The document provides biographical and contextual information about Virginia Woolf and her novels. It discusses Woolf's upbringing in London and involvement with the Bloomsbury Group. It then summarizes each of her major novels from 1915 to 1941, and examines some of her narrative techniques like stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and temporal shifts between past and present. The document analyzes Woolf's theories of the novel and how she sought to capture fleeting moments of insight and being through poetic prose rhythms and metaphors. It highlights key themes in her work like memory, light, time, and space.

1.
MOMENTS OF BEING
VIRGINIA WOOLF E IL ROMANZO

2. VIRGINIA WOOLF was born Adeline Virginia Stephen
on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London

3. BLOOMSBURY
Bloomsbury group Tavistocke square
• R. FRY
• E. M. FORSTER
• J. M. KEYNES
• L. STRACHEY
• C. BELL

5. HOGART PRESS

6. Epiphany
=
A
moment
of insight
Moments
of being
Interior
monologue
Objective
correlative
Involuntary
memory

7. I ROMANZI
• The Voyage Out, 1915
• Night and Day, 1920
• Jacob's Room, 1922
• Mrs Dalloway, 1925
• To the Lighthouse, 1927
• Orlando: A Biography,
1928
• The Waves, 1931
• The Years, 1937
• Between the Acts, 1941 -
(postumo)
Monk’s House,
Sussex

8. Teoria del
romanzo
• Rinunciando ad una visione totalizzante del mondo, l’artista
non rinuncia a catturare, a suo modo, la realtà. Ma la ricerca,
la corteggia e persino, si può dire, la circuisce nel quotidiano,
nei piccoli fatti apparentemente privi di significato, in quei
“momenti d’essere” che si rivelano improvvisi e risolutori
come momenti di visione.
V. WOOLF, Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown, 1924
Sede della Hogart Press,
Richmond

9. MOMENTS OF BEING
• “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
shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the
accent falls differently from the old; the moment of
importance comes not here but there; so that, if a writer were
a free man and not a slave, there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love, interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged: life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent 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 and
complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and
external as possible? - Modern Fiction- collected in The
Common Reader -1919

10. Il romanzo come ritmo
E’ attraverso parole speciali, che soltanto il poeta e lo
scrittore conoscono, che si svela quella realtà
altrimenti velata. Per questo la Woolf dice: “E’ la
poesia che voglio… Voglio la concentrazione e
l’atmosfera , voglio che le parole si sciolgano l’una
nell’altra, si fondano insieme, brillino –
non ho tempo da perdere con la prosa”.
(Diario, 26 maggio 1924)
Penso che lo scrivere debba essere
formale. Se la si lascia libera, la mente
diventa egocentrica, personale, cosa
che detesto (Diario, 18 Nov. 1924) in
N. Fusini, Introduzione, cit., pag. XII

11. Il romanzo come ritmo
• “A pensarci bene, credo che nello scrivere ciò che
conta è il ritmo. Potessi trovare il ritmo giusto di
domani mattina – riuscissi a indovinare il tempo
della frase – tutto finirebbe. E’ un problema che
devo pensare bene. Non c’entrano lo stile, le
parole giuste, c’entra il fatto che il pensiero deve
lievitare…” (Diario, 18 Nov. 1924)

12. Le tecniche narrative
• Whether you can observe a thing or not depends
on the theory which you use. It is the theory which
decides what can be observed.
• —Albert Einstein (in Molly HOFF,) Virginia Woolf ’s
Mrs. Dalloway, Introduction”, Clemson University
Digital Press, 2009

13. Le tecniche narrative
• Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers
herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The
doors would be taken off their hinges;
Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then,
thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh
as if issued to children on a beach.
• Demetra e Persefone: un mito apre e chiude il romanzo
(come nell’”Iiade”, come nell’”Odissea”)
• Markers of free indirect discourse and a “dual” voice, i.e.
characters exclaim; narrators do not. (HOFF, cit.)

14. Le tecniche narrative
• What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed
to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she
could hear now, she had burst open the French windows
and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh,
how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the
early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave;
• This exclamation again is a marker of figural subjectivity, the
character and the narrator sharing in the duties. Clarissa
“plunges” now just as she had “plunged” at Bourton (line 11) and
as Septimus will “plunge” later.
• The causal asyndeton, an abrupt explanatory phrase without
introduction, appears more than 30 times in the elegies of
Propertius. …The conjunction ( “in as much as,” “because”) gives
logical support to the preceeding comments as a causal
indicator frequent in free indirect discourse. HOFF, cit.

15. Le tecniche narrative
• This line introduces simultaneously both past and
present events in separate locales that will be given
in more detail later in this double beginning. In this
first page Clarissa announces past and present
simultaneously. The novel will conclude with a
double ending as well. Coming through the door in
the past and present is slightly reminiscent of the
two “ways” in Proust’s novel that dwells in the past a
great deal. Bourton and London serve Clarissa as
Combray and Paris serve Marcel Proust as the
mysteries of youth versus the worldly way of
maturity. (HOFF, cit)

16. • The air was …… chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of
eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she
did, standing there at the open window, that
something awful was about to happen; looking at
the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off
them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and
looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the
vegetables?” – was that it? – “I prefer men to
cauliflowers” – was that it? He must have said it at
breakfast one morning when she had gone out
onto the terrace – Peter Walsh.
• Parentheses often function like footnotes. Hoff,cit.
• Indica una stretta connessione tra narratore e
personaggio

17. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the
mist; the hum; the slow-­‐‑swimming happy ducks; the
pouched birds waddling …

18. Le tecniche narrative
• He would be back from India one of these days,
June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were
awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his
eyes, his pocket knife, his smile, his grumpiness and,
when millions of things had utterly vanished – how
strange it was! – a few sayings like this about
cabbages
• I RITORNI à cfr. Odissea
• Peter è un personaggio che appartiene alla
dimensione di KHRONOS

19. Le Tecniche narrative
• In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in
the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor
cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and
swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph
and the jingle and the strange high singing of some
aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life;
London; this moment of June
• Ring composition: a construction that
opens and closes with the same words.

20. Le parole danzano
come le onde
Hoff, cit.

21. Le tecniche narrative
• For having lived in Westminster – how many years now?
over twenty – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or
waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or
solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that
might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza)
before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a
warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden
circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought,
crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one
loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it
round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh –
but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting
on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be
dealt with, she felt positive

22. La prima
edizione
pubblicata dalla
Hogarth Press
• Riassumendo:
• Andirivieni dei tempi verbali
• Presente è solo il passato (in attesa
che si avveri il futuro)
• Trionfo dell’imperfetto
• Prosa come ritmo (esclamative,
scelta del lessico)
• Aggettivazione
• Conseguenze sulla struttura del
romanzo (no plot)
• Conseguenze sulla ideazione dei
personaggi (no tragedy, no
comedy, no love…)

23. La prima
edizione
pubblicata dalla
Hogarth Press
• Riassumendo:
• Mythological allusions
• Metaphors
• Ring composition
• Markers of free indirect discourse,
àexclamative àdual voice
(narrator and character) à
For(narrator, character or both)
• àquestion tags
• Double beginning and ending (in
the past, in the present)
• Parenthesis like footnotes
• Sententious comment
• Self-conscious references
• Epicurean attitude (frequency of
gardens)
• Frequent use of tricolon

24. MEMORIA
LUCE
TEMPO
SPAZIO
CLARISSA
LA FESTA
LA VITA
CLOTO
LACHESI
OBLIO
OMBRA
SEPTIMUS
PETER
LA MORTE
KHRONOS
THE HOURS
Il tempo come
protagonista:
la sconfiaa di
KHRONOS

25. Morte e Vita
La conclusione del romanzo
• “I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a
moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he
thought to himself. What is it that fills me with
extraordinary excitement?
• It is Clarissa, he said.
• For there she was.
E’ lei, è Clarissa: bastava che fosse là e le parole
danzavano, il tempo scorreva, la vita ricominciava.
Santina Meriggi
Voghera , Febbraio 2016

26. Monk’s House,
Sussex
Virginia’s
garden

27. Sitografia
• Sitografia:
• V. WOOLF, Mrs. Dalloway
• https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/.../w91md/
• M. Hoff, Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clemson University
Digital Press, 2009
• www.clemson.edu/cedp/press/pubs/hoff/hoff.pdf
• N. FUSINI, Virginia Woolf e il realismo psicologico
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ7Xs3gCAyU
• English Wikipedia
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia
• Tutte le immagini sono in licenza cc

28. Bibliografia
• Bibliografia
• V. WOOLF, La signora Dalloway,tr. it. N. Fusini,
Milano, Feltrinelli 1993 (2015)
• V. WOOLF, Romanzi e altro, Mondadori, 1978 (1982)
• N. FUSINI, Possiedo la mia anima, Mondadori,
Milano 2006

29. Ringraziamenti
Questo breve lavoro è “nato” con intenti
collaborativi e dialogici: voleva essere
niente più che il supporto per una
conversazione con i miei studenti della 5^
D scientifico, a cui è idealmente
dedicato, e con la loro docente di
inglese, prof. ssa Reana Mondo, che
ringrazio per avermi coinvolto, sul tema
del romanzo europeo nel primo
Novecento e , in particolare, su Mrs.
Dalloway.
Un particolare ringraziamento alla Prof.ssa
Ornella Dessimoni Sisti per la supervisione
generale del lavoro.