Summary Mrs Dalloway & Their Eyes Were Watching God Context and Quotes by theme
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Course
Comparative and contextual study
Institution
OCR
Context and quotes including analysis for Mrs Dalloway and Their Eyes Were Watching God for A-Level English Literature. Analysis develops the context and allows for interpretations to be made, particularly useful for developing essays and essay plans exploring purpose and background of both novels.
Identity
- Bloomsbury group: exploring less conventional relationships ‘Angel in the House’
- Hurston’s choice of colloquial language - affirming a black, working class Southern
identity
- ‘Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means tuh live mine.”
- Clarissa finding her identity with Sally Seton - female relationships incorporate
identity
- Isolation of marriage - not knowing/having identity without husband - Janie being
known as Mrs Starks or the mayor’s wife rather than Janie; ‘This being Mrs Dalloway;
not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Clarissa Dalloway’ - “everyone gives up
something when they marry”
- Finding purpose in life - Clarissa hosting parties to feel needed, important ‘The
makings of a perfect hostess’ - makes her upset; Janie having to run the shop when
she is married to Joe - moves away when she is with Tea Cake - finding purpose for
herself
- Janie’s sexual awakening
- “Ah didn’t know ah wuzn’t white till ah was round six years old” - search for
identity/finding role in society
- Passive approach to life - “waiting for the world to be made” (Their eyes); Clarissa
waiting - theme of time in ‘Mrs Dalloway’
- Isolation of life in general “She felt far away from things and lonely”
- In 1973 Alice Walker found Hurston’s unmarked grave and paid for a headstone -
called her the ‘matriarch of black literature’
- Racial segregation laws in southern america - Jim Crow laws
Gender
- “Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing”
- “Interested in politics like a man” - women desiring stereotypically masculine features
- ‘Angel in the House’ - Woolf wanted to “Kill the angel in the house”
- career / role in the future - Elizabeth Dalloway not wanting the same as her mother
- Clarissa as a housewife - “Makings of a perfect hostess”; Janie being forced to
conform to what Joe wants of her - her braided hair is symbolic of how she is
restricted within their marriage - finds better gender balance when she is with Tea
Cake
- Men objectifying/controlling women - Joe controlling everything about his relationship
with Janie; Peter Walsh following woman he finds attractive - objectifying her
because of his desires - ‘A Room of One’s Own’ essay - the Suffrage movement
“must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion”
- American women got the vote in 1920 but many black men and women were
still unable to vote due to racial discrimination in voting
- ‘Sweat’ - revolutionary because of its feminist themes and dialogue about the
consequences of seeking independence as a black woman
- The ‘new woman’ of the 1890s - Sally Seton’s embodiment of this - age of ‘flapper
girls’ - single women felt empowered , middle-class wives had the same expectations
pre and post WWI
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