 |
| "World War II, June 1944 Normandy" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Tjflex2 |
The first world war as a catastrophic break, and as the event which shaped the twentieth century, overshadows Virginia Woolf's work. In her novels there is often a violent moment of destruction or obliteration. All the lights go out; there is a roaring blackness and a sense of ‘complete annihilation’. (Lee 336)
Two years after Virginia Woolf's marriage, the First World War broke out ending that period of relative security and stability which all those at least, in western world, which grew up before 1914, look back upon with nostalgia. For Virginia it was a horrible and nerve shattering experience. She already has a sensitive soul because of tortured abused childhood. After witnessing the world war, she became weak and sick consequently she suffered from constant fits of depression. But she continued to work hard with her works.
"Her own apprehension of end attraction to death creates the private psychodrama behind these frightening patterns. But personal feelings are translated into history."
(Lee 341)
It can be seen that her books are full of images of war: armies, battles, guns, bombs, air raids, battleship, and shell shock victims, war reports photographs of war victims, and last but not the least voices of dictators. And all these features can be seen in mostly all of her novels like e.g. : Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, The Years, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One's Own, Night and Day etc.
In Jacob's Room (1922) the emergence of a young life is obliterated by the war, which is seen as a grotesque mechanical force superimposed on to terrifying chaos. The battleship ‘ray out’ at sea and young men are sent out to suffocate uncomplainingly in their submarines. Guns are heard (as she heard them in Sussex) sounding like giant women beating carpets. ‘Darkness drops like a knife’ over Europe, the great cities of the world go black, and Jacob dies. (Lee 336)
Virginia's third novel Jacob's Room is set in a pre-England. Although novel begins with the Jacob's childhood and follows him through college at Cambridge and into adulthood. It’s found that Novel sometimes seems to be an autobiographical based on the childhood and death of Woolf's brother Thoby, who also died in world war likewise here in Jacob's Room the character of 'Jacob Flanders' too faced the consequences of world war and at the end he has been killed in it.
"Mrs. Dalloway (1925), her most dramatic mixing of an autobiography and history puts to shame the idea of starting afresh in a new world."
(Novotna)
Virginia's forth novel Mrs. Dalloway represented the after effects of world war. The time frame sets the novel approximately six years after the end of World War I, which shows the transforming paradigm shift across society.
Novel framed in London, particularly in the area of Westminster, where the society is divided between those who have profited from the war and those who like Septimus Smith have been destroyed by it.
"The war lies in dreams, madness, and memory. A grey nurse knitting on a park bench becomes, in the dream of one of the characters, a gigantic symbolic shape looming over the book, ‘the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world’."
(Lee 336-37)
The war was over, except for someone like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor house must go to a cousin; Dr. Lady Boxborough who opened a bazaar they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favorite, killed; but it was over; thank heaven-over. (Woolf 8)
Regardless of the fact that a major world conflict has not taken place before the novel begins. The London's upper fashionable class was stubborn to established social dynamics, and chose to forget what the others feel. This is the reason Woolf integrates the character of Septimus as a way to create contrast between those who intend to move forward, and live life as they knew it, and those who are to unfortunate to be able to do so.
Septimus is a character double of Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway. They never met in a story, but his experiences metaphysically affect Mrs. Dalloway and her question about life, choices, and fate. Septimus a soldier who witnessed the death of his friend Evans, Septimus was suffering from an obvious case of severe past Traumatic stress Disorder (PTSD). Consequently the denouement of ignorance of his condition, there is an overall ability to analyze the extent of his illness. This leads him to end his life violently However, it is the sum of Septimus's observations about, people, life and death what makes up for the meat of the novel; his partial insanity helps him see life the way that it really is.
The importance of war in Mrs. Dalloway serves as the knowledge of inner traumas through the character of Septimus develops philosophically and psychologically. His traumatic condition and emotions as well as the constant reminds of death are juxtaposed to Mrs. Dalloway's questions about the meaning of life. Although when Clarissa Dalloway hears about his death, she finally recognizes the reality of life. there for it can be said that the importance of valuing life the way it comes one way regardless of what one can expect it to be like there was it has been found that war is the agent of change in the main characters of the story.
Whereas in The Waves the seventh novel of Woolf written in the year 1931 is like a novel called Jacobs Room shows an elegy for the death of a young man, although there is no war in the narrative but whole book is filled with the images of war. The machinery of modern life like the escalator in the tube station imitates the force of war.
"Millions descend those stairs in a terrible descent. Great wheels churn inexorably urging them downwards. Millions have died…The people on the moving stairs are like the pinioned and terrible descent of some army of the dead downwards."
(Lee 337)
The whole novel is consisting of the voices deals with the battle against the flood the novel deliberately avoids. Woolf’s next two novels, The Years and Between the Acts both were set in historical moments. Deals with disappointment and terrible life structure of families, a class, a country, It all based on the concepts and experiences of word wars.
Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, To the Lighthouse presents the war in a broader sense and historical perspective as compared to her other novels and it can be seen that war has created an abrupt gap even in the lives of characters. Like it can be seen that the novel to the lighthouse is divided into three sections out of which the first section called 'The Window' is set before the war at the vacation house in the Hebrides of Mr. Ramsay, a philosophy professor, his beautiful wife Mrs. Ramsay and their eight children. Suddenly war enters in the novel In the second section called 'Time passes', in which Woolf represents the Ramsay's house empty for decade as time and weather brings all the havoc on the house as the war progresses in the distant France. It can be seen that this section of the novel 'time passes' records three major deaths i.e.: Mrs. Ramsay dies of unspecified cause, son Andrew dies in the war and daughter Prue who dies as a result of childbirth.
"A shell exploded twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death mercifully was instantaneous".
(Woolf 145)
The above lines gives a hint of the bitter irony with which Woolf often referred to the war in the phrases 'Twenty or Thirty' which shows official disregard for the deaths of these young men, each of whom must have had an inner life as rich as that of a character in one of Woolf's novel, but who in death become simply imprecise statistics using a small word ‘mercifully’ which suggest the way that people at home talks about deaths of those they don’t really know – how could any such death be merciful?
On the other hand third, section called The Lighthouse shows the risk of survivors especially James and Cam Ramsay. Mr. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe to make sense of the losses, which are not directly related to war but are all, associated with the war. This section somewhere shows that Lily Briscoe who was struggling with her painting throughout the novel is somehow able to complete it, which she had somewhere begun before the war, whereas the surviving Ramsay are able to complete the trip to the lighthouse, there again is a symbol of artistic unity (which will be discussed in later theme of symbolism in detail) and of spatial temporal perspective perhaps the one thing in the novel that does not change as a result of the war. As Lily completes her painting with a final line down the centre, perhaps symbolizing the lighthouse, she momentarily sees the Ramsay's the war and the world before the war in her own post impressionist from the perspective. "Yes, she thought laying down in her brush in extreme fatigue I have had my vision". (Woolf 226)
Comments
Post a Comment