Influence

Hey guys! I thought I would post my intro, conclusion, and one of the stories I wrote about, which would give everyone a deeper understanding of what I wrote about. I related her other short stories to her life, emotions, and historical time period, all of which affected her work.

Virginia Woolf will forever be remembered and revered as a brilliant writer who achieved great success in spite of a world full of pain and suffering, and a tumultuous personal life. Woolf’s personal life had a great impact on her writings, starting from childhood and her experiences throughout the rest of her life. World War I reared its ugly head and the horror of the war greatly affected Woolf’s already delicate mental state. She lived through the Great Depression where she saw more hardships. Virginia Woolf’s works are multidimensional in that they are all affected by her personal biography, as well as the historical events that surrounded her writing, namely World War I. This is evident in examining selected short stories, “An Unwritten Novel,” “Sympathy,” “The New Dress,” and “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” Through exploring these short stories, one can clearly pick up on the influences from Woolf’s personal life and feelings, and the atmosphere of fear and disruption created by the war.
Mrs. Dalloway is one of Virginia Woolf’s most iconic women. People from all walks of life know Clarissa due to Woolf’s most famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway. What some people might not be as aware of is that Mrs. Dalloway is featured in many of Woolf’s short stories from around the time when she was writing and revising her novel. One of the reasons Clarissa endures as a character is because of her entirely human characteristics. Julia Briggs says, “Clarissa is humanly inconsistent: at once cold and self-absorbed; yet also warm and full of sympathy” (137). The story follows Clarissa as she walks in London to purchase a pair of gloves. On her way to the shop, she runs into various associates who frequent her parties. As she walks along, she enjoys making comments in her head about the different people she encounters, “the fat lady had taken every sort of trouble, but diamonds! Orchids! At this hour of the morning!”(Woolf 155). Clarissa is clearly a woman of the time. She thinks of menstruation as a negative occurrence, and asks, “How then could women sit in Parliament? How could they do things with men? For there is this extraordinarily deep instinct, something inside one; you can’t get over it; it’s no use trying” (153). Clarissa feels that because of the bodily differences, that women and men simply cannot participate in the same activities. It is clear that Mrs. Dalloway is a strong, intelligent woman; she “would have given anything to be like that…talking politics, like a man” (156). But she knows she will never receive that opportunity. This is a combination of Woolf voicing frustration at the social viewpoint of women, and her “impatience with conventions that prevented women writers from writing openly about their own bodies” (Briggs 139).
The encounter between the shop girl and Mrs. Dalloway goes fairly smoothly, though it takes a long time, and finally she gets her gloves. When they split, the shop girl exclaims, “gloves have never been quite so reliable since the war” (158). This comment is an interesting one in that its simplicity holds so much value for many people’s lives. One sentence has the ability to show that everyday life was changed for those who lived during the war, and even something as trivial as gloves had changed forever; nothing was untouched, and this is something important that Woolf wants the reader to identify with and understand. Clarissa realizes that “thousands of young men had died that things might go on” (159). Even if it meant that life would always be a little darker. “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” has many influences from both Woolf’s life and personal feelings and the history that surrounds it. Woolf shared with her diary, “how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of though, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind” (Briggs 134). Woolf created stories using her opinions and experiences from her life. This short story is a wonderful culmination of influences from all aspects of Woolf’s personal viewpoints.
“Somehow the connection between life and literature must be made by women,” Woolf wrote this in her diary in July of 1922 (109). She firmly believed that literature is a great vehicle for documenting everyday life for posterity and for reflection. Through her short stories, the reader can examine the connections between her life and her opinions, and they both shine through freely. Her aggravation in not being able to freely write of a woman’s body and frustration at women not being able to participate in all aspects of society are seen in “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” Feelings of inadequacy and seeing through the falsities of society are prevalent in “The New Dress” where Mabel does not fit in with the rest of the party. “Sympathy” shows the reader the anxieties that women and society were feeling at the time over death, and the feelings one experiences after hearing of death, at a time when many young men were dying for their country. Finally, “An Unwritten Novel” examines the creative process of a woman writer attempting to create an interesting character. Woolf’s writings are a vehicle for her to express herself in a patriarchal and class-dominated society that had lived through unimaginable horror due to the First World War. MCWR