I've really been liking these panels on Mrs. Dalloway, the discussion has been really intriguing and building an appreciation for the book i would not have gotten reading it on my own. The layers and layers of intricacies within the story I really feel like I would've glazed over reading them by myself.
Especially the critique of class divisions that surfaces throughout the book i.e the car montage. When taking stuff like that in it really takes the story to w a whole other level for me, Mrs. Dalloway is't just some overly reflective housewife buying flowers shes much larger than that, a symbol for all the good and bad that sprung from Victorian era England.
I was thinking of this the other day and really thought I was reading too much into this book, but upon watching the short documentary at the end of class today I really began to see how Clarissa and Septimus were not just two inhabitants of the same city but symbols for the changing times.
I'm sure I've only touched the surface of such a complex novel, but I'm not an english major so I wouldn't know anything else to say.
2 comments:
Dude, you've been brainwashed by the academic elites. You don't have to be an English major to read novels on a deep level. Was Virginia Woolf an English Major? No, she was not. How do I know that? She had a job.
In all seriousness- You must have more to say. What do you mean by "symbolic of all the good and bad"? Seems PROMISING.
While some English majors *do* somehow end up (more or less) gainfully employed, ahem, Charles's point w/r/t Woolf is well taken: as the short doc. points out, she was self-taught and not academically trained, because of the gender constraints on higher education in her era. Luckily, her father was a famous and omnivorous scholar, and he had a pretty sweet library for her to poke around in. And seriously, all it takes to read a novel (or experience any work of art) critically is an open mind and experience--the more you read, the better you get at it. Good criticism (of the sort presented in our recent panels) helps all of us see new aspects in what we'd already thought we had a grip on. It's not a matter of "I should've noticed that!" It's "what can I do with this insight? where can I go from here?" You've got a good start here; keep thinking about the ways Clarissa is both a very modern character (her avowed atheism, for example, or her feelings about female friendship and love) and somewhat "old-fashioned" or late Victorian. (Much like VW herself!)
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