Katya's Biweekly Reflections

For this extra blog post, I would like the analyze the line “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” and how it pertains to the three timelines shown in the The Hours . During class, we discussed this line as it pertains to the book, and as I read the book, I came to the conclusion that for Mrs. Dalloway, this act represents one of the few things she can do as an individual. While in society her role is that of Mrs. Richard Dalloway, when she is planning her party, she adopts the role of a hostess and can act more independently of her husband. In the film, this represents something different.   For Virginia Woolf, this line seems to represent a kind of defiance. In the moments before she starts writing Mrs. Dalloway her husband was telling her to eat because the doctors recommended it. He even said that he could make her eat by force if necessary. As soon as he said that, Virginia said “Leonard, I believe I may have a first sentence”. Allowing her main he...

  Like the characters in Mrs. Dalloway, all the people in The Sun Also Rises have been affected by World War I, and they all deal with it in different ways. In this blog post, I would like to explore how the war affected the male characters, mainly Jake, the count, and Robert.   Firstly, we can look at Jake, the narrator and the character we get to know the most. By common sense, we should have gotten to know him quite well since we’re inside his head all the time, but it feels like we know him only at the surface level. Whenever he is at a party, he internally comments on what other people do and say, and when he talks to people, he gives only one-word answers. He never describes his feelings, and it seems like he’s more of an onlooker for most events rather than an active participant. This may largely be due to his injury, which our class decided caused him to be unable to have sex. Although this injury is not visible, it seems to cause him to lose confidence, ...

                In this blog post, I would like to examine the role the doctors played in Septimus’s suicide. Although Dr. Holmes and William Bradshaw are both wrong about Septimus’s illness, they are wrong in drastically different ways.   Dr. Holmes represents the old views of mental health, or rather the non-views of mental health at the time. He believes that since there is nothing wrong with Septimus, he’s just being selfish and should just involve himself in some sports to get better. In fact, he seems a bit overconfident and reinforces typical gender roles. During one of his unannounced visits (something that alone demonstrates his arrogance), he said “‘My dear lady, allow me…’” (145) while pushing Lucrezia aside. This demonstrates his disregard for Lucrezia and other women; she had told him that he can’t see her husband, but Dr. Holmes didn’t listen. She was just another woman getting in the way of his t...