I too have read the second half in larger spells than in the first. In part, I think this is because I wanted to get through the individual sections of various characters, but I also think this may be something driven by Virginia Woolf's writing. You are on the edge of your seat hoping the characters will break out of the stories of their own creation and clearly talk with one another so you read on. When Richard can't seem to bring himself to utter out-loud how he feels, I found myself saying, "Good god man, just say it. Say it!" Clarissa, of all the characters, seems to have a better understanding of everyone's limitations, but she doesn't express her thoughts openly either. When I read this book published nearly 100 years ago, I think we haven't progressed very far at all. So many of us have an internal dialogue without ever engaging the person(s) with which it's focused.
In an essay called "Modern Fiction," Woolf argues for the invention of a new method of story-telling that can "look within" and examine life as it really is. There is one passage in this essay I find extremely enlightening. I want to share it here with everyone.
"Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance are not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it."
Keeping in mind Woolf's admonition, I believe we must be careful not to analyze or interpret her novels by relying too much on traditional or conventional categories.
This is fun. I read these sections completely differently. My read was that both of these were inherently social commentary. The doctor was following a rigid world view, social climbing (recently knighted) upper class, everything in its place. He fails to connect with the working class patients. They also fail to understand the necessity of the proposed treatment.
Richard wants to say “I love you”, but as a staid upper class British man of that period, he is not able to. He is repressed.
I think Wolfe is heavily critiquing the social mores of the period (not to mention the war).
She is also trying to highlight that multiple points of view exist - remember the skywriting scene where no one can quite make it out, but what they do think they see is different from each other.
Fun times. Sort of hard to have this kind of discussion (especially since I’m typing on my phone)
I also read this section in more of a larger section... So, I'm starting to think that it is less of a coincidence. As I've been reading I've tried to break this book into pseudo chapters where I try to recognize when we are moving into another persons point of view which allows me to take a break if needed. My brain keeps trying to add the structure of chapters back for some reason...
I had a different take on Sir William Bradshaw entirely. From the moment he assessed Septimus and suggested that he needed to be isolated in one of Bradshaws "homes" I thought it was a great idea. I believe that the best thing for him could be separation from Rezia. I'm hoping that if they are separated we could find out if his mania is truly his or maybe it is his way of escaping a marriage he didn't want to be in but didn't have the heart or courage to end. It would be a little ironic that he is brave enough to go through a war and become a hero but not brave enough to end his marriage with his wife.
It was through this theory that I convinced myself that Bradshaw was a great physician and his confident demeanor was assuring to me and I, like many in this book, went along blindly believing him. Once I look at it from the perspective of "he is just working through the motions" the facade that I briefly built around him crumbles a bit.
As a little looking forward, I hope to see one of the characters have some kind of epiphany and break free of their casted role before the end of the book.
I find the varying impressions of Bradshaw fascinating. I read him as being somewhat dismissive of Septimus's issues. It seems likely this says more about me and my own biases than Woolf's writing, which is a reminder of how much the lens of our own past experiences, worldviews and biases color how we view literally everything we perceive, often in such subtle ways that we don't even realize it.
I too have read the second half in larger spells than in the first. In part, I think this is because I wanted to get through the individual sections of various characters, but I also think this may be something driven by Virginia Woolf's writing. You are on the edge of your seat hoping the characters will break out of the stories of their own creation and clearly talk with one another so you read on. When Richard can't seem to bring himself to utter out-loud how he feels, I found myself saying, "Good god man, just say it. Say it!" Clarissa, of all the characters, seems to have a better understanding of everyone's limitations, but she doesn't express her thoughts openly either. When I read this book published nearly 100 years ago, I think we haven't progressed very far at all. So many of us have an internal dialogue without ever engaging the person(s) with which it's focused.
In an essay called "Modern Fiction," Woolf argues for the invention of a new method of story-telling that can "look within" and examine life as it really is. There is one passage in this essay I find extremely enlightening. I want to share it here with everyone.
"Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance are not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it."
Keeping in mind Woolf's admonition, I believe we must be careful not to analyze or interpret her novels by relying too much on traditional or conventional categories.
This is fun. I read these sections completely differently. My read was that both of these were inherently social commentary. The doctor was following a rigid world view, social climbing (recently knighted) upper class, everything in its place. He fails to connect with the working class patients. They also fail to understand the necessity of the proposed treatment.
Richard wants to say “I love you”, but as a staid upper class British man of that period, he is not able to. He is repressed.
I think Wolfe is heavily critiquing the social mores of the period (not to mention the war).
She is also trying to highlight that multiple points of view exist - remember the skywriting scene where no one can quite make it out, but what they do think they see is different from each other.
Fun times. Sort of hard to have this kind of discussion (especially since I’m typing on my phone)
I also read this section in more of a larger section... So, I'm starting to think that it is less of a coincidence. As I've been reading I've tried to break this book into pseudo chapters where I try to recognize when we are moving into another persons point of view which allows me to take a break if needed. My brain keeps trying to add the structure of chapters back for some reason...
I had a different take on Sir William Bradshaw entirely. From the moment he assessed Septimus and suggested that he needed to be isolated in one of Bradshaws "homes" I thought it was a great idea. I believe that the best thing for him could be separation from Rezia. I'm hoping that if they are separated we could find out if his mania is truly his or maybe it is his way of escaping a marriage he didn't want to be in but didn't have the heart or courage to end. It would be a little ironic that he is brave enough to go through a war and become a hero but not brave enough to end his marriage with his wife.
It was through this theory that I convinced myself that Bradshaw was a great physician and his confident demeanor was assuring to me and I, like many in this book, went along blindly believing him. Once I look at it from the perspective of "he is just working through the motions" the facade that I briefly built around him crumbles a bit.
As a little looking forward, I hope to see one of the characters have some kind of epiphany and break free of their casted role before the end of the book.
I find the varying impressions of Bradshaw fascinating. I read him as being somewhat dismissive of Septimus's issues. It seems likely this says more about me and my own biases than Woolf's writing, which is a reminder of how much the lens of our own past experiences, worldviews and biases color how we view literally everything we perceive, often in such subtle ways that we don't even realize it.