Comparison between joyce’s
Ulysses and WOOLF’S
Mrs Dalloway
James Joyce (1882-1941) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) belonged to the
first generation of Modernists and it’s possible to make a comparison
between their literary production analyzing their masterpieces:
Ulysses and
Mrs Dalloway.
Ulysses
is one of the greatest examples of reworking of myth in Modernist
literature.
Joyce uses the epic model to stress the lack of heroism, ideals, love and
trust in the modern world.
The plot utterly takes place in Dublin in a single day which involves the
life of three characters: Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent, Sthephen
Dedalus, a sensitive young man with literary ambitions, and Molly Bloom,
Leopold’s wife.
Leopold Bloom, compared to Homer’s Ulysses, makes common actions: he
wanders throughout the day in
the streets of Dublin making errands, stopping at the advertising office and
joining a funeral. He is distressed with two deep emotional burdens: the
unsolved grief over his baby son’s death and the crumbling relationship with
his unfaithful wife.
Stephen Dedalus, compared to Homer’s Telemachus, has only a brief
unsatisfactory meeting with Bloom, particularly at the brothel, and at the
end they go their separate ways.
Molly Bloom is different from Penelope: she hasn’t slept with her husband
since the death of their little son Rudy, and she has been unfaithful to
Leopold Bloom with her concert manager.
In this novel the author masters all his different writing techniques going
from the stream-of-consciousness to the cinematic technique transposed in
literature with flash-backs, close-ups, dramatic dialogues, or the
juxtaposition of events and creating the
collage technique, through which
he brings unity and order from the apparent randomness of the events
narrated.
The language is full of symbolism along with a richness and wide range of
vocabulary and images.
Mrs Dalloway
takes place in London on a single day, during which the protagonist,
Clarissa Dalloway, is busy running errands and making plans for the evening
dinner party.
Virginia Woolf focuses her narration pointing out the depths of human
nature through the various characters that Clarissa runs into that day, or
simply brushes during her daily activities.
Woolf’s characters are also described, while carrying out their day, as
engrossed in their flow of thoughts providing the readers with fragments of
their past experiences in order to give her characters a more round and
profound existence even if apparently concerned with the immediate
happenings of their day.
As in Ulysses, three main
characters are involved in the plot:
·
Clarissa Dalloway, a lady married to Richard Dalloway, a Conservative
Member of Parliament. This marriage forced her to give up her true love for
Peter Walsh. She is battered between her need for independence and
self-fulfillment and class consciousness. She is obsessed with the
perfection of her home and her strenous effort to live up to her ideal of
womanhood; she forces herself to deny her most natural emotions limiting
them to the point that she is in constant inner conflict.
·
Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s first love, who visits her home unexpectedly
bringing back memories of their past mutual feelings and who also casually
sees Septimus Warren Smith and his wife going to Sir William Bradshaw’s for
an interview;
·
Septimus Warren Smith, a soldier of World War I, is described by Woolf as a
sensitive young poet who enlisted to join the war for patriotic reasons and
is berated by guilt because of his best friend’s death in the war. Despite
the medical treatments, he suffers from panic attacks and a sense of
inadequacy that will drive him to committing suicide immediately after his
interview with Dr. Bradshaw.
Even though Clarissa and Septimus never meet during the entire unfolding of
the novel, they are connected in many ways.
On the one hand, Septimus is unable to separate outside reality from his
inner personal responses, he relies on his wife for stability and expects
her to protect him from difficulties related to human life. In fact, he
decides to kill himself because of his inability to react and his
psychological collapse.
Clarissa, on the other hand, is always aware of the fact that the external
world is totally separated from her inner consciousness and, at the end, she
does come to terms with her delusions, accepting the passing of time.
Both Joyce and Woolf use the narrative technique of the interior monologue
with some differences.
Joyce’s characters show their thoughts in an incoherent way and the author
sometimes use a syntactically wrong way; in fact, in Ulysses, to convey the life of an individual in a single day, Joyce uses the
“stream-of-consciousness” and the interior monolgue in order to show the
chaotic flow of thoughts in the human mind, characterized by juxtaposes
disparate and apparently incongrous images.
Dislike Joyce, Virginia Woolf never lets her characters’ thoughts flow
without control and she maintains grammatical structure of sentences; in
addition to that, in
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
doesn’t use the interior monologue to describe characters’ psyche, but to
express characters’ emotions. Moreover, Joyce uses the first singular
person, while Woolf uses the third singular person.
In their works, Joyce and Woolf introduce the new conception of time
developed by the philosophers James and Bergson. They make a distinction
between historical time, external, chronological and objective, and the
psychological time, internal and subjective.
Finally, the epiphany’s technique used by Joyce is similar to Woolf’s
events of being, moments during the characters can see reality behind
appearances.
Student: Dorotea Serrelli
Class:5°Asa
Date:29/03/2021
