adeline virginia stephen woolf, (1882-1941) the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing
TRANSCRIPT
Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf , (1882-1941)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Virginia with her father
Sir Leslie Stephen, 1902
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Virginia Woolf
by Wyndham Lewis, 1921
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Richard Kennedy, Virginia Woolf Setting Type, Hogarth Press
The Woolfs’ home, Monk’s House, inEast Sussex
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Woolf’s writing lodgeat Monk’s House
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Bloomsbury district
Rather than define the “good” in terms of happiness, which begs the question, “what is good?” G. E. Moore asks what things are good. “On this Moore gives a most eloquent pitch for such things as friendship, art and knowledge as forming the ideal that utilitarian rules will conduce to maximising ('ought' being definable as what maximizes good). It was this appeal to art and friendship as simply and irreducibly good, or intrinsically valuable, that so thrilled
Bloomsbury.”www.philosophers.co.uk/cafe/phil_jul2003.htm
G. E. Moore(1873-1958)Cambridge Philosopher
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Painting of Woolf by her sister Vanessa Bellboth members of the Bloomsbury Circle
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Lytton Strachey and Clive Bellmembers of the Bloomsbury Circle
Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington
(1916)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Angelica Bell, Clive Bell, Stephen Tomlin
and Lytton Strachey (1926)
Roger FrySelf-Portrait (1930-4)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Vanessa Bell, The Memoir Club (1943)
Because Bloomsbury “carried
forward and made new the
Enlightenment project’s self-critical
and emancipatory force and
meaning, it “put England on the
map of modernist movements. . . .
Bloomsbury artists and intellectuals
entered a struggle not to “save”
their civilization but to help advance
Europe toward its own unrealized
ideal, a civilization that had never
existed. Bloomsbury carries the
Enlightenment struggle for
civilization dialectically into the
twentieth century in its pacifism and
internationalism, its sense of history
not as inevitable progress but as an
unending fight for a future that is
always open and free.” Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde xii
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Russell
Square
Bloomsbury
It's not like the movies / They fed us on little white lies
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf. Two Stories. Hogarth Press, 1917. Includes Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall.” Woodcuts by Dora Carrington.
If a writer were a free man and not
a slave, if he could write what he
chose, not what he must, if he could
base his work upon his own feeling
and not upon convention, there
would be no plot, no comedy, no
tragedy, no love interest or
catastrophe in the accepted style,
and perhaps not a single button
sewn on as the Bond Street tailors
would have it.
Woolf, “Modern Fiction,”
2089
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Arnold Bennett, “materialist”James Joyce, “spiritualist”
Modernist Oedipus
Life is not a series of gig lamps
symmetrically arranged; life is
a luminous halo, a semi-
transparent envelope
surrounding us from the
beginning of consciousness to
the end. Is it not the task of the
novelist to convey this varying,
this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit,
whatever aberration or
complexity it may display, with
as little mixture of the alien
and external as possible?
Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 2089 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Modernist strategies of narrative:
(a) free indirect style; permeable form of 3rd person in which the
idioms and
rhythms of particular characters determine the texture of
narrative voice
(b) stream of consciousness, often alternating with free indirect
style
(c) unexpected shifts in narrative perspective; Woolf creates caves,
the
“dark places of psychology” that allow her to connect her
characters
(Diary, p. 65-6)
(d) repetition of images linked by association, echo, juxtaposition
(e) non-linear narrative structures; emphasis on what the French
philosopher
Henri Bergson called durée, or “duration,” the subjective
experience of
space-time
(f) memorialization, use of memory to structure narrative, often in
lieu of
historical models; present and remembered past exist in a single
narrative frame
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Mrs. Dalloway
Cover design by
Vanessa Bell
1925
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up,
building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh . . . In
people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar;
the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and
swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the
strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life;
London; this moment of June. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 4
Vanessa Redgrave as
Mrs. Dalloway in
Marleen Gorris' 1996
film adaptation
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
An example of a recurrent, echoing image: Big Ben tolling the hours. “First a
warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable” (4); “a young man . . . swinging
dumb-bells this way and that” (48); clocks “dividing and subdividing” the June day
(102); “Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of Big
Ben, with its lap full of trifles” (128). Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Tamra Otis, Exquisite Moment
It was a sudden revelation, a tinge
like a blush which one tried to
check and then, as it spread, one
yielded to its expansion, and
rushed to the farthest verge and
there quivered and felt the world
come closer, swollen with some
astonishing significance, some
pressure of rapture, which split its
thin skin and gushed and poured
with an extraordinary alleviation
over the cracks and sores! Then,
for that moment, she had seen an
illumination; a match burning in a
crocus . . . . the most exquisite
moment of her whole life passing a
stone urn with flowers in it. Sally
stopped; picked a flower; kissed
her on the lips.Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 32, 35
One of the most important elements of the novel is the representation of character. In modernism, this becomes a problem not only of realistic depiction of action and motivation, but also of subjectivity itself. In your paper, discuss the issues and problems associated with the modernist representation of women and of a woman’s subjectivity in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
Subject 2.b. the mind, ego, or agent of whatever sort that sustains or assumes the form of thought or consciousness
Subject early 14c., "person under control or dominion of another," from O.Fr. suget, subget "a subject person or thing" (12c.), from L. subjectus, noun use of pp. of subicere "to place under," from sub "under" + combining form of jacere "to throw" (see jet (v.)). In 14c., sugges, sogetis, subgit, sugette; form re-Latinized in English 16c. Meaning "person or thing that may be acted upon" is recorded from 1590s.
Subjective mid-15c., "pertaining to a political subject" (now obsolete), from L.L. subjectivus, from subjectus (see subject (n.)). Meaning "existing in the mind" (mind="the thinking subject") is from 1707; thus, "personal idiosyncratic" (1767). Related: Subjectively.
subject, subjectivity. These terms typically refer to Western traditions of citizenship, selfhood and consciousness. The subject of modern western societies is often referred to as the subject of knowledge (i.e., of a specific epistemological framework) or the universal subject and is regarded as autonomous, sovereign and self-determining. Many theorists challenge these characteristics when they become normative, regulative or repressive. For them, the subject is at the mercy of social forces that determine it, more or less completely. Subjectivity is the condition of being a subject, specifically the condition of self-identity (i.e., self-awareness), and the ability not only to recognize oneself as a subject (agent or citizen) but also to regulate one’s actions accordingly. To be capable of conscious action and social and historical agency, the subject must occupy a recognizable and legitimate subject position within a specific social context. See subaltern.
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
To love makes one solitary, [Lucrezia] thought. . . . And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now. . . . the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal
suffering, that eternal loneliness. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 23,
25
John Singer
Sargent
A Street in Arras
(1918)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
“To the Prime Minister,” the voices which rustled above his head replied The supreme
secret must be told to the Cabinet; first that tress are alive; next there is no crime; next
love, universal love, he muttered, grasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these
profound truths. . . . “beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 67, 69
Vincent
Van Gogh
Large Plane Trees
(1889)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
“London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith.”
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 84
Wyndham
Lewis
Battery
Shelled
(1919)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Dr. Bradshaw’s diagnosis
of Septimus Warren Smith:
It was a clear case of
complete breakdown –
complete physical and
nervous breakdown.
The European War – that
little shindy of schoolboys
with gunpowder? Had he
served with distinction? he
really forgot. In the War
itself he had failed.
Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway 96C. R. W. Nevinson, Paths of Glory (1917)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Human nature, in short, was on him – the
repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils.
Holmes was on him.
Dr. William Bradshaw never spoke of
“madness”; he called it not having a sense of
proportion. . . .
Health we must have; and health is
proportion.
But Proportion has a sister, less smiling,
more formidable, a Goddess even no
engaged in the heat and sands of India, the
mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of
London, wherever in short the climate of the
devil tempts men to fall from the true belief
which is her own . . . Conversion is her name
and she feasts on the wills of the weakly,
loving to impress, to impose, adoring her
own features stamped on the face of the
populace.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 92, 96, 99-100
Victim of Shell Shock
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Only one person in the world
could be as he was, in love.
And there he was, this
fortunate man, himself,
reflected in the plate-glass
window of a motor-car
manufacturer in Victoria
street. All India lay behind
him; plains, mountains;
epidemics of cholera; a
district twice as big as
Ireland; decisions he had to
come to alone – he Peter
Walsh, who was now really
for the first time in his life,
in love.Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 46, 48
Peter Walsh, the colonial civil servant
She flattered him; she fooled him, thought Clarissa; shaping
the woman, the wife of the Major in the Indian Army, with
three strokes of a knife. What a waste! What a folly! . . . .
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant,
now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much
indeed.Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 79
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Regent’s Park, London
Straightening himself and stealthily
fingering his pocket-knife he started
after her to follow this woman, this
excitement . . . Was she, he
wondered as she moved,
respectable? Witty, with a lizard’s
flickering tongue, he thought (for
one must invent, must allow oneself
a little diversion), a cool waiting wit,
a darting wit; not noisy. . . . He
pursued; she changed. There was colour in her cheeks; mockery in her eyes; he was an adventurer, reckless, he
thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from India) a romantic
buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties, yellow dressing-gowns, pipes,
fishing-rods, in the shop windows; and respectability and evening parties and spruce old
men wearing white slips beneath their waistcoats.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway,
53
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
A sound interrupted him; a frail quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction,
vigour, beginning or end . . . the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring
spouting from the earth; which issued, just opposite Regent’s Park Tube station from a
tall quivering shape . . . the battered woman . . . stood singing of love – love which has
lasted a million years . . . . As the ancient song bubbled up opposite Regent’s Park Tube
station still the earth seemed green and flower, still, though it issued from so rude a
mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses,
still the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages . . .
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 80-1
May
Day,
ring
round
the
maypole
Draft page of Mrs. Dalloway
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Lady Bruton, after lunch, imagines a
kind of connection
And they went further and further
from her, being attached to her by a
thin thread (since they had lunched
with her) which would stretch and
stretch, get thinner and thinner as
they walked across London; as if
one’s friends were attached to one’s
body, after dining with them, by a
thin thread, which (as she dozed
there) became hazy with the sound of
bells, striking the hour or ringing to
service, as a single spider’s thread is
blotted with rain-drops, and,
burdened, sags down.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 112
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
“Her parties! That was it! Her parties! Both of them criticized her very unfairly,
laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties. That was it! That was it!” Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway, 121
Pierre
Auguste
Renoir
“Luncheon
of the Boating
Party”
(1881)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Omnibus, c. 1925
Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and
most competently boarded the omnibus,
in front of everybody. . . . She might own
a thousand acres and have people under
her. . . . She would become a doctor, a
farmer, possibly go into Parliament, all
because of the Strand. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway,
135-6
The Strand in London
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
She looked up Fleet
Street. She walked
just a little way
towards St. Paul’s,
shyly, like some one
penetrating on
tiptoe, exploring a
strange house by
night with a candle . .
. . For no Dalloway's
came down the
Strand daily; she was
a pioneer, a
stray, venturing, trusting. . . She penetrated a little further in the direction of St.
Paul’s. She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brotherhood of this uproar.
It seemed to do her good.Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 137-8
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
But he would wait
for the very last
moment.
He did not
want to die.
Life was good.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 149
Georges Leroux, L'enfer (1917)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
... my husband was
called up on the
telephone, a very
sad case. A young
man (that is what
Sir William is telling
Mr. Dalloway) had
killed himself. He
had been in the
army. Oh! thought
Clarissa, in the
middle of my party,
here’s death, she
thought.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 183
John Northcote Nash, Over the Top, 1st Artists' Rifles at Marcoing, 30th December 1917 (1918)
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
Somehow it was her disaster –
her disgrace. It was her
punishment to see sink and
disappear here a man, there a
woman, in this profound
darkness, and she forced to
stand here in her evening
dress. . . Fear no more the heat
of the sun. She must go back to
them. But what an
extraordinary night! She felt
somehow very like him – the
young man who had killed
himself. She felt glad he had
done it; thrown it away.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 184-5 Nicole Kidman
as Virginia Woolf in The Hours
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on
for a moment. What is this terror? what
is this ecstasy? he thought to himself.
What is it that fills me with
extraordinary excitement.
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway, 194
Vanessa Redgrave plays Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris' 1996 film adaptation
The Triumph and the Jingle and the Strange High Singing
I jumped in the river and what did I see?
Black-eyed angels swam with me