Reflections on Emma and Mrs. Dalloway

So here is the last blog post. I am somewhat at a loss for what new to write about on the topic of space, time, and technology, seeing that writing more about those topics in relation to Emma and Mrs. Dalloway would be akin to beating a dead horse (or perhaps a dead iphone, in keeping with the previous theme). Instead I will reflect on where my writing and I have come over the course of this semester, and my relationships with the texts that we have been reading and discussing.

I have to admit, when I first looked at the syllabus, I thought that class discussions would focus on feminist readings of the texts we were looking at. When we did discuss women in the novels, it was in a way that was related to how advancements in technologies changed culture and therefore improved how women were viewed in society. This way of analyzing women in novels was very different from what I expected and what I had experienced before.

My reactions to the books also differed from what I would have expected. I thought that I would like a more straightforward book such as Emma over a more convoluted book like Mrs. Dalloway, but through reading I discovered the opposite. Events in Emma, much like events that took place during the time period it was set in, take much longer to complete than events in Mrs. Dalloway. It may require several pages of explanation for one event in Emma but in Mrs. Dalloway the action seems much faster and livelier, even though this is not actually the case. In fact, there is very little actual action in Mrs. Dalloway, as most of the story is told through flashbacks or in stream of consciousness. This corresponds to modern vs. older notions of how time should be spent. In modern times, we feel like we can accomplish more through the use of technology in less time, but often times much less is actually being done.

As a modern reader, I felt like I could appreciate Mrs. Dalloway more so than Emma. The limitations of understanding from the differences in social structure sometimes impeded profound meaning from Emma. For example, Harriet’s ancestry was, for the 19^th century reader, a subject of great interest and a reason to finish reading the book. For me, Harriet’s ancestry was of little importance because as a modern American, class and birth have very little importance on what I think of a person, so I had trouble connecting to the text as Jane Austen would probably had hoped.

Proportion and Conversion in Mrs. Dalloway

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Sir William Bradshaw is a psychotherapist who sees Septimus Warren Smith, an apparent lunatic. Sir William is highly respected among the high class in London because of his ability to read and deal with persons with psychological problems. When he sees Septimus, he says that the only treatment is seclusion and rest. Sir William claims that Septimus has just lost his sense of proportion. While Sir William’s diagnosis may be true, he handles it in a way that not only is not best for Septimus, but also indicative of the feudal idealists efforts to keep the world in ‘order.’

Septimus has lost all sense of the collectively accepted norms and customs known as convention. He can only acknowledge letters as a fantastic collection of sounds and images rather than understand the system that gives them their meaning: in a toffee advertisement written in the sky by a passing plane he recognizes a thrilling beauty rather than an orderly attempt to communicate (p. 21-22). While Lucrezia wastes away with worry for her husband, Septimus lives content and unimpeded in his own world, unencumbered by worries for others (p. 22-23). Sir William would diagnosis this as lacking a sense of proportion. In other words Septimus has lost a sense for the way that things are related. Letters and words do not have the same meaning to him that that they have for others. He does not have a good sense of his relationships either. He does not know that Lucrezia depends on him, that she is not happy without him. He doesn’t recognize emotional dependence or the need to reciprocate feelings. He is not concerned with things outside of himself. This is why Sir William says that Septimus has lost his sense of proportion.

Sir William is praised, loved, and well respected for his methods in dealing with mentally unstable patients because he makes these types of diagnoses. “Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion...” (p. 97) According to him, this condition could only be overcome by lots of rest, and in order for this rest to be achieved, the patient must be institutionalized. This removal from society however, is not meant to benefit the individual, but rather to remove an aberration that threatens to disrupt the flow of normalcy. He was not a healer, he was a pruner, nipping these blemishes in the bud. His goddess Proportion was actually sister to a darker deity: Conversion.

This act of conversion is important to realize in chronological context because in the world of feudalism, you either were or you were not. There was no class mobility and thus no need to convert because the social conventions for a specific class were almost always followed on principle. With the emergence of capitalism and the ability to change class, conventions had less authority. This crumbling of old standards dismayed many like Sir William, Clarissa, and who favored the order and proportion of feudalism. As an esteemed Psychologist, Sir William was able to contain the diluting of the old ideals, and tuck away what didn’t fit into his tidy world. This conversion was a conquest. Woolf describes Sir William’s act of conversion as, “That Goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others the image of herself. Naked, defenceless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress of Sir William's will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up.” (p. 98)

This “goddess” of conversion became a force during this time period because the feudal past was struggling with the capitalist present. People like Septimus lacked a sense of proportion and broke convention, so those guardians of propriety--Sir William Bradshaw and the like--sought to “help” them when in reality, they were just pruning the garden.

Woolf, Virginia, and Bonnie Kime Scott. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005. Print.

Space and Education

The variety, quantity, and scope of spaces in which a person can inhabit are integral to a person’s success. A person’s education, which is directly correlated to a person’s triumphs, is greatly determined by the space in which it occurs. A public school education can vary greatly depending on the recourses and opportunities available from place to place.

In the 1800‘s the amount of spaces a person could inhabit were limited. The few spaces a person could inhabit directly correspond with the quality and rigor of education received. This idea was displayed in Jane Austen’s Emma. In the novel, Emma Woodhouse was educated by Miss Taylor, her governess. The education Emma received was, for the most part, based off of the extent of Miss Taylor’s education. Being educated by a governess a was standard practice in that time that has since become obsolete because it is not fair to have one’s education limited by the the limited education of just one other person. Since Emma’s space was so limited, so too was her education. Due to the scarce amount of spaces Emma could be in, the quality of education she received, when compared to the education that woman receive today, was not very high. Limited spaces limited Emma Woodhouses’s education.

I, as a 21st century woman, inhabit numerous more spaces then Emma Woodhouse did in the 1800’s. Since there is much more mobility of people among spaces, ideas are spread more easily. The widespread knowledge has allowed the quality of education to increase since the time Emma was written. The amount of spaces I can be in have greatly assisted my success in life. Before college, I lived in a suburb of Atlanta with my family. That opportunities available in that space allowed me to receive a very high quality of education. Since I lived in a comparably affluent area where many of the residents would consider themselves successful, I had the ground-work to be successful myself.

Where I grew up and received my primary education greatly determined the opportunities available for me in terms of secondary education. Living so close to a major metropolitan area opened up that space for me. I am currently being educated at the seventh best public university in the nation. That wouldn’t have been possible had I not been inhabiting successful spaces for the majority of my life. I consider obtaining an education to be one of the most important aspects of my life, and the caliber of education I am receiving would not have been possible had I not inhabited spaces that allowed me to do so.

Emma Woodhouse was not able to inhabit very many spaces, which lead to her limited education. The amount of spaces that I can inhabit; however, is virtually unlimited, and I have received an extensive education so far. I hope that one day I will consider my life to be successful. When that happens, I will attribute that to my work ethic, my perseverance, and the spaces I have inhabited in my life.

Austen, Jane. Emma. New York: Penguin. 1815.Woolf, Virginia.

Student Soldiers

The years spent in college, especially in contrast with those before, are similar years in World War I described by Kern in The Culture of Time and Space: 1880 - 1918 as being in parentheses. The routines of students and their separation from their past make them like the soldiers of World War I.

As a student, I am at college with a lot of people who are very much like me. We are all caught in a routine and just trying to stay afloat, trying to stay alive. Sometimes I feel like I am just going through the motions—just going to classes and doing homework and weathering this storm—just fighting to survive. I get caught in a time flux: my hours, days and weeks run together into a blur. A soldier’s memories are confused as well because their time in the field was so regimented. There was a strict schedule which could not be departed from. The stringent schedule was meant to organize and give purpose to each hour of their day, but it instead stretched the soldier’s tour into a senseless bout of waiting, each day following like the one before it: monotony marked by gunfire.

Like a student’s time spent in class, hours of dull work leading up to a test. For soldiers, their time was spent preparing for battle or participating in one. College students spend their time studying for a test or taking one. Contributing to this anchor-less feeling was the bubble or parentheses of the time spent in college. Separated from the security of the past, old memories are smothered by the ever-pressing reality of the college work load and routine. Thoughts of family and friends were driven from soldier’s minds and replaced by the nightmarish gore of battle. A time before the violence did not seem to have ever existed.

Sometimes, I also feel a loss of personal identity. Too often I feel as though I do not have any control—that I am just going along with everyone else, thinking and doing all the same things that everyone else is thinking and doing. There are hundreds of people just like me, passing and failing, and life carries on. The soldiers of World War I were all the ‘same.’ They looked, dressed, communicated and worked alike, some living and some dying, but the war pressed on.

Adding to this shrinking, unimportant feeling is the gap between student and teacher. Teachers are distant and inaccessible. Generals in World War I remained in an office and strategized from afar, deciding the fate of the soldiers in the field, just as professors grade and teach from a distance.

There is also a similarity in the way that advances are made. In contrast to high school when success was black and white based on pass or fail, success in college can be achieved by roundabout means. You can drop classes, switch majors, take extra time, or depend on a curve. In World War I, instead of defending the front line at all costs, soldiers could cluster, retreat, reevaluate, and still win.

College life is warfare. Here we are fighting to survive, to win the war, to get that diploma. But like those soldiers, we sometimes lose sense of time and identity when caught in the routine—the parentheses of college life.

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880 - 1918. Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.: Harvard Univ., 2003. Print. 

Eliot, Woolf, and Septimus

Septimus Warren Smith lives in the moral and emotional no-mans land which World War 1 placed upon him. The War, as it was known then, differed greatly from every previous war in that nearly an entire generation of young men were sacrificed in the name of nationalism. New technologies such as barbed wire, machine guns, and poison gas transformed war from a Romanized event where men could show valor and courage to one of massacre. These changes in attitude manifest themselves through the character of Septimus Warren Smith. In Mrs. Dalloway, the changes and mental instability of Smith mirrors that of the European population as a whole. Smith’s sentiments of disillusionment are common themes of writing during this era, including in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

It is easy to understand the sense of drastic changes brought about by World War 1. Take, for example, Smith. The text says, “He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the change … was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted… But when Evans…was killed …far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, [he] congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably.” (Woolf, 84) Here Smith can be taken as sort of a metaphor for what happened to all of Europe; what happened emotionally to Smith culturally happened to Europe.

Like Smith, Europe came into World War 1 enthusiastically, like Smith, Europe relied on Romanized notions of life and warfare, and like Smith, Europe was completely different what it was at the beginning of the war. The lack of emotion that Smith comes to show is expressed in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The first four lines in The Waste Land “APRIL is the cruellest month,/ breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,/ mixing Memory and desire,/ stirring Dull roots with spring rain” demonstrates how an emotional wasteland currently exists in modern culture. (Eliot) Whereas April would normally bring new life, April is described as cruel in that the promises of renewal go unfulfilled. What the inhabitants of the Wasteland are left with is an “arid plane” emotionally devoid of any life. (Eliot, 424)

Smith clearly inhabits the Wasteland that has become post-World War 1 Europe. In Mrs. Dalloway, the narrator describes Smith by saying, “But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.” (90) The description of Smith as a drowned sailor draw parallels to the drowned sailor Phlebas the Phoenician in part IV of The Waste Land, Death by Water. Smith, like a drowned sailor, becomes removed from the worries of the world. As said in The Waste Land, “Phlebus…Forgot the cry of gulls,/ and the deep seas swell/ And the profit and loss.” (314-15) Phlebas and Smith are both described as drowned men who have forgotten the worries of this world; and similarly both have come to inhabit the Wasteland.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith represents an inhabitant of the Wasteland as described by T.S. Eliot. Woolf’s metaphorical representation between Smith and a post-war Europe further this representation to include the culture of Europe as inhabitants of the Wasteland.

Eliot, T.S. "Eliot, T. S. 1922. The Waste Land." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Web. 27 Feb. 2011.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. 1925

Presence of Women in Urban Spaces

Since January, I have learned a lot in my english class, and most of what I have learned has been related to the books that we have been reading. The most eye-opening thing that I have learned is that there has been a problematic history concerning the presence of women in urban spaces. Years ago, a woman walking alone in an urban space was identified as a prostitute. Due to the changes that have occurred in the past two centuries, rarely would I be considered a prostitute if I was walking alone in an urban space. This is such a simple thing, but I have taken this for granted.

During the 19th century, stemming from a long standing perspective, if a woman was seen walking by herself in an urban space, she was considered a prostitute. Women were sexualized when alone in urban spaces. It was un-proper, and respectable women would not and could not be alone without giving off the wrong impression. At the turn of the 20th century; however, these antiquated opinions started to break down. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway, a respectable woman, walked by herself in an urban space at the very beginning of the novel. By the time of Clarissa Dalloway, women were allowed to walk by themselves, and when seen alone in urban spaces were not nearly as often recognized as a call girl. Although the structure was breaking down, men occasionally still gleaned the wrong impression when spotting a woman by herself.

Even though standards were changing, men still gathered the wrong impression from observing a woman alone in an urban space. As Peter was taking a walk, his gaze landed on a young woman who was walking alone in the streets of London, England. He became infatuated with her and followed her for over a mile until she reached her house. Although the woman was oblivious to Peter following her, he imagined what she was like. When I first read this passage, I did not think that the woman Peter followed could have been a prostitute. When I read the excerpt again, I noticed that Peter mentioned that he saw the young woman wearing a “red carnation” (Woolf 52) which is historically a signal of prostitution, and that the young woman had “hanging flower baskets” outside of her house, suggesting indecency (Woolf 53) . Although the woman may or may not have been a prostitute, she represented the transition of opinions of what constituted a prostitution which occurred in the time of Mrs. Dalloway. Despite the fact that women were allowed to be unaccompanied in urban spaces without necessarily marked as being un proper, many years passed until women were freed of that distinction.

Now, I would have never had thought that walking by myself would distinguish me as a prostitute. In society today, indecent women are so much more explicit of the services they offer. The past hundred years have seen an increase in the quantity of spaces that respectable women are allowed to inhabit without appearing improper.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. 1925. Print.

Work, Work, Work

This week has been a really stressful week for me. I have had multiple tests and numerous homework assignments as well as commitments to my fraternity. I never really had a chance to slow down this week. Normally, that is not such a bad or unusual thing, as long as I have a chance to refresh and get ready for the next week. I normally take Sundays to do this sort of thing. In the christian faith, this is called a “Sabbath” and is a very important practice because it allows for the restoration of body and mind.

As of lately though, I have not been able to observe this particular practice, and I can feel the consequences. My mind is slower, my body weaker, and my motivation decreased. Today even, I began to wonder whether or not all of the work I was doing was even worth it. I then started to think about the present pace of life and how it is compared to those in Emma and Mrs. Dalloway. Life for them does not go so fast. Sure, there is work done, but only so much as is needed. They have the time to take a break, to paint a picture, to attend a party. They are not constantly moving--constantly filling their lives with things to do.

I feel like today we focus so much on working in order to make our lives worth it. We go to school for years not because we love to learn, but because we want to make money. We put a lot of effort into our work, even outside of our “work,” so that we can get ahead of everyone else. Soon, according to this mentality, we find ourselves working all of time, never taking time to ourselves or our families. Too often do I hear stories of a father who was never around because he was always working.

We have so much vested into what we accomplish that we work so hard to get to that point, and then once we have reached it, we are no longer satisfied with what we’ve made. Once we have “arrived” we look back and are unhappy with what our life looks like. we end up getting precisely what we wanted, but we look back on all the time wasted. While scurrying around to make as much money as possible, we left people trampled in our dust, our families neglected.

I do not want to end up like one of those fathers. I want to work enough to get by. I want to be able to provide for my family. I do not need to work so much as to be able to provide each member of my family with excessive things. I do not need to drive a Lexus or put TVs in every room. I feel like we (especially as Americans) often work to get things when our work should be the means by which we survive.

Just as work is important to surviving, being still is important to truly living. Doing one without the other will always lead to disparity.

Austen, Jane. Emma. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004. Print

Woolf, Virginia, and Bonnie Kime Scott. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005. Print.