(no subject)
Jul. 14th, 2008 08:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThroughout my many years of schooling, I have somehow escaped ever being told to read a book by Virgina Woolf. However, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
schiarire gave me a Summer Reading Assignment to read Woolf and report back, so! To the Lighthouse:
I found myself kind of flipping between two modes when reading the book. In Mode One, I was completely in-sync with the stream-of-consciousness writing and thinking, yes, Virginia Woolf, you truly are a genius at capturing the inner workings of the human mind! In Mode Two, the consciousness in the book was decidedly Not My Consciousness, and I was twiddling my thumbs and going, yes, Virginia Woolf, this is very interesting and experimental but perhaps we should move on. I am not sure whether the parts where I was closer and the parts where I were more distanced were a function of the book itself, or of my mindset while reading - it was often hard not to think about the Myth of Virginia Woolf when I was reading the actual words on the page, and the parts where I managed to banish the Myth from my mind where probably where I was most successful syncing with the book.
Speaking of the Myth of Virginia Woolf, the other thing Ji said I should report on was the Woolf/Feminism OTP. Again, in To the Lighthouse, there were places where I was reading and I went yes, that's right - usually in Lily Briscoe's narration, when she's thinking about this obligation that women have to be nice, to say the right and socially soothing thing, and sometimes you just don't want to. This is a big button of mine (as anyone will know who has listened to me babble about the song Last Midnight from Into the Woods.) But I also get the sense that - there is a Big Divide between Men and Women in the book, and there is, at the end, a feeling of overwhelming pity for Men and their foolishness and their need to be soothed by Women. That sense of divide is not my feminism.
That said, if I don't want divide, I should probably read Orlando for my next Foray Into Woolf . . . (I probably should have read it for my thesis anyways. But shush.)
schiarire gave me a Summer Reading Assignment to read Woolf and report back, so! To the Lighthouse:I found myself kind of flipping between two modes when reading the book. In Mode One, I was completely in-sync with the stream-of-consciousness writing and thinking, yes, Virginia Woolf, you truly are a genius at capturing the inner workings of the human mind! In Mode Two, the consciousness in the book was decidedly Not My Consciousness, and I was twiddling my thumbs and going, yes, Virginia Woolf, this is very interesting and experimental but perhaps we should move on. I am not sure whether the parts where I was closer and the parts where I were more distanced were a function of the book itself, or of my mindset while reading - it was often hard not to think about the Myth of Virginia Woolf when I was reading the actual words on the page, and the parts where I managed to banish the Myth from my mind where probably where I was most successful syncing with the book.
Speaking of the Myth of Virginia Woolf, the other thing Ji said I should report on was the Woolf/Feminism OTP. Again, in To the Lighthouse, there were places where I was reading and I went yes, that's right - usually in Lily Briscoe's narration, when she's thinking about this obligation that women have to be nice, to say the right and socially soothing thing, and sometimes you just don't want to. This is a big button of mine (as anyone will know who has listened to me babble about the song Last Midnight from Into the Woods.) But I also get the sense that - there is a Big Divide between Men and Women in the book, and there is, at the end, a feeling of overwhelming pity for Men and their foolishness and their need to be soothed by Women. That sense of divide is not my feminism.
That said, if I don't want divide, I should probably read Orlando for my next Foray Into Woolf . . . (I probably should have read it for my thesis anyways. But shush.)
