Mme Dalloway, une femme en costume, naviguant dans le temps avec une horloge et des fleurs.

The fictive experience of time through Mrs. Dalloway

  1. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: A Modernist Novel
  2. Time on the surface level of Mrs. Dalloway
  3. Time and Virginia Woolf’s novel technique
  4. The fictive experience of time through Mrs. Dalloway

Now the reader’s experience must be studied because, when all is said and done, it is the way in which the complexity of time is felt that constitutes part of the interest (part of the pleasure) we derive from reading “Mrs. Dalloway”.

‘Monumental’ time versus private time

Virginia Woolf suggests that time is not uniform, time is not the same for everyone at the same moment. The experience of time is filtered through the characters’ consciousness.

We may distinguish between two forms of time: ‘monumental time’ and ‘private time’. Monumental time is the time of the clocks: Big Ben striking the ‘irrevocable hour’, but it is also the time of the power, of the authorities, of the institutions that fix working hours and regulate the lives of ‘well-balanced people’. Private time is subjective; it is torn apart (asunder) between memory (the past) and expectation: looking forward to future events.

What Virginia Woolf subtly shows is that ‘monumental time’, for example, the chiming of Big Ben, arouses different responses and touches off different echoes according to the characters. Of course, the chiming of Big Ben is objectively the same for everyone at the same instant, however, Virginia Woolf sets out to show that they affect characters differently according to the state of mind and disposition they find themselves in, on the spur of the moment.

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Une pile de papiers, de livres et de puzzles sur une table présentant la nouvelle technique de Virginia Woolf à travers le concept de temps.

Time and Virginia Woolf’s novel technique

  1. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: A Modernist Novel
  2. Time on the surface level of Mrs. Dalloway
  3. Time and Virginia Woolf’s novel technique
  4. The fictive experience of time through Mrs. Dalloway

Showing the various strata of time by taking one single day is a starting point. It is a paradox since at the end, Woolf suggests that taking one single day is an illusion: huge portions of the past are to be found behind every moment in the present. each moment of the present contains within itself different temporal layers.

Time and story-telling

How can a novelist investigate and analyse the depths of different individual minds while keeping a sense of unity? Or, put differently, how can a novelist create a coherent, well-structured novel from various disconnected subjectivities?

Woolf chose a peculiar narrative voice that could dwell and stay successively in the minds of the different protagonists, and that could register/record what goes on in the character’s consciousness. The narrative presence keeps moving from one character to the next and remembers everything. It has the power to resurrect the past in the narration, i.e. the power of bringing back the past into the present or the fiction.

This narrative voice is like a state of mind outside the characters and of which the characters themselves are not conscious. The state of mind surrounds/encloses the characters and glides/insinuates into the recesses of their minds. This narrative presence violates their inner thoughts and steals their most intimate secrets.

Thus, the form of narration of “Mrs. Dalloway” is the indirect discourse, that we will analyse.

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Une peinture de personnages du Vicaire de Wakefield rassemblés dans une pièce.

Characters and characterization in The Vicar of Wakefield

  1. Characters and characterization in The Vicar of Wakefield
  2. Structure and Plot in The Vicar of Wakefield

Characters are a finished product. Characterization is the technique of production of the characters, it reflects the way of thinking.

Goldsmith was not only a novelist but also a playwright: he wrote “The Good Natur’d Man” (1768) and “She Stoops to Conquer” (1773). When he wrote “The Vicar of Wakefield”, Goldsmith was testing through fiction characters who were to become perfectible on stage. Full-fledged characters are fleshed-out characters. Fiction writing was for him a draft for theatre, that’s the reason why there are so many references to theatre in the text.

“All the same flesh and blood” (p. 10)

All of the characters are connected through the family.

The family circle

Being a vicar, Primrose reminds his reader that all mankind makes up a large family. Characters are defined through kinship (family relationships). For instance, the Primroses form the typical family structure of the 18th century:

  • the father is at the centre (patriarchal model)
  • the eldest son is favoured (primogeniture)
  • gender roles are well-differentiated (p. 45)

The patronym is Primrose: it is a forerunner of the end of the story. To be “prim” is to behave well and to be easily shocked. The “rose” is a flower, the symbol of England. “Rose” is also the preterit from “to rise”, indicating social elevation.

Throughout the novel, the reader comes across characters who are connected by family ties. Yet, in the denouement, the already existing family bonds are strengthened: In the end, the Primrose family find themselves united to the Wilmots (through George’s wedding) and to the Thornhills (through Sophia’s wedding, and through Olivia’s wedding that proves to have been genuine after all).

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Une peinture représentant un groupe de personnes dans une pièce, dont un vicaire de Wakefield.

Structure and Plot in The Vicar of Wakefield

  1. Characters and characterization in The Vicar of Wakefield
  2. Structure and Plot in The Vicar of Wakefield

“The Vicar of Wakefield” is a classic novel by Oliver Goldsmith, first published in 1766. It’s often celebrated for its charming portrayal of rural English life, its exploration of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity, and its satirical take on the social and moral issues of its time. The narrative centres around Dr Primrose, the vicar of the title, and his family as they navigate a series of misfortunes that test their faith, virtue, and familial bonds.

Dr. Primrose, a man of modest wealth and virtue, lives contentedly with his wife and six children in a small parish. Their tranquil life is upended when the vicar’s financial stability is destroyed, leading the family to move to a more humble residence in another village. The family’s trials and tribulations include financial ruin, seduction, abduction, and imprisonment. Yet, throughout these hardships, Dr. Primrose’s steadfast faith, optimism, and paternal love remain unshaken, serving as a moral compass for his family and the novel’s readers.

Goldsmith employs a mix of satire, sentimentality, and moral reflection, making “The Vicar of Wakefield” a richly layered text. It satirizes the social and moral pretensions of the time, while also presenting a heartfelt exploration of human resilience and the importance of family. The novel’s enduring appeal lies in its complex characterizations, its humour, and its compassionate insight into human nature and societal flaws.

The story is meant to educate and teach a moral lesson to the reader. Yet, the vicar is a model of good behaviour, a paragon of virtue and he is presented comically. He has shortcomings, defects, and very visible weaknesses. The vicar adores showing off and teaching lessons. He displays his knowledge foolishly. He also has a pet theme: monogamy.

The narrative structure of “The Vicar of Wakefield” is notable for its use of a first-person perspective, allowing readers an intimate glimpse into Dr. Primrose’s thoughts and feelings. This approach lends the story an air of authenticity and emotional depth, as the vicar’s virtues and flaws are laid bare.

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Un collage de femmes et d'hommes côte à côte, représentant le progrès et la diversité de la civilisation britannique aux XIXe et XXe siècles.

British Civilisation and Literature: 19th and 20th centuries

  1. The 18th Century: the Age of Enlightenment
  2. The Gothic and the Fantastic
  3. The 19th Century : Romanticism in Art and Literature
  4. English Romanticism (1798-1832)
  5. 19th Century Literary Movements : Realism and Naturalism
  6. British Civilisation and Literature: 19th and 20th centuries

The Victorian Period: 1832-1900

The Victorian Period took place during the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). Great Britain was then the first industrial, cultural and economic nation, with a thriving economy. It was a time of social and political stability and the colonies were a huge market for British products. The British population rose from 2 million people to 6.5 million people. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a demonstration of British power.

Yet, some social problems arose: trade unions were forbidden and this led to riots. The “Corn Laws” were used to keep the price of bread high. There was pauperism too: in 1864, the Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced to solve the problem of poverty with workhouses.

The Victorian Period was the age of two extremes: the poor working class and the middle classes, rich and comfortable. It was a 2-standard society. It was also an age marked by scientific and economic confidence and social and spiritual pessimism. Some great debates took place: intellectual activity and questioning on varied themes such as justice, liberty and progress. In 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”.

The Mid-Victorian society is still held together by Christian moral teachings. The stress was on the virtues of family life. Some saw the family as an agent of oppression, as an efficient means to maintain uniformity in society. It was also the time of the first real moves of the modern women’s movement. Yet, at the same time, there was a great respect for the matronly model provided by Queen Victoria herself: the stereotype of virtuous womanhood.

The 19th Century: the Great Age of the English novel and Gothic novel

With Charles Dickens, a new concern of the society emerged:

  • he was a clock (a huge worker)
  • his father was imprisoned for debt
  • he started working at the factory at 12

Dickens’ life inspired his novels: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, and Hard Times. They all revolve around the problems of society and the suffering of children.

He is never pathetic but sometimes humourous and ironic. Dickens’s depiction of the Victorian change of feelings from optimism and confidence at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837 to uncertainty and melancholy thirty years later.

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Un dessin animé parodique mettant en scène deux hommes jouant au croquet dans le style de Tristram Shandy.

To what extent is Tristram Shandy a parody?

At the beginning of a novel, a writer has to call up a world of his. It’s the “willing suspension of disbelief’ (Samuel Coleridge), which only happens if the situation is credible. It means that the reader accepts the story without always questioning the facts related, but he’s expected to take things seriously.

The opening chapter is likely to puzzle the reader who has some good reasons to feel disoriented. He suspects Sterne of playing a trick on him.

The novelist presents this text as a fictitious autobiography. “Opinions” means a documented essay, and “gent” (a short for gentlemen) specifies that the character occupies a high level in society. The quotation in Greek is erudite, it’s an epigraph (part of the paratext).

Playing with the rules of the realist novel

The story is presented as a jest.

A lack of chronological progression

The first-person narrator does not follow the linear, chronological progression of an autobiography. The story is “ab ovo” as Tristram is not born yet. He tells a story he cannot have witnessed: “My Tristram’s misfortunes began 9 months before he came to this world”.

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Un dessin animé inspiré du roman Tristram Shandy mettant en scène un homme chevauchant un cheval et un chien, créant un visuel anti roman amusant.

Is Tristram Shandy a novel or an anti-novel?

A general presentation of Tristram Shandy

The title shows that novelists played with the rules of the New Novel genre. Tristram Shandy is a unique literary experience. It is a long and intricate text that does not even tell a story, or at least in an unusual way. It cannot be read from cover to cover: there is no unique plot but digressions, essays, and experiments with typography.

We can find blank pages, drawings, dashes, italics and chapters which have gone missing. It is much more complicated than a joke, it is a book that is highly interesting in its artistic form. It is a reflexive text, which is also commenting on the meaning of fiction writing.

The influences of other writings

Sterne was a cultivated vicar and a well-read man, influenced by Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Cervantes but also by philosophers such as Descartes or Locke.

Tristram Shandy was published in several instalments. Volumes 1-6 were published in 1760-1761, and volumes 7-9 were published between 1765 and 1767. Tristram Shandy was immediately successful and made Laurence Stern rich. However, Sterne contracted tuberculosis and had to go to France (the description of Paris is in vol. 7). Several authors influenced Laurence Sterne.

Don Quijote

Sterne likes Cervantes’ comic method which consists of telling simple insignificant events by using epic style. There’s a distortion, a gap between the event or action and how the event is described. This gap is what is called “mock-heroic”: it is not serious enough to be epic, and it creates a comic effect.

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An English Romanticism painting of a landscape with trees and hills. William Turner, Dawn in the Valleys of Devon.

English Romanticism (1798-1832)

  1. The 18th Century: the Age of Enlightenment
  2. The Gothic and the Fantastic
  3. The 19th Century : Romanticism in Art and Literature
  4. English Romanticism (1798-1832)
  5. 19th Century Literary Movements : Realism and Naturalism
  6. British Civilisation and Literature: 19th and 20th centuries

English Romanticism began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads and ended in 1832 with Walter Scott’s death. William Blake and Robert Burns also belong to this literary genre, though they lived before the Romantic period.

Romanticism took place during a period of wars and revolutions, of considerable shifts and changes. It was a time of profound political and social reorganisation.

Romantic texts were varied and dealt with the Industrial Revolution and its consequences: a new class system, and a new type of economy. It’s important to emphasize the fact that this is the time when numerous kinds of problems appeared. Famous writers include William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge.

Besides the Industrial Revolution, it is impossible to ignore the two major political upheavals that took place at that time, namely the American War of Independence (1776-1783) and the French Revolution (1789), which challenged old systems of social and political organizations.

Eugene Delacroix Le 28 Juillet. La Liberte guidant le peuple
Eugene Delacroix – Le 28 Juillet. La Liberté guidant le peuple.

The French Revolution struck British consciousness at first very favourably. Samuel Coleridge celebrated and praised it in a poem entitled “Destruction of the Bastille”.

Enthusiasm melted away as the war between France and Britain broke out four years later (1793), about the same time as the Reign of Terror started (1793-1794).

Romanticism was a period of constant tensions, observable in some of the poems we will study.

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Family in Death for a Salesman photo

Family in Death of a Salesman

  1. Death of a Salesman : an extended introduction
  2. Family in Death of a Salesman
  3. Death of a Salesman: Tragedy versus Social Drama
  4. Death of a Salesman: the play’s structure, a memory play

In an article entitled The Family in Modern Drama, Arthur Miller insisted that all “great plays” finally grapple with one central issue: “How may a man make of the outside world a home?”.

Making the outside world a home would imply being “well-liked”: managing to turn anonymous, business relations into close family ties – that is to say being able, like Dave Singleman, “to go… into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?” (p.63).

In Death of a Salesman, the dream of social success cannot be disentangled from the idyllic vision of society as a large, tightly-knit family.

Yet, there is every reason to believe that Dave Singleman, as his patronymic shows, is a bachelor, when the foundation of the much-vaunted American ideal remains the nuclear family: the nuclear family as an agent of socialization and as a stabilizing influence.

Precisely in Death of a Salesman spectators are given privileged access into the private sphere of a family and occasionally turned into voyeurs. It seems that far from offering a secure, reassuring nest the family also reverberates the tensions of society at large in the 1950s.

1. The Green World patriarchal clan

Willy, through his conversation with Ben (38-41) harks back to his infancy. The image of the father is mythologized by both sons – the elder Ben and the younger Willy – even if Father Loman deserted his wife and children to lead an adventurous life.

The mother is hardly ever referred to. She must nevertheless have had a hard life providing sustenance and comfort for her two sons. When Ben followed in his father’s footsteps by running off for adventure, Mother Loman still had Willy to look after.

Willy, who recalls sitting on “Mamma’s lap” (38), suffered from his father’s absence. The lack of paternal care resulted in his feeling “kind of temporary about (himself)” (40).

Mother Loman’s caring presence is trivialized: “fine specimen of a Lady, Mother” (35) and the “old girl” when reunion with the vanished father is Ben and Willy’s single purpose. Ben starts for Alaska hoping to find his father (37) and Willy elects a father figure through his total devotion to Dave Singleman, another salesman.

Willy has remained so obsessed with the myth of his Father that he entreats Ben to tell Biff and Happy about their grandfather, so they can learn “the kind of stock they spring from” (38). So, in a way, it is as if all the Loman men sprang directly from their father’s side and as if their mother had had no part to play in their birth.

An Edenic myth is implied which seems to preclude, or at least downplay woman’s role in the procreation process.

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Death of a Salesman: Tragedy versus Social Drama photo

Death of a Salesman: Tragedy versus Social Drama

  1. Death of a Salesman : an extended introduction
  2. Family in Death of a Salesman
  3. Death of a Salesman: Tragedy versus Social Drama
  4. Death of a Salesman: the play’s structure, a memory play

Lots of critics have debated the tragic dimension of Death of a Salesman. Two levels have often been considered: the notion of genre, by referring to Aristotle’s Poetics, and the possibility of a new approach to tragedy, that would be concerned with the response of mankind to rapid technological advance.

The generic discussion (from genre) has often borne on an opposition between social drama dealing with the little man as a victim of an oppressive, social and economic system, and tragedy in which the transcendental aspect is emphasized.

Miller himself has reflected on this issue in a seminal essay Tragedy and the Common Man (The New York Times, February 27, 1949). It is clear that Death of a Salesman raises the possibility of a modern tragedy because unlike the absurdist theatre (Ionesco and Beckett), it postulates that ‘life has meaning’.

The question of the tragedy in contradistinction to social drama will be treated along three axes.

Firstly, it can be argued that Death of a Salesman is more than a social document in that it creates a modern myth through a central symbol: salesmanship (Eugene O’Neill: The Iceman Cometh).

Secondly, we may wonder whether or not Loman is invested with a tragic dimension.

Thirdly, is Death of a Salesman a ruthless indictment of American Society, along Marxist or, at least radical (in the American acceptation) lines, or does it go much beyond its social and historical context to bring about tragic catharsis in the audience?

Social testimony versus tragic myth?

The contemporary absence of tragedy

According to Miller, the absence of tragedy in contemporary American drama (1949) can be explained by the fact that man’s motivations are increasingly accounted for in purely psychiatric and sociological terms.

Literature tends to suggest that man’s miseries are born and bred within man’s mind: this is the psychological argument or, that society must be held responsible for man’s distress because of the deterministic laws that govern it – this is the point made by sociologists.

In each case, the possibility of the tragedy is denied because tragedy stems from an individual choice to assess, then to call into question and ultimately to rebel against the order of things.

“The thrust for freedom is equality in tragedy which exalts” (Tragedy and the Common Man, p.5)

If Willy Loman is simply considered as the poor, helpless victim of capitalist big business, then he is deprived of any tragic dimension. If he is merely a cog in the gigantic capitalist wheel that eventually crushes him to death, he is denied a tragic dimension. If he’s driven to madness, he has no tragic potential either.

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Death of a Salesman: the play's structure, a memory play photo

Death of a Salesman: the play’s structure, a memory play

  1. Death of a Salesman : an extended introduction
  2. Family in Death of a Salesman
  3. Death of a Salesman: Tragedy versus Social Drama
  4. Death of a Salesman: the play’s structure, a memory play

If the external plot of Death of a Salesman may be divided into chronologically organised sequences: Act One (Monday evening and night); Act Two (Tuesday), and the Requiem a few days after (Willy’s burial), the same is not true of the internal plot: Willy’s stream of consciousness.

In “the inside of Willy’s head”, past and present are blurred. Memories constantly impinge on present situations and, conversely, the present is put at some distance by the flood of recollections.

The past/present dichotomy is replaced by a non-past; non-present, in which different temporal layers commingle and coalesce. This non-past/non-present is confined to Willy’s inner mind, to Willy’s subjective world.

‘A mobile concurrency of past and present’

(The expression is by Miller, from his introduction to his Collected Plays, p.26)

Miller’s aim in Death of a Salesman is to erase any gap between a remembered past – that would be evoked through words – and a present that would be performed on stage. In Death of a Salesman both past and present are given theatrical representation.

There is no clear-cut boundary between them. Thanks to the expressionistic technique of scrim and curtain, the characters may exist in both the present and the past. For example, Biff and Happy are seen as teenagers and adults successively.

There are no flashbacks in Death of a Salesman. Better than the erroneous term flashback, the phrase double exposure would be more appropriate. In Willy’s mind, past and present exist on the same level, Willy perceives himself both in the present and in the past – which is made up of various strata.

In a way, Willy is schizophrenic; overwork, worry and repressed guilt have caused his mental collapse. In this state of nervous breakdown, past and present are inextricably mingled, time is, as it were, exploded.

In Death of a Salesman, Willy is both the self-remembering I, looking back upon himself, and the remembered I itself, that is to say the salesman as he used to be. Similarly, the same actors play their present and past selves, this is the case not only for Willy’s sons but also for Bernard, who has become a successful lawyer.

The dramatic unities, notably time, have been abolished in the most radical sense, indeed the function of memory entails a multiplicity of temporal levels, a series of different locations (Boston; New York but also the Prairie – through Willy’s father), and finally a loss of any fixed identity.

In a sense, the exploded house, with its transparent walls, its scrims and curtains is an objective correlative (a concrete, practical, tangible image) for an exploding consciousness, in which spatial and temporal fragments get intertwined.

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19th century literary movements : Realism and Naturalism photo

19th Century Literary Movements : Realism and Naturalism

  1. The 18th Century: the Age of Enlightenment
  2. The Gothic and the Fantastic
  3. The 19th Century : Romanticism in Art and Literature
  4. English Romanticism (1798-1832)
  5. 19th Century Literary Movements : Realism and Naturalism
  6. British Civilisation and Literature: 19th and 20th centuries

Introduction

Realism and Naturalism are a reaction against Romanticism (imagination, poetry and prose, as well as the main themes: nature, exoticism, history, and heroes depicted as exceptional individuals) because it was thought to have lost touch with the contemporary.

Three revolutions took place during the 19th century: the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, and the moral revolution.

In Great Britain, the Victorian Era lasted from 1837 to 1901. In the USA, the Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865.

19th century literary movements : Realism and Naturalism photo
Jean-François Millet, Des Glaneuses, 1857.

The industrial revolution

The Industrial Revolution was started by the invention of the steam machine (coal, railways, factories).

All this happened in the cities: the increase of the population led to misery and social problems such as alcoholism, tuberculosis, prostitution… There was a shift from a belief in progress to an increasing pessimism.

The scientific revolution

The Scientific Revolution expanded into the transport revolution, starting by the steam engine:

  • 1830: Manchester-Liverpool railway
  • 1869: Transcontinental railway in the USA
  • Thomas Edison invented the gramophone, the light bulb and the electric chair
  • Pierre and Marie Curie discover radioactivity…

The world was changing extremely fast.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is the origin of a philosophical theory called Positivism. He devised the “law of three stages” : (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical, and (3) the positive.

The theological phase of man was based on whole-hearted belief in all things regarding God. God, Comte says, had reigned supreme over human existence pre-Enlightenment. Humanity’s place in society was governed by its association with the divine presence and with the church.

The theological phase deals with humankind’s accepting the doctrines of the church (or place of worship) rather than relying on its rational powers to explore basic questions about existence.

Comte describes the metaphysical phase of humanity as the time since the Enlightenment, a time steeped in logical rationalism, to the time right after the French Revolution. This second phase states that the universal rights of humanity are most important.

The central idea is that humanity is invested with certain rights that must be respected. In this phase, democracies and dictators rose and fell in attempts to maintain the innate rights of humanity.

The final stage of the trilogy of Comte’s universal law is the scientific, or positive, stage. The central idea of this phase is that individual rights are more important than the rule of any one person. Science is paramount and can give man absolute knowledge and power.

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