Lily Briscoe (To The Lighthouse)

Lily is seen throughout the novel as a the antitheses of Mrs. Ramsay, yet she spends the book attempting to define and portray Mrs. Ramsey through her art. This judgment she is forced to make inspires a sense of juxtaposition regarding the two characters, while ultimately leads to Lily’s artistic struggle. While Lily rejects the conformity of traditional feminist qualities that Mrs. Ramsay has, she also puts them into practice by eluding the diligence she acquired from watching Mrs. Ramsey’s commitment to others. In the last line of the book, Lily says her vision is finished which reflects her sense of completeness, in the sense that she has now become comfortable with her lifestyle choices when compared to those of more traditional women, such as Mrs. Ramsey. Contrarily however, her vision being done could also just be her finishing a painting, ready to move on to the next. Personally, I choose to believe the completion of her painting is a more symbolic metaphor that she has come to terms with herself, almost as if she’s speaking for Virgina Woolf herself. Lily's vision is not simply just a lighthouse, rather its a representation of her choice to be exactly the way she is as a painter. Reaching the lighthouse is a transition of life as it was before, filled with doubt, to the way it will be going into the future, filled with acceptance. I think the last few lines are Lily's final moment of clarity and her ability to feel whole.

Close Reading (To The Lighthouse)

Page 47, 2nd Full Paragraph


To begin, I should probably first explain my reading technique when it comes to Woolf. Unlike most books I’ve read, To The Lighthouse would be lost on me if I read it straight, from cover to cover, for plot summery and understanding. While the plot is intriguing to me as a hopeful psychology major, I find that the plot and interactions between the characters is not as important for the reader (me? Sure…) as is the way Woolf captures the characters. For instances, it would be easy to describe Mr. Ramsay as the traditional, s elf-absorbed, intellectual father yet Woolf creates him as a bizarre man who is always found in these unconventional scenes where he is deep in thought. Anyway, to revert back to my point, I’ve read this book section by section but then I’ve needed to go back to analyze different parts that I’d flagged as possibly important. This technique will be more clear in my close reading of a paragraph that will precede this part, but what I’m trying to say is that I find Virginia Woolf difficult to read, yet once my understanding is complete, its remarkable writing.
The section I choose to do a close reading of the second paragraph on page 47 beginning with “Mr. Banks expected…”. My initial reaction to this paragraph was clear to me, Mr. Banks has a crush on Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe notices it. However, the words “rapture” and “love” were used so many times in that paragraph that thought taking a closer look might be beneficial to my understanding of Mr. Banks, Lily and the causes of her opinion towards Mrs. Ramsay and most importantly, the allure Mrs. Ramsey seems to have. At first I gathered that Mr. Banks was starring at Mrs. Ramsay because she is a beautiful woman and he’s a (dirty and old!) man who is preoccupied with her looks. Such an action is not uncommon, men are always distracted by good looking or just women in general, yet such a shallow action has more than a superficial meaning. Mr. Banks might indeed just be starring to stare, but my intrigue was sparked when Lily was unable to comment back to banks to critize Mrs. Ramsay as she normally would. She was distracted by his “rapture” towards her which then brings the reader into Lily’s perceived notion of love. Lily describes love ass “never attempting to clutch its object” signifying that love is a few element that cannot be controlled and cannot be understood in some instances. This makes perfect sense in her mind as she watches Mr. Banks, a man of 60, fancy a married and younger woman. The fact is, he simply cannot help his love for Mrs. Ramsay and cannot explain why he does love her so. Lily goes on to compare love using mathematicians and their symbols, poets and their phrases and scientists and their solutions. At first I thought this meant that people love what is around them and what their focus is, regarding professions and their focal points. However, now I’ve drawn two important (that’s up for debate I suppose!) points from Lily’s examples. The first point is that Lily uses educational/ intellectual professions and their focal points instead of more conventional jobs. She could have easily compared love to a mechanic and the cars they work on, yet she uses mathematicians, poets and scientists. Education has the purpose of human gain and by comparing the love that educators have for their subjects to the love that people have for one another, Woolf makes the connection of love and human gain. This could mean two things, either love is for the gain of all humans (love = need) or that love is a process of learning. As a silly teenage girl who would admit to being “in love” twice at the tender age of 18, I might venture to say that both are true. Love is a basic need that all humans have while at the same time it is a learning process. I could go on about my thoughts on the evolution of love and Mr. Banks placement on my imaginary timeline, yet my second point regarding Lily’s comparison of love to education (poets, science, etc) has more validity. As we are reminded throughout the book, Lily is a forty-four year old single woman who spends her time painting with no hope of every marrying. Assuming that love and marriage connect (I’m not entirely sure they ALWAYS do, however this is an unnecessary interjection) Lily wouldn’t be the character in the book I would go to for advice on love. That’s precisely what makes this section so interesting. Lily has a commentary on love and the rapture it creates yet she is always the pitied character who has no hope of ever finding love. I found this to be the most meaningful part because Lily should be the one to comment on love. She has not been tainted by a failed or loveless marriage and has no apparent lover’s scorn that would cause her to think ill upon love, rather she sees it for the way it captures even the sanest of people (scientists anyone?) and how the preoccupation it causes is about overall gain. How charming.

Hamlet: Act 1 Scene 3...Literary Findings

Binary Opposites
Polonius  Borrower vs. tender 82
Rich not gaudy 77
Love as an arrangements
Private vs. audience 101-102
Laertes  loves you now, you must fear 17 and 19
His (Hamlet) head vs. heart (Ophelia) on lines 27 and 35


Couplet Polonius  ends lines 47-48 in fear and near to create a couplet



Imagery
Ophelia  “watchmen to my heart” line 50. Ophelia talks about her brother’s warnings to her about her love affair with young Hamlet.
“steep and thorny way to heave” Ophelia is trying to contradict her brother by essentially saying he sleeps around as well (calling out the double standard). This is perhaps a theme Shakespeare trys to bring to attention about the double standard between men and women.

Laertes  “prodigal” is a word uses many times in his speech which seems to be a Biblical allusion of the prodigal son.
Polonius  uses the words “fashion” “money” when talking to his daughter about Hamlet. Both fashion and money are fleeting commodities and perhaps its his way of telling Ophelia that Hamlet’s love is temporary just as money and fashion are. The use of monetary terms shows he treats her as an object rather than daughter…yet he is warning her not to be a commodity to Hamlet.

Claudius vs Ghost Speeches

So after reading and re-reading both of the speeches made by each other characters I've noticed some key differences and and a few similarities. To begin with the differences, the Ghost's speech uses more imeragry and binary opposites to convey his message, while Claudius is a bit more literal. This was most notable to me, a high schooler, because i felt Claudius' tangent could be read once of twice to understand the meaning while the Ghost's lines had more hidden that could be found on my 5th re-read. The tone of Claudius' speech is lighter, and though transparent to the reader who realizes the truth of elder Hamlet's death, it has an element of sinceristy in specific lines which is constantly overturned by conflicting ideas. For example, the lines "That we with wisest sorrow think on him, Together with remembrance of ourselves" are said meaning that together the country mourns for the loss of their dear King, which places Claudius as a humble sucessor. Then the tables are turned quickly when he says "Holding a weak supposal of our worth, Or thinking by our late dear brother's death, Our state to be disjoint and out of frame, Colleaguèd with the dream of his advantage" which essentially says that it the country needs to move on and focus on the present. Due to the conflicting ideas and brashness of Claudius, this speech sets him up to be seen as a mistrusted character.
The Ghost's speech is different from Claudius because it is not as a literal and ideas must be taken at bay after reading it several times. When we worked with this siliolquy as tables in class, my table was given the section below...

" If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damnèd incest.
But howsoever thou pursuest this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once.
The glowworm shows the matin to be near,
And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me. "

We noticed the references to nature as well as the biblical references made using hte words "thorns" and "heaven", both refering to Jesus and God. Additionally, the reference to the "bed" verses the "couch" was a point of interest for us as we considered the importance of a marital bed and the casualness of a couch. These questions of word choice alone prove the intensity of the Ghost's speech and the hidden meaning of his lines. The tone of the Ghost is also must colder and more intense. His words provide images of harshness such as leprecy, tratiousous and seduction. While Chaudius does has refernce to some minutally disgusting things like war, they are not nearly as deliveried with nearly as much conviction as the Ghost's speech.
I realize having seen each of these speechs in movie form may cloud my opinion of each, yet even prior to this class when I read Hamlet on my own, I decided from the first act alone that Claudius was a character I was suppose to hate and the Ghost was a character I was to fear while seeking vengence for. This has led me to believe that the intention and early placement of these speechs was to make the reader beleive and see a certian version of each of the specific characters. But then again...what the hell do I know?

this hasn't been spell checked yet...so ignore that because this computer doesn't let SC work using eBlogger!

Midterm Horrors

To be quite honest, I only started studying for this literature midterm...well when I got home from school today. Not that I don't care about lit/was stressed about it, but my Calc and Italian tests seemed to cover so so much that they took up most of my time. Big mistake! After looking through all the materials online (both google and chia's website) I realized I had way more than I had imagined to learn. However, now that my day is almost over, I'm noticed that I shouldn't have made all those flashcards with the terms on them...because most of them I can recognize on my own. Sure, I may not know that an stressed part of a story that is overly exaggerated is called a hyperbole, but when reading I can pull out that portion of the text as important. Thus, I have has a bit of an epiphany. Literature is not about recognizing the key terms and analyzing why the author said that, instead its more about noticing how the author uses these literary terms to enhance the story.

Don't laugh if you already knew this because I've been raised to memorize. Math, science, social studies and even English...I'm a strict memorizer when it comes to tests. Not to say I'm a robot because I consider myself to be somewhat smart, but usually I'd be up studying for this midterm until midnight..but not this time. Perhaps this will be my grand experiment to see if I can rely on my own sheer intellect to guide me through. Hopefully it works, and if now...well, then I'll feel dumb but at least I'll know memorizing works for me! Maybe I'm being churlish and if all my kindly ignore this soliloquy....

Revising Lit X: Part 2 (The Actual Paper!)

Originally, I sent this to you until Becca convinced me it had to be a blog post. It seems like 1/2 the class has done it on blogs (I'll admit, I really like seeing what other people are writing! [side note, kathryn's is my favorite]), so I'm gonna be safe and do both...and hopefully one will be right.

Disclaimer: This is my draft after finishing my last book (I've technically done four). I'm going to focus on 4 authors (Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Philippa Gregory and JK Rowling) but because I've read Mary Shelly in school and I mildly stalk the works of JK Rowlings, I'm going to pick one more book to be as thorough as possible. Remember this is only my 2nd draft, it focuses on 1 of my two main pillars (which are character development and sense of social focus).


The Lit X!
If men and women are created equal, then shouldn’t there be a female counterpart for every famous man, one with equal talents and brilliance to offer the world? History should house a female Shakespeare and a lady Locke, shouldn’t it? Although history books mention a few women here and there, the sad fact of our world is that women were not given equal chance to develop intellectually and share their ideas until just a few centuries ago. For this reason, the list of infamous male authors and storytellers quadruples the short list of notable female writers. In the United States, the SAT’s were recently revised to allow females a chance to score higher based on the widely agreed upon theory that women are better at writing than men. We know why there are fewer women in the history of literature than men, but a more intriguing question for the world is how do women differ in writing? If women have been socially tagged as better writers, what are their strengths and how have women changed as writers over the years. A study of four authors, two contemporary and two non-contemporary, will be done to explore trends of female authors to cite distinct changes that have taken place in history. Since economic, religious, political, and other cultural occurrences could influence authors, I've chosen to isolate my study to one country. By isolating this comparison to one specific country, a more accurate comparison can be made.
To choose an appropriate country is a difficult undertaking considering cultures of the world differ so vastly that the study of African female authors would be wildly different than a study of Asian female authors. Besides picking different countries, female writers is a huge category ranging from poets to biographers, so I've decided to make it easiest on myself to narrow my focus further to just female narrative writers (novels and short stories). The country that I will choose much have the most abundant amount of narrative female writers from a range of history. History of American female authors is a relatively short history, thus I think focusing on a specific European country would help me to track progress of female authors as well as compare contemporary authors to past authors. After spending a great deal of time at the library looking through lists of female European authors I decided to choose England as my center of attention. England has a long history and was one of the first countries to be lead by a steady stream of women leaders. Surprisingly, there were more female authors to choose from than I had ever imagined including Mary Shelly Wollstonecraft, Bridgit Brophy, Philippa Gregory, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, JK Rowling, Mary Robinson May Sinclair, Anne Jellicoe and a plethora of other women suggested to me by the Westport Public Library librarians. Though many of the names were mentioned for the first time to me, others were old favorites or famous authors I’d heard of over the years.
I decided to begin my journey through the Lit X experience with a book that would be easy to understand in terms of literary style, but would offer me my first glimpse into the mind of a contemporary British female author. Philippa Gregory seemed to be a good choice; having read The Other Boleyn Girl a year ago I knew her style of historical fiction was well researched and her characters were developed in a way that made them seem relatable. I choose The Virgin’s Lover because it explores a powerful woman in history and her control and lack of control over males in her life and as an additional bonus it gave my insight into an era of England where a women lead the country. The plot follows Queen Elizabeth I’s reign over England as an unmarried woman in love with a married friend of hers, Robert Dudley.
The novel explores both Dudley's wife’s opinion of the ordeal as an insignificant lady of the time and the power struggle Elizabeth has as a female leader of a influential country. Though the plot is intriguing alone, while reading the novel I was more apt to notice the subtle phrases and descriptions that Gregory uses to describe characters making character development my focus. The beginning of the novel focused on Dudley’s wife’s view of her husband’s alleged affair and his need to be away at court to pursue at better political career. The most interesting aspect of the book was the paradox between Elizabeth and Amy. Both women were in love with the same man, yet Elizabeth had more control over Robert due to her political position as Queen despite the fact that Amy was his lawful wife. Gregory thus depicts Amy as a wishful thinker by idealizing her thoughts to say things such as “How could he leave me to struggle here and dash off to her? How could it start so well, in such wealth and glory as it did, and end in hardship and loneliness like this?” (3). While deeply hurt by her husband’s lack of fidelity in the beginning, Amy felt pity for Robert in the end and reasoned that his actions were due to his failing political efforts which he masked with physical love for the most powerful person in England, whom happened to be a woman.
Though only a small focus of the book, Amy is an unusual character in the sense that she is madly in love with her husband but as soon as he proves unfaithful to her, he begins to lose her a bit more each passing day. As the story progresses, Amy creates reasons to pity and belittle Dudley thus protecting her own sense of pride.
The conclusion this book lead me to was that this contemporary female author created a female character that acts by today’s standards even though she was suppose to live nearly 500 years ago. A contemporary woman would act as Amy did and fight back from infidelity by either asserting herself in anger or leaving the man in question. While I cannot generalize like that, I know that women today are more able to take action against cheating husbands than in Elizabethan England because modern society offers a safer haven for single women than harsh England. Gregory made Amy have modern thoughts like feeling sorry for her cheating husband and justifying it as a way to further his political standing, which leads me to think that female authors, write from experience without even realizing it. The Virgin’s Lover is a beautiful composed historical fiction that has accurate information down to the nitty gritty, but there are still modern moments that peak through in the character development.
To confirm my basic theory, I decided to read a non-contemporary author. I picked Jane Austen and read Pride and Prejudice. Contrary to Gregory, Jane Austen creates characters not compatible to the female experience of her era. One of Austen's most memorable characters is Elizabeth and although she is polite and proper, she is different from the typical women from Austen's era in the sense that she is aware she needs a man to support her but rejects a handsome man interested in her. A critic of Austen's, Marvin Mudrick, dissects Elizabeth by saying "her own pride is in her freedom, to observe, to analyze, to choose..." (xiv), proving Elizabeth's pride was a source of freedom for her. This source aids Elizabeth in her unique thought process that strays from women's roles of her time. Elizabeth acts as an independent, intelligent young woman who is quite willing to stand up for herself within a societal setting that creates barriers against her. Society demands a good marriage as Elizabeth's only hope for personal growth, while Elizabeth feels her worth souled not be dependant upon a husband status. Mudrick speculates that "Elizabeth comes closest to speaking for Austen herself" (xv) than characters of other Austen's works., which in my opinion would suggest again that character development is dependant upon the authors opinion and life experiences as a women.
Though Elizabeth is not compatible to Austen's era as Amy Dudley is compatible to Gregory's era, Elizabeth is similar to Jane Austen as an individual. Jane Austen, herself, was not compatible to other women and their standards of her era. She choose never to marry, lived with her parents into adulthood and choose to spend her life writing. Though from different eras, Gregory and Austen find common ground as female authors, who use their life experience to shape the actions of their characters.
Perhaps this suggests that the female experience has a subconscious impact on female authors. The female experience is by my standards are aspects of life that are unique to females that bond women of the world together.


Next Step!?
I promise I know where I'm going with this! My next revision (which is actually almost done) will be posted/sent sometime next week hopefully. My next draft continues with sense of social focus and I'm comparing two "sci-fi"ish (pretend its w word just this once) books, Frankenstien and Harry Potter. What I've decided to do is to look at the messages of both these books and how they relate/don't relate to societal expectations and how that is influence by female authors and. Also, I define the female experience, in care you were worried! I hope this doesn't sound too far off and confusing, I swear it all ties together! Happy New Year!