I was interested to learn that Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf had a somewhat vexed relationship. I can see similarities in their work, or at least in their short stories, and wonder to what extent such overlaps were coincidental or deliberate. Lee points out, “Their friendship was intimate but guarded, mutually inspiring but competitive” (381). In light of this, I read specifics in Mansfield differently than I did prior to reading Lee’s work. For example, “Prelude” seems to have much in common with some of Woolf’s short stories, particularly in its use of color, which I must admit, I have begun to focus on as a result of our class discussion on visual art.
Mansfield employs visual descriptions bright with imagery. She says of the interior design in Kezia’s house, “The dining-room window had a square of coloured glass at each corner. One was blue and one was yellow. Kezia bent down to have one more look at the blue lawn with the blue arum lilies growing at the gate, and then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow fence” (82). What this extended quotation illustrates is the prominence of vivid color in Mansfield’s writing. Perhaps this is an element of all writers of the period, or possibly, it was in reading Woolf’s work that Mansfield first saw this technique. Despite the specifics, the proverbial who came first argument, I feel that reading either one of these women can enrich one’s experience when reading the other.
There is one difference which stands out in Mansfield’s work; “Prelude,” “Bliss,” and “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” seem to involve more personal and familial type stories than those included in Woolf’s collected stories. I am well aware that this could be merely a result of the particular stories we have read by each author, but still it strikes me as curious that Mansfield’s stories seem to resonate with family and children while Woolf’s simply do not or at least they do not do so in such an obvious fashion. I wonder if this could be attributed to what Lee explains as a focus of Mansfield on having children. It appears, “Katherine maintained two entirely disparate sets of beliefs in her head: one that she was incurably ill and indeed dying, the other that she would recover, have children, live in the country with Murry and be perfectly happy” (382). I can’t help but see this split most clearly in “Bliss.”
Of course, it is only speculation but I find the mother’s place in the story to be an intriguing one with regard to the observation of Mansfield’s personal life made by Lee. Perhaps the tension that the author felt with regard to having her own family, which seems to culminate in a move to the country, the quintessential space for domesticity and the fear of her own mortality play out in the mother and the nanny in the story. “Bliss” seems to render this split visible in that the child in question is literally a part of the mother but seems as though she is not the child’s guardian in any way. This observation is perhaps clearest when Bertha mutters, “Why have a baby if it has to be kept—not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle—but in another woman’s arms?” (146). Bertha is the child’s mother, but the nanny is the one who is in control. The baby, then, may occupy the unease Mansfield experiences at the thought of having children of her own. It is made clear that the mother in the narrative loves this child. She says, “I’m fond of you. I like you,” but her place seems to be with her husband Harry and the nanny’s, as Bertha knows well, is with the child. Mansfield emphasizes this via dialogue between the two women who I feel may stand in for two distinct facets of her own personhood. The story goes on, “‘You’re wanted on the telephone,’ said Nanny, coming back in triumph and seizing her Little B” (147). I imagine this connection is a reach, but after learning of Woolf’s mental illness and the way in which it may have impacted her work and her life in general, I feel this could be a similar overlap in mental state and literary work. I find it fascinating to construct an explanation regarding one seemingly innocuous plot point in one story, the simultaneous embodiment of and longing for motherhood in “Bliss” and how Mansfield’s own conflicted feelings of having children influence this.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
Virginia Woolf
To be honest, I was not expecting to find Virginia Woolf’s short stories as convoluted as I did, but after reading them and thinking about some of the narrative qualities, I find they appear to be more like journal entries than short fiction. Perhaps they are a hybrid of the two, as Sandra Kemp describes them as “an interior monologue” (62). In Kemp’s article, we also learn that Woolf allowed herself to indulge in short stories such as “The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens,” and “Monday or Tuesday” as a personal indulgence. She explains, “they were written by way of diversion; they were the treats I allowed myself” (63). I find that the way Woolf viewed the work strongly impacts the experience readers will have when they read it.
In several different places within these short stories, we can see the fragmentation commonly associated with modernism as well as what Kemp terms the blending of the “inner and outer voices” (77). I believe what Kemp is referring to here is the near seamless manner whereby the reader can barely distinguish whether they are reading the narrator’s words or a character’s words. I am also including in my reading of this statement the way that Woolf often transitions from one thought to another without clearly distinguishing whose thoughts they are, or perhaps more importantly, if these thoughts belong to a single person or multiple people. For example, the third paragraph of “Monday or Tuesday” contains a largely fragmented passage which exists, I feel, at the intersection of a conversation with another character and a frantic internal dialogue. It reads, “Radiating to a point men’s feet and women’s feet, black or gold encrusted -- (This foggy weather--? No, thank you—The commonwealth of the future)—the firelight darting and making the room red, save for the black figures and their bright eyes” (17). The section continues, but that becomes more streamlined as it goes on.
Another observation I made after reading several of these short stories, and perhaps I would not have been as quick to make this connection had last week’s class not focused on visual arts, was Woolf’s use of color and carefully artistic descriptions of items and images in these works. There is, of course, the titular reference to color in “Blue & Green” which I feel signifies the difference between land and sea, confinement and freedom. The strong emphasis on color and nature pervades nearly every line in “Kew Gardens.” Woolf describes a landscape where there are “leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface” (39). The passage continues to catalogue a “brown earth,” “grey back of a pebble,” “brown circular veins,” and “vast green spaces” (39). To me, the way the first paragraph uses color and depiction coincides with the imagery common to the time period, but also to the paintings of Van Gough and others that we examined last week. I am curious to the extent that Woolf fashioned her descriptions to match the visual representations of place offered in paintings.
The visual arts were something she was immersed in partially because of her family. Kemp details a conversation between Virginia and Vanessa regarding visual arts. She says, “‘I should like you to paint a large, large, picture, where everything would be brought perfectly firmly together, yet all half flying off the canvas in rapture” (62). This statement makes clear the importance of visual art for Virginia Woolf and the values she places on it find their way into her short stories. I also think that the color is used as a means of rich description because its absence frightens Woolf. In a way, her inclusion of color works as a means to preserve what she fears could be lost. Woolf says “‘We shall very soon lose our sense of colour’” (67). Kemp informs us that “she calls this ‘the worst of living in a highly organized community” (67). Because the short stories she wrote were half journal and half fiction, Woolf can address her emotions. She does this in subtle ways like with her abundant use of color rather than by overtly stating her concerns via characters within the narratives of these short stories.
In several different places within these short stories, we can see the fragmentation commonly associated with modernism as well as what Kemp terms the blending of the “inner and outer voices” (77). I believe what Kemp is referring to here is the near seamless manner whereby the reader can barely distinguish whether they are reading the narrator’s words or a character’s words. I am also including in my reading of this statement the way that Woolf often transitions from one thought to another without clearly distinguishing whose thoughts they are, or perhaps more importantly, if these thoughts belong to a single person or multiple people. For example, the third paragraph of “Monday or Tuesday” contains a largely fragmented passage which exists, I feel, at the intersection of a conversation with another character and a frantic internal dialogue. It reads, “Radiating to a point men’s feet and women’s feet, black or gold encrusted -- (This foggy weather--? No, thank you—The commonwealth of the future)—the firelight darting and making the room red, save for the black figures and their bright eyes” (17). The section continues, but that becomes more streamlined as it goes on.
Another observation I made after reading several of these short stories, and perhaps I would not have been as quick to make this connection had last week’s class not focused on visual arts, was Woolf’s use of color and carefully artistic descriptions of items and images in these works. There is, of course, the titular reference to color in “Blue & Green” which I feel signifies the difference between land and sea, confinement and freedom. The strong emphasis on color and nature pervades nearly every line in “Kew Gardens.” Woolf describes a landscape where there are “leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface” (39). The passage continues to catalogue a “brown earth,” “grey back of a pebble,” “brown circular veins,” and “vast green spaces” (39). To me, the way the first paragraph uses color and depiction coincides with the imagery common to the time period, but also to the paintings of Van Gough and others that we examined last week. I am curious to the extent that Woolf fashioned her descriptions to match the visual representations of place offered in paintings.
The visual arts were something she was immersed in partially because of her family. Kemp details a conversation between Virginia and Vanessa regarding visual arts. She says, “‘I should like you to paint a large, large, picture, where everything would be brought perfectly firmly together, yet all half flying off the canvas in rapture” (62). This statement makes clear the importance of visual art for Virginia Woolf and the values she places on it find their way into her short stories. I also think that the color is used as a means of rich description because its absence frightens Woolf. In a way, her inclusion of color works as a means to preserve what she fears could be lost. Woolf says “‘We shall very soon lose our sense of colour’” (67). Kemp informs us that “she calls this ‘the worst of living in a highly organized community” (67). Because the short stories she wrote were half journal and half fiction, Woolf can address her emotions. She does this in subtle ways like with her abundant use of color rather than by overtly stating her concerns via characters within the narratives of these short stories.
Friday, February 8, 2008
The Visual Arts
In reading about the visual arts, I find myself relating everything to poetry and the rules, for lack of a better term, which Eliot and Pound endorsed. I thought this was a bad thing until in my continued reading I found Macleod, Fry, and Goldman making the same connection. I lost count of how many times the Eliot’s objective correlative came up as well as the idea of fragmentation. For example Goldman states, “The Post-Impressionists ‘were not interesting in the discoveries of the Impressionists only so far as these…helped them to express emotions which the objects themselves evoked” (125). This emphasis on art and emotion, however that emotion may be represented, had, for me, not yet been blatantly linked to the emotion evoked by other arts. After these readings though, I feel as if I had failed to realize the most obvious relationship; arts, paintings and sculptures are the visual equivalent of literature.
The painting with its colors and lines connotes feelings and emotions much in the way a written work does—visual arts are the poetry of the eyes. While this may seem obvious to some, I needed the relationship between the poetry of first decades of the twentieth century and Post-Impressionist and Impressionist art to be made irrefutable, by using the language commonly associated with the criticism of the former to describe the latter. Macleod asserts that the visual arts had a great influence on poetry and it is easy to see this when realizing the emphasis on form, innovation, point of view, and emotion in either. Macleod continues to look at individual artists and finds of Picasso with regard to Analytical Cubism that his objects “became hardly recognizable” and saying of Braque and Picasso, “the two artists banned almost all color from their canvases” (200). We must recognize that cubism broke objects into small parts, literally Picasso and the other Post-Impressionalists fragmented images, a most obvious commonality between much of the poetic form indicative of modernism. Also, I read the second portion of this statement as the visual equivalent of the “DON’T’S” which Pound emphasizes in “A retrospect.” The lack of superfluous language and unnecessary words in many ways mimics the lack of color in Picasso’s work. With regard to form, we can see that much like important action in poetry often happening between lines or in the absence rather than presence of words, painting worked in a similar way. Fry describes this by discussing space on a canvas. He says of Cézanne, “Space indeed is his real subject, and his feeling for it is so intense that he could make a design of almost nothing else” (273). This reminds me of the starkness of some modernist poems, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” for example. In this two line poem, the meaning exists in the words which don’t.
It appears that whatever standards and expectations were expected of writers at this time, were also expected of visual artists. Clive Bell begins his “The Artistic Problem” for example, “We all agree now – by ‘we’ I mean intelligent people under sixty – that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art” (102). His statements seem to parallel the desire of critics like Eliot and Pound to create works that were new, but to realize that their greatness must be recognizable and therefore not entirely foreign.
What is perhaps most interesting with regard to the similarities between the visual arts and literature is the representation of emotion. While poetry is supposed to paradoxically embrace and renounce emotion, art exists to foster it. It is in its translation from artists to audience that leaves room for problems. Bell declares, “One man cannot pour an aesthetic experience straight into another” (106). This would appear to evoke Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative, but as Goldman finds of Post-Impressionist arts, “All the emotion and associations’ that the object ‘may be made to convey in poetry were omitted’” (125). Art then does not reside in a place of tension as much modernist poetry does. There is no conflict between the need for emotion and the difficulty in representing it. The art is concerned, according to Goldman, “with the arousal of emotion,” (131) making it, in my opinion, a more accurate medium and one better equipped to traffic in the world of human response.
The painting with its colors and lines connotes feelings and emotions much in the way a written work does—visual arts are the poetry of the eyes. While this may seem obvious to some, I needed the relationship between the poetry of first decades of the twentieth century and Post-Impressionist and Impressionist art to be made irrefutable, by using the language commonly associated with the criticism of the former to describe the latter. Macleod asserts that the visual arts had a great influence on poetry and it is easy to see this when realizing the emphasis on form, innovation, point of view, and emotion in either. Macleod continues to look at individual artists and finds of Picasso with regard to Analytical Cubism that his objects “became hardly recognizable” and saying of Braque and Picasso, “the two artists banned almost all color from their canvases” (200). We must recognize that cubism broke objects into small parts, literally Picasso and the other Post-Impressionalists fragmented images, a most obvious commonality between much of the poetic form indicative of modernism. Also, I read the second portion of this statement as the visual equivalent of the “DON’T’S” which Pound emphasizes in “A retrospect.” The lack of superfluous language and unnecessary words in many ways mimics the lack of color in Picasso’s work. With regard to form, we can see that much like important action in poetry often happening between lines or in the absence rather than presence of words, painting worked in a similar way. Fry describes this by discussing space on a canvas. He says of Cézanne, “Space indeed is his real subject, and his feeling for it is so intense that he could make a design of almost nothing else” (273). This reminds me of the starkness of some modernist poems, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” for example. In this two line poem, the meaning exists in the words which don’t.
It appears that whatever standards and expectations were expected of writers at this time, were also expected of visual artists. Clive Bell begins his “The Artistic Problem” for example, “We all agree now – by ‘we’ I mean intelligent people under sixty – that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art” (102). His statements seem to parallel the desire of critics like Eliot and Pound to create works that were new, but to realize that their greatness must be recognizable and therefore not entirely foreign.
What is perhaps most interesting with regard to the similarities between the visual arts and literature is the representation of emotion. While poetry is supposed to paradoxically embrace and renounce emotion, art exists to foster it. It is in its translation from artists to audience that leaves room for problems. Bell declares, “One man cannot pour an aesthetic experience straight into another” (106). This would appear to evoke Eliot’s idea of the objective correlative, but as Goldman finds of Post-Impressionist arts, “All the emotion and associations’ that the object ‘may be made to convey in poetry were omitted’” (125). Art then does not reside in a place of tension as much modernist poetry does. There is no conflict between the need for emotion and the difficulty in representing it. The art is concerned, according to Goldman, “with the arousal of emotion,” (131) making it, in my opinion, a more accurate medium and one better equipped to traffic in the world of human response.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
"Prufrock"
I wish that I had something profound to say regarding Eliot’s poetry, but the truth is that I find it less compelling than his prose. I was interested to learn after reading Torrens’s essay the applicability of his prose to his poetry. I suppose this may be obvious to some, but I had not made the connection until I read the ways “Hamlet” can be used in conjunction with “Prufrock” to offer an insightful reading of it. To view the poem as a “‘form of emotional relief’ for the author” (48) seems related to the paradox that is present in so much of Eliot’s criticism. The paradox that exists between the need for emotion and release in poetry in a medium which should simultaneously be void of such finds a balance in “Prufrock.”
There is a hopeful tone in the beginning of this poem, “Let us go then, you and I, / when the evening is spread out against the sky” (3). However, the speaker becomes less optimistic as we move into the third stanza. It is at this point that the poem takes a more ominous turn as putrid descriptions punctuate four of the next five lines, such as, “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (3). The “yellow smoke” is reminiscent of Eliot’s scientific explanation in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The chemical reaction here works to shift the tone of the poem from initially positive and pleasant to dingy and desperate.
The descriptively grimy words continue through the third stanza, “pools that stand in drains, / Let fall upon its back in the soot that falls from chimneys” (3). These images which Eliot uses throughout “Prufrock” make the poem, and by extension its author, seem defeated. I think that it is in this way that this particular poem may perfectly illustrate how to be expressive of emotion while still denouncing it. Since the individual describing such dirty things in the poem seems to take steps to distance him from them, one can read the poem as attempting to move away from emotion, but the overall feeling for readers of “Prufrock” is easily that of emotional response.
This poem to me reads like a journey. This is perhaps best illustrated by a multitude of references to time. Time is a theme repeated throughout the work both explicitly and also in more covert ways. Lines such as “And indeed there will be time” and its near verbatim repetition after only two lines, “There will be time, there will be time” (4) signal a long and trying personal journey for readers. Eliot conveys this more subtly in his use of “evenings, mornings, afternoons” (4). The times of day pass in quicker succession than the years of the speaker’s life, but the focus of the passage of time is apparent at many points in the poem.
I find that this emphasis on lifetime may represent Eliot’s desire to relive his own. I do not mean that to suggest that this is a poem about second chances; in fact, I lean towards thinking the opposite. Instead of writing an emotional poem about an individual, “Prufrock” is instead a very dry account of a person. It is the reading of it and the emotions readers bring to it that make the poem seemingly full of emotion. It is in this way that Eliot’s work can survive his own nearly impossible requirements, to be at once pushing away from emotion yet truly able to express it.
Lines like “I grow old…I grow old…” do not necessarily have any emotional connotation; they are straight forward observations. However, when written alongside the rest of the unemotional equally straight forward lines in “Prufrock,” they begin to have a greater meaning. Although this work is less fragmented than say The Waste Land, the way in which the pieces fit make the whole nearly unrelated to the fragments which make it up.
There is a hopeful tone in the beginning of this poem, “Let us go then, you and I, / when the evening is spread out against the sky” (3). However, the speaker becomes less optimistic as we move into the third stanza. It is at this point that the poem takes a more ominous turn as putrid descriptions punctuate four of the next five lines, such as, “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (3). The “yellow smoke” is reminiscent of Eliot’s scientific explanation in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The chemical reaction here works to shift the tone of the poem from initially positive and pleasant to dingy and desperate.
The descriptively grimy words continue through the third stanza, “pools that stand in drains, / Let fall upon its back in the soot that falls from chimneys” (3). These images which Eliot uses throughout “Prufrock” make the poem, and by extension its author, seem defeated. I think that it is in this way that this particular poem may perfectly illustrate how to be expressive of emotion while still denouncing it. Since the individual describing such dirty things in the poem seems to take steps to distance him from them, one can read the poem as attempting to move away from emotion, but the overall feeling for readers of “Prufrock” is easily that of emotional response.
This poem to me reads like a journey. This is perhaps best illustrated by a multitude of references to time. Time is a theme repeated throughout the work both explicitly and also in more covert ways. Lines such as “And indeed there will be time” and its near verbatim repetition after only two lines, “There will be time, there will be time” (4) signal a long and trying personal journey for readers. Eliot conveys this more subtly in his use of “evenings, mornings, afternoons” (4). The times of day pass in quicker succession than the years of the speaker’s life, but the focus of the passage of time is apparent at many points in the poem.
I find that this emphasis on lifetime may represent Eliot’s desire to relive his own. I do not mean that to suggest that this is a poem about second chances; in fact, I lean towards thinking the opposite. Instead of writing an emotional poem about an individual, “Prufrock” is instead a very dry account of a person. It is the reading of it and the emotions readers bring to it that make the poem seemingly full of emotion. It is in this way that Eliot’s work can survive his own nearly impossible requirements, to be at once pushing away from emotion yet truly able to express it.
Lines like “I grow old…I grow old…” do not necessarily have any emotional connotation; they are straight forward observations. However, when written alongside the rest of the unemotional equally straight forward lines in “Prufrock,” they begin to have a greater meaning. Although this work is less fragmented than say The Waste Land, the way in which the pieces fit make the whole nearly unrelated to the fragments which make it up.
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