"saw faces laughing at him,
calling him horrible disgusting
names, from the walls"
The Yellow Wallpaper
Nota:
Faces in the wallpaper
"first, that trees are alive;
next, there is no crime; next,
love, universal love"
Leonard Woolf
Nota:
"What tends to break one down, to reduce on to gibbering despair when one is dealing with mental illness, is the terrible sanity of the insane"
"for one must be scientific,
above all scientific"
"his body was
macerated until
only the nerve
fibres were left"
Quick
moving
through
ideas
Nota:
Woolf moves through Septimus' ideas very quickly, so that the reader feels as if they are being hurtled through this experience of insanity. Shows how he is thinking
"like a drowned sailor ona rock. I leant over the edge
of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the
sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive"
"two dogs playing on
a hearth-rug... they had
to be together, share
with each other"
Evans "undemonstrative in the
company of women"
"congratulated
himself upon feeling
very little and very
reasonably... he
could not feel"
"he gave in"
"the sin for which
human nature had
condemned him to
death... the verdict
on such a wretch"
"Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned,
deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there
was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom
which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of
course; the brute with the red nostrils had won"
Rezia
"But for herself she had done nothing wrong.
she had loved Septimus; she had been
happy... Why should she suffer?"
Dr Holmes
"Dr Holmes said there was
nothing the matter with him"
Virginia's experience
Nota:
"Doctors "know absolutely nothing"
Hermione Lee
Nota:
"competition of languages is one of the plots of Mrs Dalloway"
"This is a life of heroism, not of oppression"
"Leonard made Virginia's illness one of his life works"
Elaine Showalter
Nota:
"Septimus feels so much because others feel so little"
"His grief and introspection are emotions that consigned to the feminine"
"as soldiers returned to take over their former places as social leaders, women returned to their former places as primary psychiatric patients"
"human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor
charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure
of the moment. They hunt in packs."
"health is largely a matter
in our own control"
"Human nature, in short, was on him - the
repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils"
The War
"change a face in two
years from a pink innocent
oval to a face lean,
contracted, hostile"
"Every one has friends who were
killed in the War. Every one gives up
something when they marry."
"The millions
lamented; for
ages they had
sorrowed"
"when something happened which threw
out many of Mr Brewer's calculations... so
prying and insidious were the fingers of the
European War"
"He went to France to save
an England which consisted
almost entirely of
Shakespeare's plays and
Miss Isabel Pole"
Britishness
Hugh
"the most sublime respect
for the British aristocracy of
any human being"
"represented all that
was most detestable in
British middle-class life"
"No country but England
could have produced him"
"snob"
"obsequious"
"a little job at court"
Richard
"a bit thick in the
head; yes; but a
thorough good sort"
"He ought to have been
a country gentleman"
"no decent man ought to read
Shakespeare's sonnets because it
was like listening at keyholes"
"Never had he seen London look so
enchanting... the richness; the greenness,
the civilization"
Sally
"the last person in the world one would
have expected to marry a rich man and live
in a large house near Manchester, the wild,
the daring, the romantic Sally""
Peter
"No, no, no! He was
not in love with her
any more!"
Clarissa
"she was straight
as a dart, a little
rigid in fact"
"With twice his wits, she had to see things
through his eyes - one of the tragedies of
married life. With a mind of her own, she must
always be quoting Richard"
"doing good for the sake of goodness"
"Still, one got over things"
"Beauty was everywhere"
"it was extraordinary how vividly it
all came back to him, things he
hadn't thought of for years"
"that woman's gift,
of making a world of
her own wherever
she happened to be"
"Life itself, every moment of it, every
drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the
sun, in Regent's Park, was enough. Too
mcuh, indeed. A whole lifetime was too
short to bring out... the full flavour"
"Voice of an
ancient spring
spouting from the
earth"
"the world itself is without meaning"
"The secret signal which one
generation passes, under
disguise, to the next is
loathing, hatred, despair"
"Love between man and woman
was repulsive to Shakespeare.
The business of copulation was
filth to him before the end."