Ann Levine’s Take on “The Legacy”—Critical Critique #12

Anne Levine begins her essay in giving the reader an example of how she taught Virginia Woolf’s short story “The Legacy”; she was a high school teacher.  She divided her class up into two sections and told one group to sympathize with Gilbert and argue that Angela was the villain; the other group was to argue the reverse.  Levine tells us that she thought Woolf’s writings an excellent example of how there can be different interpretations from readings.  She reminds us that Woolf herself stated that “our task as readers is not to look simply for symmetrically arranged gig-lamps” (74).  The meaning and significance isn’t all laid out for you the reader; we must search for the meaning.  Of course, everyone brings their own identity to interpreting readings; therefore, people will interpret readings to their own perspective. 

Levine helps us to realize her interpretation, which I believe is more in line with what Woolf would have intended.  Gilbert represents the Victorian, domineering patriarchal husband that Woolf rebelled against.  Levine puzzles out the meaning of “The Legacy” by using quotes from A Room of One’s Own.  Angela is an excellent mirror for enlarging and reflecting her husband’s humongous ego, but yet his mirror of Angela only reflects a woman whose day exists of little trifles, low intelligence, and childlike behaviour. 

Before she died she wouldn’t allow him to read her diary, but after her death, he was free to read them.  The part of herself that she kept from him, she allowed him to see after her death.  Did she hope to educate him?  Levine relates other interpretations by different scholars, and here is one that I found to be very pertinent:  “The crux of the tale is the husband’s realization that his wife—the one person he supposedly knows through and through, a woman he thinks belongs to him—is capable of a life . . . that he cannot share” (Kiely 88). 

I haven’t read the short story yet, but this article was so straightforward that I believe it will be helpful in assisting me to understand the story.  With that said, I must admit that in my head while began I reading this, I was shouting, “Woolf wouldn’t make Angela the demon!  I know that one school of thought is that a reader shouldn’t bring the writer into the reading.  But how can you not in a Woolf story?”   Of course as I continued reading, I saw that Levine was giving this a more feminist reading.

And one last thought, I kept thinking of Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House while I read this.

Work Cited:

Kiely, Robert.  Beyond Egotism:  The Fiction of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence.  Cambridge:   Harvard University Press, 1980.  (her citation)

Levine, Ann.  "Virginia Woolf's 'The Legacy.'"  The English Journal 75.2 (1986):  74-78.  Web.  6 November 2010.

Mr. Carmichael will be playing the part of Proteus in this paper....#11

I first began reading Jean Elliott’s article “The Protean Image:  The Role of Mr. Carmichael in To the Lighthouse” with a sense of incredulity.  Basing her argument mainly from the last scene where Lily Briscoe works through her emotions and tries to finish her painting while Augustus Carmichael basks in the sun dozing, she claims that she can prove that Carmichael symbolically represents the Greek god Proteus.  He was the god of prophecy and who once captured, would answer questions; however, he disliked answering questions so he would change shapes.  If one holds him tight until Proteus tires of his ruse of shape changer, he will answer your questions.  I agreed with the ocean god motif, but I couldn’t quite agree with the shape changing; however, Elliot supports her argument and is convincing. 

The shape changing is explained with the phrases “cat eyes,” “his paws,” “padding softly,” and “like some sea monster” (294).  And Lily does indeed question him while he is captured by sleep as he lies near her while she paints.  In further proving her point, Elliot points out that Carmichael never answers one of Mrs. Ramsay’s questions.  The following quote she uses from Dryden’s translation of the Proteus tale illuminates her argument:  “But first the wily Wizard must be caught, / For unconstrain’d he nothing tells for naught: / Nor is with Pray’rs, or Bribes, or Flatt,ry bought” (11.571-573).  Another godlike quality is that Lily believes he reads her mind in that last scene. 

The other aspect of her paper that I found pertinent (also because I had already had the thought, but she gave me the phrases that support the hypothesis) was that Mr. Carmichael adds a stable element to the story.  Both Lily and Mrs. Ramsay comment that Mr. Carmichael is the same.  Of course, this is contradictive to the argument that he is Proteus. 

Elliot convinced me that Carmichael could be representative of Proteus, and she also believes that he was based off of Leslie Stephen’s old friend Professor Wolstenholme.  She gave me insight to the character of Augustus Carmichael.  She does make one comment that she never explained; I am supposing that her readers would know why it was significant without having to explain it.  She comments that the name Augustus is pertinent to the writings of Virgil which leads me to believe that a mythology class should be a requirement for English majors.    

Works Cited:

Elliott, Jean.  "The Protean Image:  The Role of Mr. Carmichael in To the Lighthouse."  Studies in the Novel 12.4 (1980):  359-368.  Web.

Woolf, Virginia.  To the Lighthouse.  1927.  Ed. Mark Hussey.  Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, Inc., 2005.  Print.

Let the Sun Shine In... CR #10

Finally!  I can understand and assimilate a critical essay on Virginia Woolf.  I am referring to Jeanne-Marie Zeck’s article “’Shining in the Dark’:  Jinny’s Reign as Sun Goddess.”  Zeck wrote this article to argue her point that Jinny is at the very least as important as the other characters, if not more important.  After reading her essay, Jinny arises as the most important character.  I haven’t finished the book yet, so I still keep the right to change my opinion, but Zeck lays out her argument in a logical and methodical way. 

She begins her article by giving the reader some other critics’ opinions of Jinny; promiscuous, self-indulgent, one-dimensional, unimportant.    Historically speaking, women who enjoy sex and seek it eagerly have been tagged with many a derogatory term.  Ironically, in the margins as I read this article I wrote, “Virginia Woolf was a flirt, but I don’t believe she enjoyed sex.  Maybe these characters – or the women – all personify an aspect of Woolf’s own character.  Jinny has the sexuality that Woolf may have wanted, or at least a bit more of.”  Why is that ironic?   It’s ironic because in one of her endnotes, Zeck makes a similar statement. 

Returning back to the topic of this blog, Zeck purpose in this essay is to assert that Jinny is the Sun Goddess, and Zeck tries to wrangle Jinny out of her usual classification. In that Jinny connects with other people and “relishes communion with others” (126).  I just realized by using the word “communion” Zeck brings forth the idea of gods and worship.  She contends that Woolf consistently uses sun imagery to describe Jinny and also uses sun colors when describing her.  When Jinny attends a party, she always searching for the gilt chair so that she can “both illuminate others and be admired by them” (127).  Not all want to be illuminated however.  Rhoda yearns for darkness, and illumination reveals Susan’s shabby dress.

Zeck believes that by Woolf putting Jinny on the throne as the sun goddess, she has aligned Jinny with a more powerful position.  Women are usually associated with the moon.  The most interesting part of this article for me was that by elevating Jinny to the status of a sun goddess, Woolf also elevates woman to a maternal god (129). 

Jinny lives in the moment, and when Percival dies, Bernard thinks of suicide.  It’s Jinny who teaches him how to continue, to move past death and to live in the moment.  Woolf has tied Jinny and Bernard together also in that each is referenced with a motif of circles; they are a union. 

And I’ll close this with my favorite line from this essay:  "The answer, Woolf suggests, is to replace the sun god with the sun goddess who illuminates a world without illusions, a world made up of drop after drop of heavy, delicate but substantial moments"(130).  --- moments of being ---

Work cited:

Zeck, Jeanne-Marie.  “’Shining in the Dark’:  Jinny’s Reign as Sun Goddess.”  Virginia Woolf:  Emerging Perspectives.  Selected Papers from the 3^rd Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf.  Eds. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow.  Pace Up, 1994. pp. 126-131. PDF.

Another Critical Reading for TTL, no. 9

In his article “The Rhythm of Creativity in To the Lighthouse,” J. Hillis Miller makes some fairly far-fetched conclusions.  From the title and from the first paragraphs, the reader knows that Miller addresses the rhythmic creativity of Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, and Augustus Carmichael.  He reminds us that Virginia Woolf writes with a rhythm; she creates “a rhythmical groundswell which is comforting and sustaining” (168).  He claims that four characters display creativity:  Mrs. Ramsay with her dinner-party, Lily Briscoe with her painting, Augustus Carmichael with his poetry, and Mr. Ramsay with reciting poetry.  And here I have do argue that simply reciting poetry loudly and obtrusively is not creative but attention grabbing.  He then describes the nature of Mr. Carmichael’s creativeness a little more fully, but oddly considers that the novel presents it obscurely (171).  Odd, as I see it as being definitively stated because he was acknowledged later in the novel as an accomplished and published poet.  The family and the readers might see Mr. Carmichael’s character as being obscure, but it’s a pretty clear-cut case on the topic of his creativity. 

Miller next addresses the question of who is the narrator.  His description of the narrator reminds me of a spirit that invades a body and then has complete knowledge of the one whom it possesses, but at the time of possession, only knows what the character knows about the other people.  He uses several different terms for this type of narrator:  “indirect discourse, erlebte rede, or style indirect libre,” stating that each includes an essence of the type of narrator Woolf employed (no pun intended) for this novel.  He describes how the reader learns nothing of the narrator, but in my opinion, knowing the narrator would detract from the tone of the story.  He also explains how Woolf’s narrator in To the Lighthouse is vastly different from the omniscient narrator of the Victorian writing style.  I see it as Woolf’s narrator pin-pointing onto one character, or perhaps, focusing in like a microscope would be a better analogy because as Miller states the narrator occupies the character “from within, down to every crevice” (175). 

Miller then puts his microscope on Augustus Carmichael.  He seems to equate Carmichael with the narrator; he surmises that from these two quotes:  Carmichael “give(s) no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion whatsoever,” and Mr. Carmichael cannot respond to Mrs. Ramsay because he was “sunk … a grey-green somnolence which embraced them all … in a vast and benevolent lethargy of well-wishing” (TTL 19), (178).  That is not the description of a narrator who invades and searches into every crevice of the character’s soul; that’s a description of someone on a drug-induced high.  Perhaps that is why the narrator cannot get into Carmichael’s mind; he’s in a constant drug fog.  If the narrator tries to invade his person, she/he/it gets a contact high and starts reciting poetry with Carmichael.  Although I think that I made a funny assessment, I believe it to actually be more reasonable than Miller’s.   I do agree with him when he states that the narrator depends on the minds of the characters for its existence, but then again that’s a bit like saying that the river is dependent on water for its existence.

Miller moves onto discussing the “trope of prosopopoeia” which basically means the personification of the house in the “Time Passes” chapter.   He also delves a little bit into philosophy in that he touches on the conversation between Andrew and Lily about whether or not the chair exists when they aren’t there (unfortunately dust is proof that things exist when “we” aren’t there).   Finally, he closes out his article in discussing the differences between writing like a woman or riding like a man. 

I thought his article made some good arguments and at times went off the reservation.  There were instances where it became another one of those articles that made me question my intelligence.  I read this mainly to hunt for information on Augustus Carmichael; Miller did make me realize why we may not get much information on Carmichael – the invasive narrator cannot penetrate the fogged mind of the opium addict; however, that’s not his opinion.  Also, he seemed to veer off of what I thought his topic to be – Lily and Augustus’s creativity. 

Works Cited:
Miller, J. Hillis.  “Mr. Carmichael and Lily Briscoe; The Rhythm of Creativity in To the Lighthouse.”  Modernism Reconsidered.  Ed. Robert Kiely.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1983.  Print.

Woolf, Virginia.  To the Lighthouse.  1927.  (They didn’t give me the page of citations, so I don’t know which version Hillis used.) 

My Impressions of "The Waves" by Viriginia Woolf

North York Moors National Park

Virginia Woolf wrote The Waves after her two very successful modernist novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, but this novel ventures further into the new found land of modern writing.  Her experiment into the stream-of-consciousness succeeded with the preceding novels, that she extended the experiment into trying to not even have characters.  In some ways she did succeed.  I had a difficult time in keeping characters straight, especially with the men.  I then wondered if she purposefully wrote the men to be more generic, but then I remembered Neville is a homosexual, Louis is an Aussie, and then Bernard becomes the typical family man.  Then again, I would stop and wonder as I was reading, "Is this the gay one, or is it the other."  Then I realized that I could be bringing too much of myself into the reading; being a woman I would of course relate to the women more than to the men.  I too remember my younger days when I felt like the sun shone on me, or the exact opposite when I had such little confidence or self-worth, I wondered if i really existed.  At times I felt like Jinny and others just like Rhoda.  So I could relate to them.  And Susan, what about her?

Like Susan, I feel it sometimes, that hard tumorous knot in my side.  That seed that they planted oh-so-many years ago that has grown into a hard-shelled mass.  Susan has it.  The knot that "they" have created by making you think "their" way, dress like "they" dress, act like "them," color inside the lines, drive "this" car, live in a house size of an aircraft carrier.  The knot that is the cancer created from them making "you" conform.  Driving into work this morning with my windows down letting the air "style" my hair, I saw others sealed into their cans on wheels breathing the closed-in air of manufactured vehicles.  Susan needs a walk on the moors, her squirrels, her doves, and her father to clean this cancer from her body.  At the going away dinner for Percival, she dresses shabbily.  She fits in better than Rhoda, but she can’t adjust to the city and fashion.

And just like Susan, I too love and hate.  Just minutes ago, I hated, and hated, and hated one more time for shits and giggles.  I hated that those people were talking so loudly as I was trying to read a critical article; I hated that I forgot to bring my Wheat Thins, but most of all I hate, from the tips of my hair down to the bottom of my toes, Apple computers.  Steve Jobs is the anti-Christ.  Last night, I loved the strong winds trying to push me about, and I loved seeing the leaves dance on the road as I was coming home.  I loved coming into my home where my heart resides.  My whole body sighs with relief when I get out of my car and come home.  I felt just as Susan did when she arrived home.  Home cures us.

Again like Susan, I had all these ideas of how my life would be. Although, I never had the maternal instincts she did.  When the book passes mid-day and all the characters are past their primes, Susan gives the impression that her life didn't quite go as she planned; not that she really had any plans.  It seems as if she is a bit disillusioned and settles for her current way of life.  She no longer speaks of country living as passionately as she once did.  Life does tend to bring reality to one's plans and youthful ideals.

But what is the book about overall?  In a different venue, Woolf brings reality to us.  Just as her novel uses the time of day and the position of the sun to parallel the life span of a group of characters, she uses this story to relate reality.  We all have plans of what we want to do in youth; dreams that sometimes come to fruition and sometimes not.  Death knocks on doors; sometimes he’s invited, and other times he shows up unannounced and unexpected.  Other times, we realize that what we wanted wasn’t as great as we expected it to be.  I think this happened to Susan.  A couple of statements in the last chapter assure the reader of this:  Susan says to Bernard, "My ruined life, my wasted life"; she had loved Bernard, and Percival loved her.  Now, she completely admits that her life wasn't what she wanted it to be (168).  Later (I think at a dinner party), she says, "Still I gape ... like a young bird, unsatisfied, for something that has escaped me" (171).  In thinking of Susan some lyrics to a John Lennon song pop in my head, "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."  It's what she thought she wanted, but still something escaped, the essence of her true desire.  Youth says, "I want this, I'm going to be that, My life is going to be wonderful!"  Then age and reality catch up, and then you wonder, "This is what the fuck I got out of bed for?"

And I keep forgetting to mention this.  Drew said that she thought the character's were each representative of some aspect of Woolf's personality.  I had a similar thought.  At one point it dawned on me (maybe we've mentioned this in class, I hope not as I sure would like to seem astute) that Rhoda represents the hurt side of Woolf.  The piece that was tainted by George and Gerald's touch.  The bit that always wants to hide for fear "it's" still out there wanting to hurt you.  "It" that thing that is more powerful than you, that you can't escape.  It's why she tried to hide from sight; why she had no face. 

Anyway, this REALLY is my second to the last thought -- the woman who writes assiduously is Woolf.  I hope my epiphanies aren't echoes from lecture; I now see why you want the blogs before class discussion.

And with my last comment, I have this to say about Percival.  He’s very similar to Augustus Carmichael.  The strange narration style never visits Percival; we only see him through the eye-thoughts of the others.  We are never allowed to invade Percival’s mind.  Perhaps his thoughts were dull because I envisioned him as what we now refer to as “a jock,” all muscle, good looks, good connections, but undeserving except by birth.  Would Carmichael’s thoughts be any more interesting?   --- Okay, I should save all that and the rest of what I was about to type for my paper; therefore, end here I shall!

Work Cited:
Lennon, John.  "Beautiful Boy."  memory.

Woolf, Virginia.  The Waves.  1931.  Ed. Mark Hussey.  Orlando, Florida:  2006.  Print.

Digging up the True Dirt on Mr. Carmichael (CR# 8)



Will the real Mr. Augustus Carmichael / Joseph Wolstenholme please stand up?

Ellen Tremper begins her critical article stating that Virginia Woolf, just like her character Clarissa from Mrs. Dalloway, enjoyed reading memoirs, but in about the third paragraph the reader discovers what Tremper’s argument really is.  In 1987 John Ferguson wrote an article for the Journal of Modern Literature arguing that Augustus Carmichael was modeled after Thomas De Quincey.  Woolf wrote an essay on his autobiography titled “De Quincey’s Autobiography,” so she does know the man.   (It can be found in The Common Reader:  Second Series.)   Tremper claims that the person Carmichael was modeled after was a man who stayed at Talland House with the family to get away from his wife.  I decided to make a chart of the similarities of the characters, so perhaps you, dear reader, can have a stab at deducing.

	Loved Thoby/Andrew	Math Man	Size	Bad Marriage	Opium Habit
Augustus Carmichael	Yes	Yes	Capacious	Yes	Oh yes
Mr. Wolstenholme	perhaps, gave him a gold crown	Yes	Fat cheeks	Yes	No, just grumpy read below
Thomas De Quincey	Did he even know him?	No	Skinny as a rail filed to a needle's width	Well, married beneath his status but loved her.	Yes

In making a simple chart, we find that Mr. Wolstenholme is the clear winner with De Quincey and Carmichael only having the opium use in common.  If by winning you mean a reclusive, opium using, portly poet; then yes, he is the winner.  Tremper does not use a simple chart to argue her point; she employs lines from the holograph manuscript of the novel.  Ferguson uses the opium and marriage as the strongest arguments; however, De Quincey introduced his wife to the Wordsworths who were devastated to hear of her death (165).  Now, if he was ashamed of her, would he have introduced to her to the Wordsworths?

I just bumbled onto something in the web.  As you know, I like to have an image that represents my blog in some way, so I googled Augustus Wolstenholme in images.  Amazingly, I actually found one, but there was also information.  Tremper thought that the real “Woolly One” was not an opium user, but read on:

"Leslie Stephen, the father of the author Virginia Woolf, studied mathematics at Cambridge and held a fellowship at Cambridge from 1854 till 1864. During that period he became friends with Wolstenholme. Several years after Wolstenholme's death, Stephen wrote down details of his own life for his children and in these he refers to Wolstenholme (Conner, Fergusion):-

I think especially of poor old Wolstenholme, called 'the woolly' by you irreverent children, a man whom I had first known as a brilliant mathematician at Cambridge, whose Bohemian tastes and heterodox opinions had made a Cambridge career inadvisable, who tried to become a hermit at Wastdale. He had emerged, married an uncongenial and rather vulgar Swiss girl, and obtained a professorship at Cooper's Hill. His four sons were badly brought up: he was despondent and dissatisfied and consoled himself with mathematics and opium. I liked him or rather was very fond of him, partly from old association and partly because feeble and faulty as he was, he was thoroughly amiable and clung to my friendship pathetically. His friends were few and his home life wretched. ... [We] had him stay every summer with us in the country. There at least he could be without his wife (Gow)." (I emphasized "opium.")

(I am rather excited that I further proved Wolstenholme’s likeness to Carmichael.  Okay, back to our regularly scheduled blogging.)

The other aspect of Ferguson’s article that Tremper takes umbrage at is that he also equates Woolf to Carmichael and De Quincey.  He believes that the opium use of the two men is the same as Woolf’s “inner ocean of depression” (169).  I believe anyone stating that her illness had no effect on her writing would be remiss, because any aspect of the whole as some effect on a person’s life, job, and creativity.  Tremper uses the argument that Woolf used her past to help construct characters in her creations, but that her bouts with mental illness do not equate to the same a De Quincey and Carmichael’s voluntary use of opium.

All-in-all, Tremper makes an attempt to disclaim Fergurson's arguments.  I think she proved her argument well, even without my assist. 

Works Cited:

Gow, R. "Joseph Wolstenholme, Leslie Stephen and 'To the Lighthouse.'" Irish Math. Soc. 34 (1995), 40-46.  (This was cited from O'Connor and Robertson below.  I didn't know how to cite a citation within a webpage.)

O'Connor, J.J.  and E. F. Robertson.  “Joseph Wolstenholme Biography.”  The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive.  24 October 2010.  Web.   June 1998.

Tremper, Ellen.  “’The Earth of our Earliest Life’:  Mr. Carmichael in To the Lighthouse.”  Journal of Modern Literature, XIX, I, Summer, 1994.  pp. 163-171.  Print.

Testing the waters with short stories (CR #7)

We’ve all heard the line, “She gets me,” but how is that pertinent in reading a critical article?  After reading one critical article recently, I had doubts that I understood the English language; but with Teresa Prudente’s paper on Virginia Woolf’s use of short stories, “’To Slip Easily From One Thing To Another’: Experimentalism And Perceptions in Woolf’s Short Stories,” I get her; she’s talking my language.  Prudente asserts that Woolf uses the medium of the short story to test the waters, or experiment, with her modernist style of writing.  She uses an article by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” extensively to assist her in defining the short story genre, and of course, she uses Virginia Woolf’s own words.

Prudente poses that perhaps the most important aspect of Woolf’s experimentation of using the short story is with using the time aspect, delving into the mind, and letting go of concrete.  Woolf tries to “convey the essence of these moments,” the moments of being (3).  Prudente uses “The Mark on the Wall” as her first example of how Woolf uses the consciousness to tell a story through a “series of meditations” (3).  She insists that Woolf does not portray the mind as fixed, but dynamic, changing, and contrasting.  Prudente also discusses the spiraling progression in the story; how the narrator or main character keeps returning to the mark on the wall.  Most importantly though, she believes that “The Mark on the Wall: reveals two major Woolfian aspects:  “the close connection and interactions between external and internal reality” and “the treatment of narrative time not only as depicting, but rather as reproducing the time of consciousness” (4).  Woolf succeeds in doing this in a meditative short story.  It is in the abstract, the thought, the mind in which Woolf is testing the waters.  Prudente states that Woolf confronts the dualities of existence: the real versus the unreal, the visible versus the invisible. 

Prudente then moves on to how Woolf describes character.  For an example, she employs my favorite Woolf essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”  She believes that Woolf thinks the self can never be fully defined and is unlimited.  Referring back to how Mr. Bennett describes his characters, he describes their house, clothes, job, etc. but ignores the mind; “human beings escape rigid definition” (6).  We should explore human nature, the mind, not the fabric.

Next Prudente deals with the experimentation with narrator.  She tells us that Woolf explored the “I-centered narration” in her short stories; whereas the novels usually employ the use of third-person narration (8).  The voice in the short-stories is abstract and reveals one of Woolf’s innovations; she does not give us reality.  The reader does not get bricks and mortar but play-doh, something malleable.  Prudente relates to us that Woolf wants to express the ordinary and the flights of the mind.  She wants to “reproduce (the) human experience fully,” and to do so, we must include the corporeal and the metaphysical.  And then how all that relates to each other in time.

Work cited:

Prudente, Teresa.  "'To Slip Easily From One Thing To Another':  Experimentalism And Perception in Woolf's Short Stories."  Journal of the Short Story in English 50 Spring 2008: 2-10.  Web.