Lecture notes
Modern Fiction: 'Good Morning, Midnight' and 'Mrs Dalloway' Lecture 3 Notes
- Module
- Modern Fiction
- Institution
- University Of Leeds (UoL)
Some notes from Andrew Warnes on 'Good Morning, Midnight' and 'Mrs Dalloway'.
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07/10/2024‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘Good Morning, Midnight’ Lecture 3
1. City
2. Interiority (way in which the novels capture this interior consciousness)
3. Gender and Feminist Theory - exposes us to a female autonomy which is able to
withstand the patriarchy imposes upon the female protagonists.
1. City:
‘Mrs Dalloway’
● Early modernist idea comes from Charles Baudelaire
● City is a playground / place of adventure / unpredictable encounter - act of freedom
● Idea city is a New Frontier / a place of mystery and unexpected connections e.g.
Sherlock Holmes’ ‘Opium Den’.
● ‘Mrs Dalloway’ - how the city, as a space of adventure, works for a single woman.
Clarissa enjoys the freedoms and the sights. Fundamentally different activity for her
and wandering the city can be seen as a gendered activity in ‘Mrs Dalloway’.
● Daytime, ‘official’, civic London in ‘Mrs Dalloway’.
● Peter Walsh on ‘Buckingham Palace: ‘a child with a box of bricks could have done
better’.
● Peter Walsh on Whitehall: ‘all the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the
black, the spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them’.
● Conjuring idea of public, official London - monumentalism of the city of imperial
London and imperial Paris.
● Different perspectives respond to this grand narrative of public daytime in London.
● Clarissa Dalloway on shopping: ‘But what was she dreaming as she looked into
Hatchard’s window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in
the country, as she read in the book spread open: ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages’. Another feature of London that remains intact.
Captures this idea of the lone protagonist, in solitude, in the busy space of the
metropolis, urban yearning for a loss state of nature e.g. William Butler Yeats’ ‘The
Lake Isle of Innisfree’, an example of this, lonely poet in Dublin. Links with armistice
and the ravages of war which becomes more apparent.
● One of the innovations of ‘Mrs Dalloway’, subsequent in the immediate generation
after Virginia Woolf right up to present time. The use of the past continuous tense.
Woolf uses this formulation to create a vivid, more intense evocation of
consciousness in action. This kind of active transformation.
‘Good Morning, Midnight’
● As title indicates - movement of daytime to nighttime and move away from imperial,
official city.
● Non-descriptive, interchangeable hotels and restaurants. Very interior city. The
descriptions of indoors and bedrooms really pervade this text. Consumer capitalist
city.
● Focus upon female writers who had moderate success.
● Title was apt - published not long before.
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