“The Window” Sections 7-10

Questions?

Allusions What do they add -- ◦ if you are unfamiliar with what is being alluded to? ◦ If you become familiar with the original text?  Example: Charge of the Light Brigade

Water II Consciousness II Text floating objects  actions  conversation  allusions surface of the water sea creatures  consciousness  memory  original texts depths of the sea more sea life  the subconscious

Allusions What allusion is Woolf using in Sections 7-10?

Grimm’s Fairy Tale: The Fisherman and his Wife Introduced in Section 7 alluded to (she reads a passage) ◦ in Section 8 (“the water was quite purple, and dark blue”), ◦ in Section 9 (Mr. Bankes mentions it), ◦ in Section 10 “’Well, said the wife, ‘if you won’t be King, I will…’” “For my wife, good Isabil,/Wills not as I’d have her will’”; “the sky was pitch black”). Underlies …is floating, in a sense, through these sections

Read first pages of Section 7 What has she created? What is this relationship like? What is Woolf portraying here about the Victorian marriage through this particular couple? Is Mrs. Ramsay as much of an artist as Lily? Sterility vs. fecundity

The Fisherman and his Wife

What connections do you see between the novel and the story? This is a feminist novel. What would be an anti-feminist reading of the fairy tale? A feminist reading? Is Mrs. Ramsay like the Fisherman’s wife?

Read first pages of Section 7 What has Mrs. Ramsay created? Is she god-like here? ◦ “Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all aglow…” (59) ◦ “…the rapture of successful creation” (61) What really drives Mrs. Ramsay? ◦ “That was what she minded…that she was suspected; and that all this desire of her to give, to help, was vanity” (41, 65) ◦ “Wishing to dominate, wishing to interfere, making people do what she wished – that was the charge against her” (57, 88) ◦ “A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her” (59, 92)

Lily and Mrs. Ramsay’s desire for connection For Mrs. Ramsay: “two notes sounding together” (39, 61) For Lily: “how life, from being made up of little separate incidents…became curled and whole like a wave…” (73) “for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired…nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself” (79) “how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left” (83) “that one could walk away down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with someone” (83)

Lily’s picture Section IX, page 75, page 81 “she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that” (77)

Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley Mrs. Ramsay is wondering when they will come back