslie Stephan. Virginia Woolf is