Woolf Street Haunting

Oftentimes, stories composed in a conventionally gothic aspect also conceal tales of suffering, repression, and resistance underlying the otherwise eerie façade. This subversive technique applies, in particular, to several prominent foremothers in women’s literature, many of whom have attained recognition for their forward-thinking during an era of absolute patriarchal domination. For women writers, gothic literature possesses an inherent ability to serve as a platform to explore broader thematic concerns in a discreet fashion. Thus, the haunted setting, trivialization of feminine fear, and alter-ego madwoman motif in Charlotte Bronte’s, “Jane Eyre,” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” is instrumental to each author’s shrouded

Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own” uses the symbolism of a room to express solitude and leisure time. Women were excluded from education and the unequal distribution of wealth. Through this idea, women lack the essential necessities to produce their own creativity. Women wrote out of their own anger and insecurity. Men wrote intellectual passages that were highly praised because a woman could never live up to a man’s expectations in literature due to lack of education.

Yet, in this presentation of logic, there is a great deal of pathos tied in as well. Women have fought hard for the right to have their own place to live and here she recognizes the tremendous achievement that they have won for themselves, while not downplaying the obstacles that they are yet to face. Virginia Woolf uses all three appeals and often ties them together to better get her point across.

The understanding of belonging is not a concrete block, but a dynamic plain fertilised by interaction with an individual’s context. This allows equilibrium to form between beliefs of identity, and uncovering the true meaning of belonging. Both nineteenth century poet Emily Dickinson and Modernist author Margery Williams explore this complex state of acceptance through their works, ‘The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson’ and ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’. Paradox in ‘What mystery pervades a well’, and mechanical metaphor in the microcosmic short story detail that differentiating truth and imagination is integral to cultivate an understanding of belonging. Stichomythia in ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’, and economic discourse in ‘I had been hungry all the years’ depict that acceptance can only be achieved through overcoming the struggle between yearning to belong and facing societal barriers. Finally, it is discovered that personal notions of identity are formed through experiences in the larger world, which creates a cemented understanding of belonging. This is portrayed through an extended weather metaphor by Margery Williams and inclusive language in ‘I died for beauty’. Together, the composers create texts which bring the audience on a journey of acceptance and identity, in turn enriching their understandings of belonging.

An individual’s true identity will only develop once they have gone through experiences that force them to break away from societal and environmental expectations. However, this identity will not be formed until they have truly embraced and evaluated the experiences. Therefore, the development of an identity is a gradual learning process. This is evident in the film ‘Muriel’s Wedding’ directed by P.J. Hogan (1994). In this film, the protagonist, Muriel, has developed a fabricated bridal identity due to the societal pressures and expectations of the successful female. Muriel has created this identity in order to become acceptable to the patriarchal society. This notion of a fabricated identity is further demonstrated in the poem ‘Diving into

The physical migration of humans from house to house brings about new chapters of their lives and renews the individual self. Correspondingly, Kate Chopin uses the motif of houses in The Awakening in order to convey the transitions Edna experiences throughout her self-exploration. Each house in the text portrays a distinctive stage in Edna’s life and contributes to the reader’s understanding of Edna’s essentially unattainable desire for ultimate freedom from all responsibilities. The cabins at Grand Isle mark the start of Edna’s journey, then at Cheniere Caminada she discovers her true desires, her return to the big house in New Orleans depicts her forced return to traditional roles, and her rejection of these values is fully apparent when

Many aspects contribute to the formation of a person’s self-identity. Whether it be their surroundings, their culture, their language, or even other’s personal identities, they all shape one’s perception of the world, the self-imposed rules surrounding them, and where they believe they belong within it. This world is encompassed with stories, and they contribute to the fabrication of everything ever known. It is these stories and histories that surround all things that play a comprehensive role in the formation of one’s identity. Jasper Fforde, in his novel The Eyre Affair, demonstrates and testifies to this through both

In Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own” (16) if she is to write fiction of any merit. The point as she develops it is a perceptive one, and far more layered and various in its implications than it might at first seem. But I wonder if perhaps Woolf did not really tap the full power of her thesis. She recognized the necessity of the writer’s financial independence to the birth of great writing, but she failed to discover the true relationship to great writing of another freedom; for just as economic freedom allows one to inhabit a physical space---a room of one’s own---so does mental freedom allow one to inhabit one’s own mind and body “incandescent and

The first major point made by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own is synonymous with the essay’s thesis. Woolf first introduces this theme in the beginning of her essay: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). The concept of a woman needing to possess finances and an individual space is recurrent throughout the book. To Woolf, this idea is tantamount to obtaining freedom. During the era in which Woolf lived and set A Room of One’s Own, women faced various limitations that stripped them of their ability to find true creative liberation. With so much of their time spent in the house and no access to finances, women struggled to find separation from the home. Thus, Woolf’s emphasis on money and a room symbolizes the separation and freedom

World famous poet, Edgar Allan Poe, once wrote in one of his poems, “From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” In those lines, Poe demonstrates his love for being alone because his childhood was full of isolation, meaning that the writer grew used to the feeling. Since boyhood throughout his adult life, Edgar Allan Poe endured through a series of unfortunate events. From his parents dying, his animosity with his foster father, his consecutive poverty, to facing rejection from the public, the man’s life was as ominous as his fiction. This essay will discuss the reason behind the writing of one of Edgar Allan

According to the statement by Hilliary Clark, “the process of self – othering”, what she meant is that you have to experience not only your current perception of the world, but also through other perceptions of the world, while trying to gain a new understanding of the world. Through this method, the narrator is able to experience and understand emotions that are meaningful to her. In this essay, she divides her impressions of her current self into “four selves”- the first two selves representing the decay of beauty, the third self being the current perspective of the narrator, with the fourth self being optimistic towards the future. The threshold that Woolf is crossing in her essay is her perception towards life and death and its significance towards the human experience, as she is using the justification that death is meaningful in our lives.

In Grier English classes, we have discussed about the change of identity in many different books, for example, Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Sometimes, the mental activities experienced by the characters that are facing great transformations resonate with our life. Within all of these books we read and suffered through with countless tests and projects, I find a very important lesson in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

These novels largely followed the precedent of Victorian and Edwardian realistic characterization and narrative consciousness. The story of Rachel Vinrace is conveyed through the traditional omniscient, omnipresent narrative consciousness which occasionally projects its own thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions onto the "reality" of Rachel's world. In Jacob's Room, Woolf extends the omniscience of the narrator exponentially. Consciousness or narrative voice is no longer centered in a singular fictional "being." Instead, the narrative consciousness is dispersed across the whole of the work's universe; the collective voice of the novel includes the traditional impersonal presence as well as Jacob's view, Betty Flander's view, the view of the London crowds, and many others.

High upon a lonely hill surrounded by a great dark forest, stood an ancient, crumbling manor, known as the Haunted House. The windows were all smashed and it looked like the house was used a long time ago and was never used again. The font gates were as old as the hills. It belonged to a greedy old man, he was as short as a stump, he was really grumpy and fat who everyone said he was a wizard. Even though he owned the immense haunted house he didn’t dare to go inside because he was frightened like a child in dark, so he lived in the small cottage in the grounds of the manor, with just his black cat for company. He was as lonely as the master who has go to war, but hews happy, because he had a true love. His true love was gold, and he had

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