Virginia Woolf: Jacob’s Room Dr. Theresa Thompson English 4150 Fall 2008

biography Born in London, Jan. 25, 1882 Daughter of Leslie Stephen & Julia Duckworth StephenLeslie Stephen Married Leonard WoolfLeonard Woolf The BloomsburyThe Bloomsbury Group “Around 1910 everything changed” Roger Fry Literary critic, diarist, & Novelist Novelist Jacob’s Room 1922 SuicideSuicide 1941, age 59 Virginia Woolf

Modernism: a specific form of artistic production “Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England […] included with Joyce and Proust in the realization of experimental achievements [...]” (NY Times). Employs William James, “Stream of Consciousness” (JR 8, 32-3) Woolf and Joyce: the problem of “the egotistical self” (1/26/1920). Difficult to get out of our own heads. (JR 49) Ruotolo: “A choreography for Woolf’s fiction inevitably develops from the rhythm of broken sequence.” (JR 10, 52)

Modernité: dislocation and ambiguity Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. (1992) , a move from local time zones to global ordering of time & space Joyce and Woolf, both born in Formative years coincide with “the era of the clock’s final triumph in ordering life.” Modernism has a “temporal autonomy” A past recovered in memory, in streams of consciousness, or in a time in the mind. (JR 19, 39) Creates “conflicting, double awareness of two separate, even antithetical views of time and life….” Time before Jacob Jacob as a boy (7)boy Jacob Flanders: Life and death mixed (16)

Modernization Budgeon: “Light and the heavenly bodies are doing what they always did, but the wheels of mechanical civilisation are ever accelerating.” the wheels of mechanical civilisation Stevenson: “… contemporary changes in forms of transport were more responsible than the thinkers... for the new sense of time in Western man” (118). JR 49: “What can this sorrow be”-- FlanderFlanders & a Lost Generation. (JR 29) The empty room (JR 39)

Modernization and Modernité Air: “The laughter died in the air” (JR 44).died in the air GasGas (14) Zeppelins AirplanesAirplanes (better known as “flying coffins”) Death’s Head Moth (23) Richtofen’s Flying Circus (Dogfights)Flying Circus Sea (22) Submarines The Lusitania (JR 48)Lusitania Land Guns Tanks Young men who will never grow old (JR 43).men Jacob’s LadderJacob’s Ladder & the issue of salvation. (JR 62)salvation

The “White Feather” One young woman remembers her father, Robert Smith, being given a feather on his way home from work: "That night he came home and cried his heart out. My father was no coward, but had been reluctant to leave his family. He was thirty-four and my mother, who had two young children, had been suffering from a serious illness. Soon after this incident my father joined the army." army.

Gas casualties at Bethune 1918casualties1918

The Trenches “Given this association between war and sex, and given the deprivation and loneliness and alienation characteristic of the soldier’s experience …we will not be surprised to find both the actuality and the recall of front-line experience replete with what we can call the homoerotic…. a sublimated… form of temporary homosexuality. Of the active, unsublimated kind there was very little at the front” (Fussell 272)

The dead Military Casualties in World War I Belgium 45,550 British Empire 942,135 France 1,368,000 Greece 23,098 Italy 680,000 Japan 1,344 Montenegro 3,000 Portugal 8,145 Romania 300,000 Russia 1,700,000 Serbia 45,000 United States 116,516 Austria-Hungary 1,200,000 Bulgaria 87,495 Germany 1,935,000 Ottoman Empire 725, ,000