Hey....it's criticism time! (Article 9)

So these next two I'm going to make comment on are sources I used in my essay. There wasn't a whole lot out there that really...pertained to my topic, I guess the best way to put it is. However, Julia Briggs can always be counted on as a slam-dunk, so I checked out her chapter on Mrs. Dalloway in Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life.
     Basically, as with the other chapters in Briggs' book, the chapter focuses on the circumstances, motivations and methods of Woolf when writing Mrs. Dalloway, starting from when it was a short story entitled "Mrs. Dalloway and Bond Street" until it was formed into the classic we all know and...er, perhaps love today. Briggs' states that "Woolf intended her experiment to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery, and uncertainty, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction--its comedy, tragedy, love interest, its concern with secrets, marriage and death." (Briggs, 130) (As an aside, this reminded me of a quote by awesomeness-incarnate comic book writer Alan Moore, most famous for Watchmen and V for Vendetta: "Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky." I think Woolf would have agreed, heh.)  Aaaaaanyways, to do this, she was going to "[relate] events through the conscious-ness of individuals..." (134) which sounds relatively easy but, as we have seen from this class alone, this is not a simple matter of thinking and writing, otherwise maybe everyone would have been doing it, even Woolf's beloved Victorian writers.
          The chapter goes through the main characters with short little analysis of each, like Clarissa's "changing consciousness" (136) and "inconsistency" (137).  I found especially interesting Briggs' relation of Woolf's process of writing Septimus, whom everyone loves. Apparently it was quite a struggle for Woolf to impart, in tangible word form, the drifty, inane nature of madness: "'The mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squint so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it.'" (Briggs, 146, quoting Woolf). This is interesting considering Woolf's own multitudinous experiences with bouts of madness--Briggs mentions that the name "Septimus" could in fact partially derive from the "seven trips into her own inner darkeness, in 1895, 1904, 1910, 1912, 1913, 1915, and...1921." (146) And of course it practically goes without saying that the stupid doctors in the novel are based on Woolf's own experiences with psychiatrists at the time. From there, the chapter goes into more of thematic side of things; madness, of course, and past desire (Walsh and Clarissa interminable affection that cannot be requitted), and same-sex love.
        It's a good chapter; of course it is, what else would it be? And I recommend it, heck any of this book, to anyone who needs historical and mental context to Woolf's writings.