Here's to the obsessed

As to why the number of blog posts have rapidly decreased, I can offer only one explanation:

I'm putting on a senior piano recital on June 6. And since I only work well under pressure, I've put off a lot of memorizing until now. Well, the pressure's on and I'm currently practicing about three hours a day. Or more.

Add that to school, other recitals, award ceremonies, church, running, graduation activities, and whatever else life has to throw at me... well, let's just say I don't have a lot of free time.

I feel like school is my extracurricular activity.

Our study of Modernism in Lit class is now over and we've moved on to Post-modernism. I really didn't get enough of Woolf and Freud though. When I have more time, I want to reread Mrs. Dalloway and mull over the beautifully written passages.

"What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" -was that it? - "I prefer men to cauliflowers" -was that it?"

~Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway pg 3

The red text is one amazingly long sentence.

"She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death." ~ Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway pg. 184

On the surface, this novel is about an older woman planning and putting on a party, while reminiscing about the past. Dig a little deeper (or take a Lit class) and you'll find Freudian psychology and life or death fights against coercive forces.

Woolf took the idea of the novel and turned it completely upside down with her crazy syntax, stream of consciousness writing, transitions, and plots. She also completely turned the idea of gender roles topsy-turvy. Every novel we've read so far have had distinct lines between feminine and masculine.

Faust - Gretchen and Faust

Crime and Punishment - Sonya and Raskolnikov

Civilization and Its Discontents - Eros and Thanatos

But in Mrs. Dalloway? Nope. We have Lady Bruton. She's described with very masculine features and is very active in politics. Woolf writes, "She should have been a general of dragoons herself" (105). Then there's Peter Walsh. Romantic and passionate, Peter is very in touch with his emotions and longs for intimacy. In a description of him, Woolf says, "It was this that made him attractive to women who liked the sense that he was not altogether manly" (156).

Woolf takes gender roles and gender stereotypes and swaps them. Makes a masculine woman and a feminine man. And of course both Clarissa and Septimus have these homo-erotic relationships in their past: Clarissa with Sally and Septimus with Evans.

But the best part is that Woolf follows the idea of the salvific feminine that we've been following all quarter.

In Mrs. Dalloway, the effects of World War I are clearly evident. The war (thanatos) destroyed life and love and civilization. Septimus is the character that represents this the most. And it is Clarissa and her parties that bring people together and heal life. Eros saves civilization in the end. And while every person has eros, it is more firmly connected to females.

Salvific feminine. In the form of parties. I love it.