V Woolf Mrs Dalloway Flashcards
‘Septimus…congratulated himeslf of feeling very little and very reasonable/. THe War had taught him. It was sublime…’
Madness, the mind
the war
‘[of Septimus] ‘the last shells had missed him…he watched them explode with indifference…[until] the sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel’
Madness - irony of terror that one cannot feel
stasis - uncertainty/problematisation of time, is narrator talking from past or present?
‘Health we must have, and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is Chrsit (a common delusion)…you invoke proportion; order rest in best, rest in solitude’ [Sir Williams]
Madness and treatment of madness
‘Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess’
Madness - shows that the belief of Sir Williams in medicine and proporiton is just as irrational as the ‘delcsion that he is Crhist’ which he condemns - both expressed as theological beliefs, ironic in the modernist period of secularisation
[of Sir Williams[ he states he ‘made England prosper, secluced her lunatics….penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion’
Highlights how authority controls the preporoduction of views, and thus categorises and defines the categories of ‘madness’ and ‘sanity’
also points to modernity as a sense of being controlled - by a force operating on a macro level, concerned not with individuals but the whole of ‘england’, impersonality
Rezia records all Septimus says in writing: ‘just as he spoke it/ Some things were very beautiful; others sheer nonsense. He was always….wanting to add something; listening with his hand up. But she heard nothing’
Madness as an example of extreme reaction to modernism - rather than being subsumed into the macro-level impersonal forces, retreats into himself and a rich self-constructed world which only he can understand
[Septimus, to Rezia] ‘the fallen, he said, they tear to pieces’
War and madness
Sepitmus ‘would invent sotires about Holmes….[who] seemed t stand for something horrible to him. ‘Human nature’, he called him’
literary tradition
Madness and inversion of tradition/accepted knowledge
[Spetimus] ‘the vision…hew ould cry that he was falling down, down into the flames! Actually, shewould look for flames, it was so vivid. But there was nothing….it was a dream, seh woud tell him’
Madness and its proximity to reality - because of its closeness to the human subconscious/consciousness?
[Septimus, internally to himself] “one must be scientific, above all, scientific”
attempt to understand, desire for the certainty which madness has fragmented
Peter Walsh sees hospitals as ‘one of the triumphs of civilisation….efficiency, the organisation, the communal spirit of London’
Irony that illness characterises modernity
Closeness of the city
Peter Walsh: ‘thinking became morbid, sentimental…yet it is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one many do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw’
Loneliness and self-knowledge - is a self constructed alone or in company?
‘always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people, not being known’
Importance of communality - the breakdown of this communal feeling/agreement in modernity?
Clarissa: ‘anything, any explosion, was better than people wandering aimlessly’
need for direction - post-war problem is that, unlike during the war, this direction itself is fragmented
‘she never spoke of England, but this isle of men….was in her blood (without reading Shakespeare), and if ever a woman could have worn the helmet…that woman was Millicent’
cultural heritage?
