Hey guys, it's Leila from Ignite and today I'm talking about my actual all-time favorite text which is Mrs. Dalloway. Now if you are studying the HSC and you're looking at Textual Conversations, this content is explicitly relating to that module. However, if you're just looking for some general contextual points on Virginia Woolf, who is the author of Mrs. Dalloway, stay tuned and you can just overlook the explicit rubric connections I'm making to the HSC students.
To establish my framework for how I'm looking at Mrs. Dalloway today and why I'm even mentioning context if you are studying the module A Textual Conversations, I just want to draw your attention to a key part of the rubric which kind of justifies why I'm even considering the context of Virginia Woolf. The part that's highlighted here it reads that students need to consider the context of the rubric. personal, social, cultural and historical contextual knowledge that they bring to the text which influences their perspective and shapes their own compositions. So your understanding of Virginia Woolf is obviously going to influence what you really take away from Mrs Dalloway. Had she gone into the text blind and not really considered what kind of paradigmatic forces are feeding into her construction of ideas, you wouldn't come to the same full appreciation that you would have being informed of the context.
So I think it just really deepens your understanding of what Virginia Woolf is trying to convey and it also makes us understand more deeply the surrounding circumstances of her text. So there are two main contextual features I'd like to take you through in this video. The first one is the contextual backdrop of World War I which pans from 1914 to 1919. Her text was released in 1925 but she was crafting it around that war period.
And the notions of the post-war context and the ramifications of the war are certainly reflected in the text, particularly in her protagonist, Septimus Warren Smith, who we know is a war veteran. So there's an explicit reference to her context there. And secondly, I'd also like to talk about psychoanalysis, which was a novel idea that came around during this time.
And the reason I'm going through psychoanalysis after World War I... It's because the notion of looking into one's psyche actually helps us unpack some of the ramifications of World War I. Not only in relation to the protagonist Mrs. Dalloway, but again with Septimus Warren Smith, because his trauma having gone to the war actually impacts his psyche, and the way he's represented is also in relation to this circulating notion of psychoanalysis at the time. On a broader and even formal level, The stream of consciousness, which is an aspect of form in Virginia Woolf's text, stay tuned, in another video I'll be going through that aspect of form, but that is also influenced by psychoanalysis. The way that she writes is underpinned by the way the mind was really moving at the time. Don't worry, this is just the intro, I'll be slowing down on each of these points, but I just wanted to foreground where I'm really heading with the video. Okay, so World War I. If we take a step back and consider the implications of war, Obviously the first thing that comes to mind is there are a multiplicity of deaths that occur in this period.
World War One was a particular shock to the psyche of people in Europe and that's because they went into the war in 1914 early in the year and they actually thought it was going to be over before Christmas. Five years later we finally sign off the Treaty of Versailles which marks the end of the war and the war panned over a much longer period of time than was expected. had a huge impact on the home fronts.
Women were taking on roles that they weren't traditionally expected to take. Men were going to war not really knowing what to expect. Many were conscripted and thought they were going on an adventure.
You had young boys, often around the age of 16 to 18, who come back completely emasculated. They're effeminate due to the trauma they have been exposed to during war. So as a starting point, I want you to think about this.
The war was a blow to the psyche. It exposed... Europe and particularly Britain, which is where Virginia Woolf is placed, it exposed them to the trauma of that experience and following on from that, the Europeans and the British around this time, they found it really hard to reintegrate into society following the war. And to be honest, that kind of makes sense. If you think about it, if you're a war veteran and you've come back from the experience of watching your best friend die on the battlefield and you've seen death on such a large scale, It's very hard to reintegrate into society and deal with the mundane futilities of everyday existence because you know that this image of death is foreboding and it's almost impossible to accept everyday life after what you've experienced.
And this notion of post-war trauma and how this infiltrates into society is certainly captured in Virginia Woolf's novel. On one hand you see the character Mrs Dalloway and how she's really quite insecure about the trivialities of her existence. She goes through the beginning of the novel and she's planning this party and she wants to be this perfect hostess and she realizes that this mundanity of her existence as a domestic woman who's obsessed with throwing parties, she sees it as so trivial and that recognition of life as trivial following the backdrop of war is where the context really comes into the text.
When we think about Septimus Warren Smith, the war veteran, you see how he struggles to not only connect with his wife Lucrezia, but also just live within that modern day context following what he's seen at war. He references his friend Evans, who he saw die in the war, and you see him really descend to a point of madness in the text, and eventual suicide. Sorry to break the trajectory of the text if you haven't read it.
But you see him actually succumb to suicide because he can't deal with being institutionalized as a mental man coming back from the trauma of war. Okay, so that's why war is relevant to the text and I've foregrounded a couple of links. If you are quoting from any parts of the text that I have just mentioned, it would obviously be useful to come back to World War One and justify why Wolfe is exploring this idea in that way.
I also should have flagged this earlier, if you are doing the comparative study, Remember that dealing with context is really important in comparing why certain values that cross over between Virginia Woolf Dalloway and Stephen Daldry's The Hours. So for example if you're looking at the notion of mortality and you want to compare it between the texts you want to speak about how World War I impacts mortality being represented in this way in Mrs Dalloway and then link it to mortality or the notion of death in The Hours pursuant to Stephen Daldry's context. That's why we're really bringing in context to the analysis.
Okay. So what I've done here is I've actually shown you a quote which exemplifies this notion of a one feeding into the meaning that's conveyed in the text. I've given you an explicit example here. Let's have a quick read through most of the quotes I give you today from the early stages of the text. So it says here, Septimus Warren Smith, who is the character that reflects Mrs Dalloway, right here is the war veteran, aged about 30, pale-faced, bleak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes, the world has raised its whip.
Where will it descend? Okay, so even if we start off with the characterisation of Septimus, he is emasculated, he's quite an effeminate man. Effeminate means he's not your typified alpha male description.
Even if you're a student studying T.S. Eliot, the conveying of a lot of his personas are also worn down from the war. In fact, there are some congruences between Septimus Warren Smith and a lot of the characters in Eliot's poultry.
Moving on though to my next contextual point. So World War I, that's really framing the historical context, the material facts of the time. Psychoanalysis is an extension of that and this is more a way of thinking.
It's a literary framework of the time period that we can use to actually analyze the implications of the First World War. Now psychoanalysis came out in the early 20th century. It was around 1901 that the real pioneer of this concept, Sigmund Freud, wrote the Interpretation of Dreams, which was the first... look into the human subconscious and really analyze how our subconscious and our past can manifest and come out in the present. So in a nutshell psychoanalysis is the study of the subconscious of the mind and how this subconscious plays out in different ways.
Now the reason this is relevant particularly in the post-war period is because if we think about the trauma of war and notions of PTSD right post-traumatic stress disorder They're directly implicated by the fact that there was a war at the time. However, immediately after the war, we didn't really have developments in clinical psychology. So people who were suffering mental illness weren't really treated in the right way. And that's definitely a feature of the treatment of Septimus in the text, right? He really struggles with being institutionalized.
If you're comparing it also to the hours and the way that Virginia Woolf is portrayed, She really hates her doctors, right? Because they didn't understand the psyche in the way that we do now. And the way that we have come to appreciate modern psychology is actually a reflection of the early foundings that Freud made.
So psychoanalysis is important because it's reflected in the text through the ways that we delve into the subconscious of characters. On one hand, Septimus through the trauma and how that feeds into how he's treated. And Virginia Woolf is critiquing our lack of development in psychology. and really understanding the trauma that Septimus encounters. In the example of Mrs. Dalloway, psychoanalysis comes out in a little bit of a different sense.
When we look at Sigmund Freud's work, he actually unpacks two key suppressed desires that he thinks is within everyone's psyche. And the first one he looks at is actually the suppression of libidinal desire, which is your sexual desire. And he says that everybody has...
a drive in that sense which may be suppressed. And his second one is the mortidinal, right? The death drive or this desire to look into the concept of mortality is something we find fascinating. And as I've framed, that aspect of the death drive is more channeled through Septimus, this feature of psychoanalysis at the time.
But then when we look at Mrs Dalloway as a character... She's more of a reflection of the suppressed sexual desire that Freud explores in his work and if you've read the text you would know she has this very implied sexual attraction to Sally Seton right who's another female character and that's a huge kind of controversy for the time because lesbianism was a very underlying and hidden concept and of course that is something you can then compare to Clarissa in the hours as somebody as a modern-day woman who is embracing her lesbian sexuality. But there are two quotes I want to go through that showcase this element of psychoanalysis in the text and hopefully now you're seeing the nexus between context and content of the text and how they're informing the meaning that is conveyed and how you can down the track compare that to what's going on in the hours.
So my two quotes here. The first one is from Septimus. He says, I will kill myself, an awful thing to say. She must take him away to someone in the park. So the first quote is from Septimus.
quote is Septimus talking about his suicidal thoughts okay so that feeds in not only to World War one being a post-war veteran but also the fact that he has this entrenched desire to kill himself and that links to Freud cycle analysis about the suppressed mortidinal drive. The second one is a very symbolic quote from Mrs. Dalloway and she's talking about this monster within her. I'm going to read through it and then discuss how this links to the suppressed libidinal desire in my way of reading this quote.
It rasped her though to have stirring about in her this brutal monster, to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf encumbered forest, the soul, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self-love, this hatred. Now there have been quite a few interpretations of this moment in the text but it's quite proximal to Mrs Dalloway's desire for Sally Seaton and she often refers back to times in her youth where her and Sally had this like intimate relationship. So the monster that she's referring to within her is actually, in my view, her lesbian desire. So the fact that she feels that it's a monster in her, she's trying to suppress it and control it, is a clear example of that psychoanalytic element of the time.
Freud talks about how we have these desires within us which must be suppressed. And that element of psychoanalysis, right, the mortidinal, the libidinal, I think they're channeled through the two characters. The death one being channeled through Septimus. and the more sexual suppressed desire being shown in Mrs Dalloway's lesbianism. Both of those ideas are then channeled through the hours, okay?
So if you're looking at elements of sexuality, and if you're looking at the elements of mortality in that text, you would then contrast how elements of Doldry's context have allowed the development in these ideas. Okay, but as a starting point, I hope I've foregrounded some of the key issues which create the backdrop to Mrs Dalloway, and I hope I've really started to get you thinking about new ways you can understand the text when we look deeper into context. Please comment if you have some questions and please also subscribe to our channel to keep more content coming your way. But for now guys thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in our next video. pause, share with your friends.
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