Hebdomadal 5: Diving into Dalloway (Updated 3/2)

A quick warning: I probably won't be getting your response to this hebdomadal back to you at all speedily, what with your first essays and midterms on my plate. Please be patient with me...

Topic 1: The Crisis of Intimacy

Prof. Wolfe has mentioned twice, now, that modernity is marked by a "crisis of intimacy." What does the "crisis of intimacy" mean psychologically to characters in Modernist fiction? Pick apart a paragraph from a dialogue between Peter and Clarissa (e.g. pp. 40 to 48, but really any paragraph in which one of them thinks about the other will work): how does this paragraph help reveal what the crisis of intimacy feels like to those suffering it?

You might think specifically about the ways Mrs Dalloway manifests the crisis of intimacy as a problem of reconciling theoretical and practical responses to the Freudian problems Prof. Wolfe has been raising this week.

Topic 1½: Failures of Communication, Crises of Intimacy

You might consider this crisis of intimacy in terms of the failures of communication we studied last week in our reading of In Our Time. Connect one of Hemingway's failed love stories ("The End of Something" or "The Cat in the Rain" or "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot") to the Peter-Clarissa story. How is the communication between Hemingway's characters different from the communication between Woolf's characters? How does Hemingway depict the failure of intimacy? How does Woolf? What are the important differences in the two authors' discussions of communication and intimacy?

You might, alternatively, look at Richard's meditation on loving his wife (beginning on p. 115): how does he simplify or nuance problems of communication in this sequence?

Topic 2: Symbols, Narration, and Realism

Much of Mrs Dalloway is riddled with symbolism, often overt symbolism which would seem to undermine the apparent realism of the text. Pick a paragraph that foregrounds symbolic meaning (e.g. the paragraph running from pp. 33-4, beginning "Sally's power was amazing...") and, working closely with that paragraph, address this question: In what ways, and why, is Woolf intermixing realistic stories with poetic invention? You might particularly consider the different positions the narrator takes in the passage you analyze.

Here's one way of approaching this question: Sir William Bradshaw remarks that one of Septimus's symptoms is a propensity to "attach[] meanings to words of a symbolical kind" (96). What is the particular danger in thus "attaching meanings"? What does it mean that Woolf, through Bradshaw, seems to be associating our reading practice -- in which we very much attach meanings to words of a symbolical kind -- to severe mental illness?