Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think: the Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900. Columbia University Press, 2006 This book discusses the thematic structure of how an individual is created within a novel. In this work, the critic is making the argument that, historically, novels and individuals are one in the same. According to Armstrong, the character must first find a frustration with their position in the social order, and then work to change it. How Novels Think also reveals how the new…

Treatment of women in society shashi Desponde’s selected short stories A Liberated Woman and It Was the Nightingale Shashi Desponde , an Indian woman writer in, was born in a small town of Dharward in 1938. Her father, the famous kannada playwright, was described as ‘the Bernard Shaw of the ‘Kannada theatre’ .She acquired an M.A. in English from Mysore University. She married Dr. Desponde, A Neuro-pathologist in 1962 and visited England in 1969. Inspired by this visit, she published an account…

In her novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf explores the thematic implications of time's continuous procession foreword. Woolf uses images of the sea as a symbolic depiction of the passage of time in relation to human lives. This pattern of images suggests that time takes on a number of different forms. Likes the waves, times sometimes appears repetitive and nearly motionless, but it also has a violent and entropic nature that calls attention to the impermanence of human life by threatening…

Virginia Woolf was an English writer in the twentieth century. During this time, society revolved around sex. According to Sigmund Freud, the emotions that were aroused in a young child (typically around the age of four) resulted in an unconscious sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. This is referred as the Oedipus complex. Virginia Woolf, would take these new psychoanalysis studies and apply them to the female gender. She would try and negate many of the concepts that society…

Eternal Love To the Lighthouse, written by Virginia Woolf, is a novel about the effect relationships have on people’s lives. The first part of the novel The Window is about the Ramsay family and their guests’ time during a 12-hour span period at a summerhouse. All of them have the basic story of considering visiting the lighthouse the next day, but each character has a sub-plot. In the second part of the novel Time Passes, about ten years have gone by. Mrs. Ramsay has passed away, and the rest…

the other hand, in the George Washington painting the structure and craft consists of Washington standing with his arm extended which shows he is about to speak and holding a sword. While, in the Dinner Party the structure and craft of the Virginal Woolf plate consists of a blooming flower with seeds in the center and the center seems to be bursting out from the petals. Furthermore, the structure and craft in the Anna Van Schurman plate consists of a butterfly with shades of…

While both Woolf and Petrunkevitch both focus on an insect, Woolf explains that death is an inevitable part to life and also shows how beautiful the struggle for life is by the dynamic point of view and artistic tone she used. Woolf’s view on the moth changes from hopeful and energetic to insignificant and helplessness by the essays end. Woolf starts her essay by describing the energy outside her window as “pleasant morning… earth gleamed with moisture.” Woolf then transfers the energy of the…

In Virginia Woolf’s passages called “Two Cafeterias” she talks about how she went to two different colleges and how women have a place in society that isn’t the same as the men’s place in society. So, she decides that she would go to two universities to see how the meals compared to each other. She was disappointed by the women’s meal as she realized there were major differences between what the women were given for dinner and what the men were served for dinner. While she is at a men’s…

“The Death of the Moth”, by Virginia Woolf, and “The Spider and the Wasp”, by Alexander Petrunkevitch, had both similar and different ways of expressing tones. Both Woolf's and Petrunkevitch's writing styles are similar. They both use descriptive imagery and details. Some examples of this in Petrunkevitch's essay are "the exasperated spider" and "soft membrane". Another example, this time in Woolf's essay, is "hay-coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour". These descriptive…

The title character from Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” and the moth from Don Marquis’ poem “The Lesson of the Moth” have similar philosophies on life. To start with, Harrison and the moth’s deaths had meaningful purposes behind them. Harrison Bergeron met his demise by interrupting the ballet to remove his handicaps and dancing with a ballerina. By doing this, “Not only were the laws of the land were abandoned, but the laws of gravity and the laws of motion as well.” (Vonnegut…