Zachary's 20th Century Blog

  Watching “the hours,” I was interested in Steven Daldry’s depiction of Virginia Woolf, and her relationship with real-life Woold’s character of Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway . From the outside, it appears Clarrisa and this depiction of her creator have little in common. While Woolf struggles with depression and had tried to kill herself multiple times prior, Clarissa is a stable woman of deep thought and is not erratic in nature. While Clarissa has made peace with death and her mortality, Virginia Woolf is discontented, so much so that Daldry has her decide to vent her frustrations with life in this character of Clarissa she creates. And immediately, this intimate relationship begins to develop throughout The Hours between Woolf and Clarissa.  Woolf and Clarissa certainly have some important parts of their worldview in common, and its clear Woolf begins to paint Clarissa seeing some connection. For example, both Woolf and Clarissa are fervent atheists, and both of them...

       Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, we see three characters—Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus—battle with the idea of death and I think they respond in different ways, whether it’s coping or giving into death. I think Woolf does a really good job of capturing how different people battle with death throughout the novel, and I think she executes a really realistic portrayal of how people respond to this thought.       To start this exploration of death in Mrs. Dalloway, I’ll offer a way of battling death that none of the three main characters choose: religion. Research has indicated a “u-shaped” correlation between the fear of death and religiosity and indicates that (a) people who more fear death are more likely to pursue religious and (b) religion tends to assuage members’ fear of death with time. Clarissa strongly rejects religion as a way to address death and instead attempts to cope with her impending (in the long term) death through utter acceptance....

  I think a pretty core question to the beginning of Ms. Dalloway is whether Clarissa Dalloway herself is happy. And not only happy but also content; does she have a lot of regret in her life? A lot of people, including myself, I’ve listened to discussing the beginning of Ms. Dalloway in class seem to endorse the idea that Ms. Dalloway is happy, or at least overall content. I see Ms. Dalloway as a strong female character, confident in herself. And Woolf shares this confidence in Ms. Dalloway. She chooses to have the story focus on Ms. Dalloway despite the fact that her husband, Richard is an M.P. Most traditional English Literature stories would not only focus on the men in general but would be even more likely to focus on men who have an “important” role in the British government. So Woolf is clearly trying to make a point by making Richard and M.P. and then declining to focus on him whatsoever.  But is Ms. Dalloway truly content? To answer this question, I think we have ...

         To me, the most interesting part of reading The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker is contrasting the way Howie thinks with how I think. Howie is an extremely scientific person, and he spends most of his lunch break and his ride dissecting tiny things in his life that most of us honestly consider being pretty boring and meaningless. He connects them to society, our economic system, etc., and while reading it I almost feel like I’m reading something completely ironic making fun of people who break down everything and treat everything like it is immensely important. But Baker is being completely genuine. He’s taking things that people find trivial and showing that they aren’t trivial to everyone.     I compare this to how I think, which is generally focusing on the bigger pictures in the world. I like to think about society as a whole, about politics and how we can organize the distribution of values and wealth to make it function as well as po...