I think Minta does feel that she has lost more than a brooch by agreeing to marry Paul. And I do think that Mrs. R. is more than a little bit responsible ... whatever her intentions, she has meddled ...
Nothing to it, dinner for “15” (Mona: was Mildred included in the 15?), including Lily Briscoe, determined but full of self doubt (why is it usually, “Lily Brasco“ but sometimes just “Lily“?); Mr. Bankes, incorrigible, stubborn; Mrs. Ramsey, ever the mom (sometimes too much so?); Mr. Ramsay, crusty and ill-tempered (Merriam-Webster: a “curmudgeon“); Paul (suffering what “had been far and away the worst moment of his life when he asked Minta to marry him”’, apparently with the encouragement – pressure? – of Mrs. R.), and the all but fearless Minta (“sitting in a tree …”; with what resolve?); the reclusive Nancy, and Andrew, Prue, Jasper (our marksman; beware beloved crows outside the window); Rose, the sensitive little one who loved the pre-dinner “little ceremony of choosing jewels, which was gone through every night“; why did Mrs. R. have negative prognostications? “Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed“); and, also “sitting in a tree”, the “disreputable old bird“ Joseph (with his “very trying, and difficult disposition“) and his crow companion Mary (Mr. and Mrs. R?). The great clangour of the gong called all to assemble in the dining room for dinner. Let the games begin.
Great dinner guest list! I wasn’t keeping track, but I look forward to what others come up with! I’m also intrigued with the way Woolf quilts the endings and beginnings of the chapters into each other and struck by the wildly different lengths of the “chapters.”
In today’s Ch. 13 section, Lily’s sudden moment of perception reads almost as a writing tip from Woolf:
"And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching the children throwing catches."
She perhaps integrates a character's movement to signal deeper meanings. Catching a ball, losing a brooch, (just as Mrs. Ramsey has her daughter choose her own jewelry), being afraid of a bull (just before they sit down to the Bœuf en Daube). The small physical movements of daily life move into high relief amid so much stream-of-consciousness. Much like a painter chooses specific brush strokes......or maybe I’m looking too hard for clues as to how Woolf manages to do all of this!
Jennifer, this is beautiful. Funnily I had missed the strength of that passage you quoted because I was so struck by the line “So this is marriage..,” which I think wryly hilarious. Also, I love how you’ve pulled together the connections through the objects of jewelry and beef (once a scary cow perhaps ...).
Re-reading the pages again with this passage, it also strikes me again how out of left field and hilarious it is the line about Mr. Ramsey laughing out loud about Hume and some bog. It’s so apt, their long togetherness involves side by side physical presence and internal distance, each absorbed in own thoughts.
I am often finding Woolf really funny and I’m surprised by this. Or, I might be on my own island reading her this way. :)
To your point about small movements inflating to become much larger focal points--the stream-of-consciousness bits often feel like watching a scene in a movie that suddenly switches into slow motion. I get so wrapped up in the slowed down and very specific moment the text is dwelling on, and I forget the context, how we made it there in the first place. The concrete physical movements are great at pulling me back from those slowed down moments and back to a reality in which I can re-steady myself before diving into the next moment of slow contemplation and chaos. These moments are absolutely necessary to prevent the readers--or at least this reader--from getting lost in all of the rambling thoughts.
As a newcomer to this lovely novel made up of profoundly thought provoking stream of consciousness, I am wondering if here we see some intriguing romantic plot turn:
This feels to me like infatuation:
"Certainly, Nancy had gone with them, since Minta Doyle had asked it with her dumb look, holding out her hand, as Nancy made off, after lunch, to her attic, to escape the horror of family life. She supposed she must go then. She did not want to go. She did not want to be drawn into it all. For as they walked along the road to the cliff Minta kept on taking her hand. Then she would let it go. Then she would take it again. What was it she wanted? Nancy asked herself. There was something, of course, that people wanted; for when Minta took her hand and held it, Nancy, reluctantly, saw the whole world spread out beneath her, as if it were Constantinople seen through a mist, and then, however heavyeyed one might be, one must needs ask, 'Is that Santa Sofia?' 'Is that the Golden Horn?” So Nancy asked, when Minta took her hand. 'What is it that she wants? Is it that?' And what was that? Here and there emerged from the mist (as Nancy looked down upon life spread beneath her) a pinnacle, a dome; prominent things, without names. But when Minta dropped her hand, as she did when they ran down the hillside, all that, the dome, the pinnacle, whatever it was that had protruded through the mist, sank down into it and disappeared."
("Escape the horror of family life" made me smile.)
This feels like the hornet's sting of jealousy and disappointed infatuation:
"And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in, so she leapt splashing through the shallow waves on to the shore and ran up the beach and was carried by her own impetuosity and her desire for rapid movement right behind a rock and there—oh, heavens! in each other’s arms, were Paul and Minta kissing probably."
I too wondered whether Mildred might be the 15th person at dinner. Her presence or lack of it, either way, says something significant about class within the family.
I very much doubt Mildred would join them - it was not the done thing with servants, no matter their status among the household employees, or longevity of service. I suspect “dinner for 15” just sounded better than “dinner for 14,” and was also Mrs. R’s general mindset about the approximate size of the party she was hosting. We also learned that she was prone to exaggeration. What a lovely little surprising piece of self-characterization as she plays the exaggeration game with Jasper!
I’m sure you’re right. And the Ramsays had maids, too. Had they welcomed all the help at the dinner table they’d probably have been treated as pariahs by their peers.
Only on looking over the chapters again did I notice that all of Chapter 15 is a parenthetical aside. It makes me wonder why the reader needs to take this digression into the story of Paul and Minta (Nancy and Andrew) in light of the rest of the novel (which I have never read before). I mean, I enjoyed the little jaunt, the budding romance, the sudden "manly" behavior of Paul and Andrew when the brooch is lost--but I wonder why I'm taking this side-journey. And I wonder why Paul's proposal was the worst moment of his life--and I'm irritated by that I have no idea how old Nancy actually is (or Andrew). I wish Woolf gave readers just a little more characterization. Just reading the book without any supplements (and trying to avoid spoilers), I had no idea the characters were on holiday on the Isle of Skye. I just didn't know where they were or what they were doing there. (These complaints do not mean I am not loving the book and enjoying this conversation though).
Now that I'm read the incredible Nussbaum essay (thank you, Anthony for the recommendation), I can only see how much characters don't know what other characters' motivations are. Why is Cam running? Why is Nancy miserable in her family? Why is Paul unhappy to have proposed? Why does Rose like doing the jewelry picking every night? No one truly knows anyone's else's mind or motives.
Nussbaum's essay makes me feel like the novel is more a philosophical-thought-and-aesthetic-experiment than a "novel" (not that this is a bad thing). Again, I'm enjoying the experience--just questioning it as well.
First time reader as well, but I do not mind the lack of background on the characters; adds to the intrigue. Hemmingway’s iceberg theory comes to mind.
this is my 4th read, and I'm not sure I new (or remember) that they were on holiday! I think your comment is about lack of characterization is true of most modernist novels. Even the 7 volumes of Proust hit's hard to get a sense of Marcel in the way you get from most novels. I suspect these novelists are trying to put the reader in the position of knowing people only from thoughts and observations.
This is my first read and I think one would gain so much by re-reading it. There was this great swipe of energy w the running entrance of Cam and I flipped back to see who this boy was (my brother is named Cameron) and saw the prior references with little bits of characterization that I had not retained amidst both reading and trying to make sense of what’s going on. I think a few more details, perhaps just ref to two week holiday on the island, I don’t know, would aid the reader and give them more bandwidth to take in the spectacular shifting insights and POVs.
Among all the activities of beach walks and dinner preparations, and the searching for a lost brooch or choosing of the best necklace, there is an undercurrent of loneliness in each character. “We might all sit down and cry,” Minta feels but doesn’t know what for, and Mrs. Ramsay reflects that all feelings felt for oneself make one sad.
Mrs. Ramsay seems like a life force, fostering pairings, love, life, increase. But to what extent is she also fostering conventional roles, roles that limited the agency of women, especially. Thinking back to Section IX. She says an unmarried woman has missed the best of life, and she doesn’t take Lily’s painting seriously.
two friends have asked me to officiate their wedding. In looking for good marriage quotes, I'm compiling a list of quotes I can't use during the ceremony for their anniversary. I'll add to the "can't use" list: "So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.”
“Did Nancy go with them?” - repeated over and over. Mrs. Ramsey's dread is both irrational/unwarranted and natural fear of the life's impermanence (which will proved up by the novel's end). The whole "kids go to the ocean, Mrs. Ramsey is worried, but nothing happens" subplot seems like another example of VW's theme that traditional plot's are kind of and embarrassment. In most novels some bad would have happened, or there be some adventure the became a focal point. But here the scene (fairly long in such short novel) is just another ripple.
...divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one’s mother at Rose’s age.” Children unbury thoughts of our own childhoods.
Mr. Ramsay feels he is, or fears feeling is, inadequate, a failure as a philosopher/thinker. Or so he says to his wife. (Or is this Mrs. Ramsay repeating his statement verbatim or is it her intuiting what he means to say (ch 7) ?).
Likewise Mrs. Ramsay reports she feels inadequate as the recipient of Rose's feelings, because "what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was" and "it was so inadequate, what one could give in return" (p 81).
The sadness in that, the feeling of inadequacy to her children’s feelings, when she really understands their depths of feeling and could have a moment of connection, but, perhaps, I guess it’s more that she knows about her own depths and bats them away with action.
This line caught my attention: “...however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.”
Hmm..an oddly familiar thought. Something akin to the way it can occasionally feel as a writer to read Woolf? At least now I have words to describe how it can feel: “hopelessly discontented.”
I got a late start and am playing catch-up but had to respond to this - it is exactly how I'm feeling! Reading Woolf makes my writing feel like a Dick and Jane book!
did she accept his proposal?
Yes ... and we’ll get a chance to see how the marriage worked out.
I think Minta does feel that she has lost more than a brooch by agreeing to marry Paul. And I do think that Mrs. R. is more than a little bit responsible ... whatever her intentions, she has meddled ...
Nothing to it, dinner for “15” (Mona: was Mildred included in the 15?), including Lily Briscoe, determined but full of self doubt (why is it usually, “Lily Brasco“ but sometimes just “Lily“?); Mr. Bankes, incorrigible, stubborn; Mrs. Ramsey, ever the mom (sometimes too much so?); Mr. Ramsay, crusty and ill-tempered (Merriam-Webster: a “curmudgeon“); Paul (suffering what “had been far and away the worst moment of his life when he asked Minta to marry him”’, apparently with the encouragement – pressure? – of Mrs. R.), and the all but fearless Minta (“sitting in a tree …”; with what resolve?); the reclusive Nancy, and Andrew, Prue, Jasper (our marksman; beware beloved crows outside the window); Rose, the sensitive little one who loved the pre-dinner “little ceremony of choosing jewels, which was gone through every night“; why did Mrs. R. have negative prognostications? “Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed“); and, also “sitting in a tree”, the “disreputable old bird“ Joseph (with his “very trying, and difficult disposition“) and his crow companion Mary (Mr. and Mrs. R?). The great clangour of the gong called all to assemble in the dining room for dinner. Let the games begin.
Great annotated cast list! You’re fast!
Anthony Domestico mentioned it on Day 4 discussion, I believe. I found the article on Jstor (my school subscribes), but mary g posted a link:
http://newliteraryhistory.org/articles/26-4-Martha_Nussbaum.pdf
Great dinner guest list! I wasn’t keeping track, but I look forward to what others come up with! I’m also intrigued with the way Woolf quilts the endings and beginnings of the chapters into each other and struck by the wildly different lengths of the “chapters.”
In today’s Ch. 13 section, Lily’s sudden moment of perception reads almost as a writing tip from Woolf:
"And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching the children throwing catches."
She perhaps integrates a character's movement to signal deeper meanings. Catching a ball, losing a brooch, (just as Mrs. Ramsey has her daughter choose her own jewelry), being afraid of a bull (just before they sit down to the Bœuf en Daube). The small physical movements of daily life move into high relief amid so much stream-of-consciousness. Much like a painter chooses specific brush strokes......or maybe I’m looking too hard for clues as to how Woolf manages to do all of this!
Quilts is the perfect word for Woolf’s method.
Or stitches together. Love it.
Jennifer, this is beautiful. Funnily I had missed the strength of that passage you quoted because I was so struck by the line “So this is marriage..,” which I think wryly hilarious. Also, I love how you’ve pulled together the connections through the objects of jewelry and beef (once a scary cow perhaps ...).
Re-reading the pages again with this passage, it also strikes me again how out of left field and hilarious it is the line about Mr. Ramsey laughing out loud about Hume and some bog. It’s so apt, their long togetherness involves side by side physical presence and internal distance, each absorbed in own thoughts.
I am often finding Woolf really funny and I’m surprised by this. Or, I might be on my own island reading her this way. :)
She is often very funny, and very few people talk about this
To your point about small movements inflating to become much larger focal points--the stream-of-consciousness bits often feel like watching a scene in a movie that suddenly switches into slow motion. I get so wrapped up in the slowed down and very specific moment the text is dwelling on, and I forget the context, how we made it there in the first place. The concrete physical movements are great at pulling me back from those slowed down moments and back to a reality in which I can re-steady myself before diving into the next moment of slow contemplation and chaos. These moments are absolutely necessary to prevent the readers--or at least this reader--from getting lost in all of the rambling thoughts.
I love the connections you have drawn.
As a newcomer to this lovely novel made up of profoundly thought provoking stream of consciousness, I am wondering if here we see some intriguing romantic plot turn:
This feels to me like infatuation:
"Certainly, Nancy had gone with them, since Minta Doyle had asked it with her dumb look, holding out her hand, as Nancy made off, after lunch, to her attic, to escape the horror of family life. She supposed she must go then. She did not want to go. She did not want to be drawn into it all. For as they walked along the road to the cliff Minta kept on taking her hand. Then she would let it go. Then she would take it again. What was it she wanted? Nancy asked herself. There was something, of course, that people wanted; for when Minta took her hand and held it, Nancy, reluctantly, saw the whole world spread out beneath her, as if it were Constantinople seen through a mist, and then, however heavyeyed one might be, one must needs ask, 'Is that Santa Sofia?' 'Is that the Golden Horn?” So Nancy asked, when Minta took her hand. 'What is it that she wants? Is it that?' And what was that? Here and there emerged from the mist (as Nancy looked down upon life spread beneath her) a pinnacle, a dome; prominent things, without names. But when Minta dropped her hand, as she did when they ran down the hillside, all that, the dome, the pinnacle, whatever it was that had protruded through the mist, sank down into it and disappeared."
("Escape the horror of family life" made me smile.)
This feels like the hornet's sting of jealousy and disappointed infatuation:
"And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in, so she leapt splashing through the shallow waves on to the shore and ran up the beach and was carried by her own impetuosity and her desire for rapid movement right behind a rock and there—oh, heavens! in each other’s arms, were Paul and Minta kissing probably."
Am I wrong?
I wondered if Nancy didn’t have some feelings for Minta ...
Yes.
I too wondered whether Mildred might be the 15th person at dinner. Her presence or lack of it, either way, says something significant about class within the family.
I very much doubt Mildred would join them - it was not the done thing with servants, no matter their status among the household employees, or longevity of service. I suspect “dinner for 15” just sounded better than “dinner for 14,” and was also Mrs. R’s general mindset about the approximate size of the party she was hosting. We also learned that she was prone to exaggeration. What a lovely little surprising piece of self-characterization as she plays the exaggeration game with Jasper!
I’m sure you’re right. And the Ramsays had maids, too. Had they welcomed all the help at the dinner table they’d probably have been treated as pariahs by their peers.
Only on looking over the chapters again did I notice that all of Chapter 15 is a parenthetical aside. It makes me wonder why the reader needs to take this digression into the story of Paul and Minta (Nancy and Andrew) in light of the rest of the novel (which I have never read before). I mean, I enjoyed the little jaunt, the budding romance, the sudden "manly" behavior of Paul and Andrew when the brooch is lost--but I wonder why I'm taking this side-journey. And I wonder why Paul's proposal was the worst moment of his life--and I'm irritated by that I have no idea how old Nancy actually is (or Andrew). I wish Woolf gave readers just a little more characterization. Just reading the book without any supplements (and trying to avoid spoilers), I had no idea the characters were on holiday on the Isle of Skye. I just didn't know where they were or what they were doing there. (These complaints do not mean I am not loving the book and enjoying this conversation though).
Now that I'm read the incredible Nussbaum essay (thank you, Anthony for the recommendation), I can only see how much characters don't know what other characters' motivations are. Why is Cam running? Why is Nancy miserable in her family? Why is Paul unhappy to have proposed? Why does Rose like doing the jewelry picking every night? No one truly knows anyone's else's mind or motives.
Nussbaum's essay makes me feel like the novel is more a philosophical-thought-and-aesthetic-experiment than a "novel" (not that this is a bad thing). Again, I'm enjoying the experience--just questioning it as well.
I missed the reference to the essay, can you repeat it?
http://newliteraryhistory.org/articles/26-4-Martha_Nussbaum.pdf
First time reader as well, but I do not mind the lack of background on the characters; adds to the intrigue. Hemmingway’s iceberg theory comes to mind.
this is my 4th read, and I'm not sure I new (or remember) that they were on holiday! I think your comment is about lack of characterization is true of most modernist novels. Even the 7 volumes of Proust hit's hard to get a sense of Marcel in the way you get from most novels. I suspect these novelists are trying to put the reader in the position of knowing people only from thoughts and observations.
This is my first read and I think one would gain so much by re-reading it. There was this great swipe of energy w the running entrance of Cam and I flipped back to see who this boy was (my brother is named Cameron) and saw the prior references with little bits of characterization that I had not retained amidst both reading and trying to make sense of what’s going on. I think a few more details, perhaps just ref to two week holiday on the island, I don’t know, would aid the reader and give them more bandwidth to take in the spectacular shifting insights and POVs.
Among all the activities of beach walks and dinner preparations, and the searching for a lost brooch or choosing of the best necklace, there is an undercurrent of loneliness in each character. “We might all sit down and cry,” Minta feels but doesn’t know what for, and Mrs. Ramsay reflects that all feelings felt for oneself make one sad.
Mrs. Ramsay seems like a life force, fostering pairings, love, life, increase. But to what extent is she also fostering conventional roles, roles that limited the agency of women, especially. Thinking back to Section IX. She says an unmarried woman has missed the best of life, and she doesn’t take Lily’s painting seriously.
two friends have asked me to officiate their wedding. In looking for good marriage quotes, I'm compiling a list of quotes I can't use during the ceremony for their anniversary. I'll add to the "can't use" list: "So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.”
Actually, I’d find that charming in a wedding speech.
“Did Nancy go with them?” - repeated over and over. Mrs. Ramsey's dread is both irrational/unwarranted and natural fear of the life's impermanence (which will proved up by the novel's end). The whole "kids go to the ocean, Mrs. Ramsey is worried, but nothing happens" subplot seems like another example of VW's theme that traditional plot's are kind of and embarrassment. In most novels some bad would have happened, or there be some adventure the became a focal point. But here the scene (fairly long in such short novel) is just another ripple.
That's funny. I recently officiated a wedding too. I did not quote Woolf. Her view of marriage may be too nuanced for a nuptial ceremony.
...divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one’s mother at Rose’s age.” Children unbury thoughts of our own childhoods.
Yes!
Mr. Ramsay feels he is, or fears feeling is, inadequate, a failure as a philosopher/thinker. Or so he says to his wife. (Or is this Mrs. Ramsay repeating his statement verbatim or is it her intuiting what he means to say (ch 7) ?).
Likewise Mrs. Ramsay reports she feels inadequate as the recipient of Rose's feelings, because "what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was" and "it was so inadequate, what one could give in return" (p 81).
The sadness in that, the feeling of inadequacy to her children’s feelings, when she really understands their depths of feeling and could have a moment of connection, but, perhaps, I guess it’s more that she knows about her own depths and bats them away with action.
This line caught my attention: “...however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.”
Hmm..an oddly familiar thought. Something akin to the way it can occasionally feel as a writer to read Woolf? At least now I have words to describe how it can feel: “hopelessly discontented.”
Yes!
I got a late start and am playing catch-up but had to respond to this - it is exactly how I'm feeling! Reading Woolf makes my writing feel like a Dick and Jane book!