As requested, some suggestions for further reading. To limit the illimitable field of “cool stuff to read related to modernism,” I’ll stick to a few headings:

cutting room floor:

Here are some classics that didn’t fit for various reasons:

• Ulysses: you’ve heard me talk about it ad nauseam. Joyce’s work is endlessly fascinating, from Dubliners to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Finnegan’s Wake, but it’s Ulysses that immediately struck readers as shattering the boundaries of the novel in 1922 and still gobsmacks readers with its range, allusiveness, humor, and fidelity, in a way, to Homer.
• Heart of Darkness: Conrad is exemplary (and/or notorious) for so many reasons: he’s a Polish man who wrote in French and English; his novels pushed the boundaries of the realist novel in its “early” stages; and his representations of colonialism have been a touchstone–often with seething rage and biting humor–for postcolonial writers seeking to claim their individual and collective stories from colonialist oppressors.
• In Our Time: Hemingway has become something of a cliché to us, but IOT is a phenomenal example of the modernist “story cycle” (like Cane, Winesburg, Ohio, and Go Down, Moses), one that intersperses masterful short stories of post-WWI life with fragments from the War, conveying a sense of trauma and fragmentation on the page.
• The Making of Americans: Gertrude Stein’s tome that radically reinvents the novel form in a massive tome that tells the story, sort of, of two American families but that, more profoundly, mediates on narration itself, on the pleasures and modes of being that writing can bring about. As Stein puts it herself:

and so then I will go on writing, and not for myself and for any other one but because it is a thing I certainly can be earnestly doing with sometimes excited feeling and sometimes happy feeling and sometimes longing feeling and sometimes almost indifferent feeling and always with a little dubious feeling.

• Nightwood: Djuna Barnes’s novel that’s part of Ty Miller’s “late modernism” and has become a classic in “queer studies.”
• Cane: Jean Toomer’s strange and wonderful novel-like text from the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro movement migrates through genres (poetry, song lyrics, narrative prose), regions (rural Georgia, NYC, DC, and back to GA), and registers (vernacular Southern speech, fragmentary stream-of-consciousness).

If you liked James, you’ll love…

• more James: the novels typical of James’s “late style” are often cited as a point of origin for modernism in the novel. The Ambassadors is James’s masterpiece, for my money, a novel obsessed with## migration, boundaries of all kinds, from aesthetic to erotic to moral to geographical, and above all with representation itself, in a rich instance of modernist self-reflexiveness. Also might dip into The Golden Bowl or experimental prose writing like the marvelous and challenging The American Scene, which features some of the best writing about turn-of-the-century NYC in existence.
• Edith Wharton’s work extends the Jamesian inheritance in many ways: not as formally experimental, but at least as invested in exploring the New Woman and other faces of modernity in ways that recall Masie. Check out Age of Innocence or Custom of the Country: the latter is the closest kin to Masie in terms of theme.

Woolf? Who’s afraid?!

• I think here the only answer is more Woolf: The Waves is the most deliriously experimental, interlacing the free indirect discourse of six narrators over an entire lifecourse. The beginning is one of the most daring depictions of childhood consciousness I know in ways that will remind you of Faulkner.
• To the Lighthouse is also splendid and probably the most like Dalloway in terms of perspective: also focused on a matron of high social station around the time of the Great War. I’ve thought about its representation of the “pause” of all normal social life during the War many times during the pandemic!
• Woolf’s prose writings are also wonderful: like T. S Eliot and Ezra Pound and others, she was a “double threat,” as deft a critic as she was a novelist. The compilation Genius and Ink is a good place to start.

Faulkner

• Where to start? For many critics, the “big five” are The Sound and the Fury, AILD, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. You could do worse than attack them in that order: TSAF is as good an exemplar of modernist prose as Ulysses or Dalloway. Beginning with LIA Faulkner turns to themes of race and Southern history with a vengeance: AA! is one of the most profound explorations of the slave system I know. And pick up Edouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi as your guide: if there’s one book I most wish I’d written, that’s probably it.

McKay

• Banjo is part of a trilogy of related novels of vagabondage around the “Black Atlantic”: the others are Home to Harlem and Banana Bottom. I’m interested, as I mentioned in class, in the linkages between McKay and the “bottom dogs” tradition associated with Edward Dahlberg: you might check out his Bottom Dogs and From Flushing to Cavalry, books fascinated with the unproductive and sordid side of life in ways that anticipate some of the themes of the Beats, for whom Dahlberg was something of an elder statesman.

West

• West wrote two other slim novels: The Dream Life of Balso Snell was written when West was an undergraduate and is basically an extended poop joke joined with mock-classical tropes and the setting of the Trojan Horse story. A Cool Million is West’s send-up of Horatio Alger’s novels: subtitled “the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin,” it narrates the (literal) disassembly of an “average Joe” amid the nascent home-grown fascism of 1930s US culture. Sound timely? It is!

There’s more where that came from, of course, and it’s biased towards the US side of the puddle, but that should keep you all busy for a while! Have a great summer and keep in touch!

James first offers that Masie has been divided as he states “in two and the portions tossed impartially to the disputants” (James 3). In King Solomon’s story, the child being torn apart is subjected to death by division. One part mutilated and torn apart for one mother, and the rest for the other. Although James frames Masie’s situation as such, I can’t help but ask whether her freedom arises from the same division that is meant to destroy her. Masie’s division allowed her to be part of both her careless mother’s life while also being with her distanced father. In this process Masie is able to see more than initially intended. If Masie would have grown in a perfect home with two loving parents, her level of understanding would have been significantly reduced to that of a normal child’s. Masie is anything but normal and this division is essentially what makes Masie, Masie. It’s the premise of what she knew and what she was exposed to. 

In his article “The ” Partagé Child” and the Emergence of the Modernist Novel in What Maisie Knew”, Phillip speaks of this multiplicity of information and knowledge accessible to Masie. He writes “As Maisie seeks to contain this excess in others, dividing her already divided interior in order to make room for the interiors of others, so too does the novel divide itself upon her, creating an ever-increasing split consciousness.” (Phillips 107). Masie, already divided, makes even more room within herself to absorb everything around her. She discovers the art of being silent, of withholding and understands the power she holds with the knowledge she receives. Phillip highlights this point so strongly when he says “They imagine a child with an interior, but that interior is perfectly empty, perfectly porous, and strikingly inanimate. In truth, it is an interior belonging not to its child host but to her parents.” (Phillips 100). Masie understands the power she holds as an empty vessel, yet takes the power away from their hands and into hers. Stripped of her innocence, she is free to choose. Exposed to the morally right and wrong yet seeing both at play in her life, she chooses to make her own rules as everyone already had made their own. She understands that her limitation is no longer held by those around her as they are all equally disqualified from navigating her through life. 

In her division, she is no longer perfectly whole. She is no longer able to retain the entirety of what is being poured into her, rather she is torn apart and granted the opportunity to release the rotten, the dirty, all that does not benefit her. Dismembered, she is able to decide where she wants to go, which source she wants to tap into, which side of her she chooses to embrace. She is no longer held or restricted by the wholeness she is intended to have, the wholeness her parents wished to pour into.

Social constructionism is a theory that states that what we know as normal, right, or good is really just a shared assumption of what we as a society think is correct. As time passes, these shared assumptions become more like the truth and way of life. Anything that contradicts this set of beliefs is immediately deemed as wrong. When looking at What Masie Knew by Henry James, we see that Masie was instructed to believe and think a certain way. Her governesses had the most responsibility of teaching her with both formal and informal education. As a child, Masie struggled with her innocence. She grew up in a toxic environment where neither of her parents cared very much about her. She was exposed to the idea of affairs and learned that people who she should be looking up to were actually doing things she was being taught was wrong.

Often children are viewed as innocent and naive, almost as if they know nothing of the world. Often they are disregarded as less than due to their lack of understanding of the ways in which the world works. Masie was viewed in the same way. A lot of emphases was placed on Masie’s idea of what was right and wrong. However, in reality, we as a society have built a set of rules that don’t inherently make sense. We base everything that happens in this world on the social constructs we have built together. We’re not innately born with an understanding of how the world works, we are taught it. If each child was born into a different society, each would have their own understanding of the way the world works. This happens when Masie is aware of Miss Overmore’s affair. Masie is taught that an affair is wrong because when one marries someone, that person then becomes the one they’ll spend the rest of their life with. This then means that it is the only person they’ll interact with in a physical, emotional, and mental manner. However, that is something that Masie doesn’t immediately make sense of.

Because James brought the bible into the story when referring to King Solomon, I want to talk about how men in the bible had more than one wife. In biblical times (more specifically in the old testament), polygamy was not only normal but was encouraged and celebrated. It was normal to love, have sex with and interact with more than one person. If born in this time period, Masie would have had to adapt to this norm and her moral compass would have been set to a different setting. Masie is somewhat looked down upon for her lack of understanding of the world yet she is not given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the fact that she has not yet been instructed to think like those around her.

Masie doesn’t have a moral compass because it hasn’t been given to her. She was not born with a set belief of morals. The morals she is being taught are constructs placed by society, ideas that could change as society changes.

• I’ll cover this in class today, but here’s the link for your final paper submission:
  • https://www.dropbox.com/request/n3opIqQT5MoObki72ODq
  • due Thursday 5/20 at midnight- one letter grade penalty for every day it’s late
  • please submit in an editable form (.docx, .pages .rtf) rather than .pdf if possible

Simple Bibliography

James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Print.

Kruger, Katherine. “Supreme Simplicity”: Reading the Child and Childlike Reading in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. Novel, 2020, pgs. 57-75.

Phillips, Michelle H. “The ‘Partagé Child’ and the Emergence of the Modernist Novel in What Maisie Knew”. The Henry James Review 31.2 (2010): 95–110. Web.

Attridge, John. “The Lesson of the Master: Learning and Cognition in ‘What Maisie Knew.’” Sydney studies in English 37 (2011): 22–43. Print.

Pitcher, David. “What Maisie Knew: A Child’s Experience of Divorce.” Journal of divorce & remarriage 52.7 (2011): 519–528. Web.

Annotated Bibliography

James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Print.

The usage of What Maisie Knew is necessary as the most direct means of being able to analyze Maisie’s behavior throughout the entirety of the novel. My main question revolves around the novel itself and it will be utilized the absolute most compared to my other sources, providing for about 50% of my referenced content.

Kruger, Katherine. “Supreme Simplicity”: Reading the Child and Childlike Reading in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. Novel, 2020, pgs. 57-75.

            Kruger speaks more about the writing of the novel itself, but this writing can almost be seen as an extension of Maisie’s character as a whole. It can be used as a counter to my question as my question poses that Maisie is not simple whatsoever, but it can also be used to battle whether or not my question even has any weight.

Phillips, Michelle H. “The ‘Partagé Child’ and the Emergence of the Modernist Novel in What Maisie Knew”. The Henry James Review 31.2 (2010): 95–110. Web.

            Phillips’ writing agrees deeply with my original research question as it addresses and understands the amount of sheer power and authority Maisie holds within the novel. It speaks on the fact that she is indeed the answer to most of the questions that the other characters tend to doubt and be unable to answer. As the centralized character of interest, the whole story continuously revolves around her and she utilizes her silence as her greatest strength.

Attridge, John. “The Lesson of the Master: Learning and Cognition in ‘What Maisie Knew.’” Sydney studies in English 37 (2011): 22–43. Print.

            Maisie has a long and furious learning experience from all different times of sources both formal and informal, but Attridge challenges whether or not her knowing things also meant she understood them. It definitely gives the possibility that Maisie could be either the most naïve or most ingenious character in the entire novel as her knowledge retention was strong. Her decision to hold this knowledge to herself could be debated to be a problem or a solution and both I and Attridge will delve into these theories.

Pitcher, David. “What Maisie Knew: A Child’s Experience of Divorce.” Journal of divorce & remarriage 52.7 (2011): 519–528. Web.

            By understanding the ways in which divorce can effect a child’s psyche, we can determine the causes of why Maisie decided to develop the personality she did. Through this development it can be determined whether her silence was even her own fault or not.

Wolfe, Jesse. “THE SANE WOMAN IN THE ATTIC: SEXUALITY AND SELF-AUTHORSHIP IN ‘MRS. DALLOWAY.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, 2005, pp. 34–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26286352. Accessed 7 May 2021.

I will use this source to explore the sexuality of the characters, specifically Clarissa.This article relates Clarissa’s sexuality to Virginia Woolf herself which may or may not be a part of the essay.

Sautter-Leger, Sabine. “Railed in by a maddening reason: a reconsideration of Septimus Smith and his role in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, 2017, p. 3. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A490474584/AONE?u=cuny_hunter&sid=AONE&xid=77cd7357. Accessed 7 May 2021.

This will be used to relate Septimus to the overall narrative of the novel and Clarissa herself. This will also be used to connect the anxieties and fear post WW1 to the ideas of conformity and rebellion and the mental state of those who were deeply psychologically ‘affected’ by the war or otherwise.

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries, edited by Julie Vandivere, and Megan Hicks, Liverpool University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815440.

Selections of this will be used to contextualize Virginia Woolf with her contemporaries with specific emphasis on their ideas about marriage and love. 

Eng, D. T. C. (2020). Virginia woolf as a creative social artist: Female transcendence and male ambivalence in to the lighthouse and mrs. dalloway. Agathos, 11(2), 93-105. Retrieved from http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/scholarly-journals/virginia-woolf-as-creative-social-artist-female/docview/2462487385/se-2?accountid=27495

This will be used to analyze and contextualize females and femininity in a primarily patriarchal and phallic centered society. 

Drobot, I. (2020). Virginia woolf’s modernist path. her middle diaries and the diaries she read. Philologica Jassyensia, 16(2), 412-413. Retrieved from http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/scholarly-journals/virginia-woolfs-modernist-path-her-middle-diaries/docview/2477759601/se-2?accountid=27495

These are Woolf’s journals which may or may not be used in the essay. They would give context to her mental state and yet there may not be anything which relates to the specific thesis I’ve chosen. 

Wood, Olivia. “A Diamond and a Tropic Gale: Reexamining Bisexuality in Mrs. Dalloway.” Journal of Bisexuality, vol. 18, no. 3, July 2018, pp. 382–394. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/15299716.2018.1540374.

This will be used to examine love vs marriage in the novel, specifically related to Septimus and Clarissa’s relationships with Evans and Sally respectively. 

“Marriage.” Family Experiments: Middle-Class, Professional Families in Australia and New Zealand c. 1880–1920, by SHELLEY RICHARDSON, ANU Press, Australia, 2016, pp. 177–216. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1q1crn1.15. Accessed 7 May 2021.

This will be used to analyze marriage as an institution as popularly regarded by people in the 1920’s. This may or may not be used to examine the socio economic status’s of opinions of marriage. 

Littleton, Jacob. “Mrs. Dalloway: Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 41, no. 1, 1995, pp. 36–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/441714. Accessed 7 May 2021.

This will be used to challenge the Bildungsroman and analyze how Woolf did not create Clarissa as a young coming of age woman but as a woman struggling with middle age and the reflection of when she was a young woman. Primarily this will be used to emphasize how a womans life does not end with marriage at a young age as the novels of previous periods (including the georgian and victorian era, extending further into the zeitgeist) imply by usually ending just after or soon after a woman and her male partner marry. 

GELFANT, BLANCHE H. “Love and Conversion in ‘Mrs. Dalloway.’” Criticism, vol. 8, no. 3, 1966, pp. 229–245. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23094188. Accessed 7 May 2021.

This will be used to explore how Clarissa Dalloway uses her parties as forms of love, conversation as a means of connection and intimacy yet reinforcing that she is ever divided from her guests by ending conversations early to ‘entertain’ others.

For my final paper, I am looking at intertextuality within Mrs. Dalloway, specifically the way in which Woolf interacts with Shakespeare. Because I see this connection most strongly in the character of Septimus Smith, I looked for work that specifically dealt with Smith and his role within the novel, his reading of Shakespeare, and some that looked more generally at Mrs. Dalloway and the way it deals with tragedy, both thematically and as a genre. I searched for work, as well, that looked at Woolf’s creation, Judith Shakespeare, to help me draw a connection between Judith and Septimus that I want to flesh out further in my final paper.

Hite, Molly. “Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway.” Narrative, vol. 18 no. 3, 2010, p. 249-275. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nar.2010.0003.

Hite, in this article, discusses the function of third person narration of obscuring ethical cues within a narrative. Rather than being able to take ethical cues from narration, texts like Mrs. Dalloway, with their presentation of an almost flat account of the actions and thoughts of its characters, create a troubled affective response for readers. Hite reads this as part of what she sees as the larger modernist project to reject social classification and codification that serve as shortcuts to moral judgement amongst readers.

Mauck, Courtney A. “The Tragedy of Septimus Smith: Woolf’s Recreation of Shakespeare.” CEA Critic, vol. 78 no. 3, 2016, p. 340-348. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cea.2016.0031.

Mauck reads Shakespeare as a point of connection between Mrs. Dalloway’s two central characters, Clarissa and Septimus Smith, and further sees Septimus as the character more entrenched in Shakespeare’s work, specifically because of his connection to the text Antony and Cleopatra. Mauck reads Septimus, through his connection with Antony in particular through this reckoning with war trauma, as the tragic figure within the novel and considers the instrumental quality her serves within Clarissa’s story.

Schwartz, Beth C. “Thinking Back Through Our Mothers: Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare.” ELH, vol. 58, no. 3, 1991, pp. 721–746. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2873462. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.

Pushing back a traditional “Anxiety of Influence” reading of the writer and their muse, Schwartz looks at Woolf’s assertion that female writers look back through their mothers to mine inspiration for their work. She talks about Woolf’s construction and canonization of female characters, like Judith Shakespeare, in this search for an inspiration, and finds Shakespeare himself to function as maternal, or at least androgynous, figure in Woolf’s writing.

Webb, Caroline. “Life After Death: The Allegorical Progress of Mrs. Dalloway.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 40 no. 2, 1994, p. 279-298. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0199.

In this article, Webb reads the progression of Clarissa Dalloway, over the course of the novel, moving from dwelling in the past to a commitment to the present, as running parallel to the experience of the novel’s reader trying to discern a particular allegorical underpinning to the text before moving to read Mrs. Dalloway on its own terms. Like Hite, Webb reads Mrs. Dalloway as actively discouraging generalization and categorization, instead encouraging readers to live in the details of the text, to look at the particulars as they try to draw their conclusions about what the novel “means” to say.

White, Siân. “The Dramatic Modern Novel: Mimesis and The Poetics of Tragedy in Mrs. Dalloway.” Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 24, 2018, pp. 101–134. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26475576. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.

White looks at the ways in which Woolf draws on the structure of classical tragedy in her construction of Mrs. Dalloway. The novel takes place within a single day and more or less moves smoothly from one location to the next. White reads this engagement with Aristotle’s original prescriptive definition of tragedy as Woolf returning to this old text with the goal of imagining how it might be adapted for a more modern novel and the kind of storytelling she was trying to achieve.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3^rd ed. Edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 857-859.

Virginia Woolf, in this section of A Room of One’s Own, imagines Judith Shakespeare into existence, a sister for William. Judith is equally as gifted her as brother, but Woolf illustrates her vastly different trajectory in life because she is a woman. She is denied the comprehensive education afforded to her brother, expected to marry young. Woolf imagines that the confines, the lack of opportunity afforded to Judith, would ultimately result in her taking her own life. For my purposes, I’m interested in exploring the link between Judith Shakespeare and Septimus Smith, two characters who find themselves ultimately unable to navigate a world that is trying to impose rigid structure upon them.

 My primary source for this research project is William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. When looking for secondary sources on Jstor and Gale Academic Onefile, I used key terms like ‘motherhood’, ‘femininity and sexuality’, as well as ‘womanhood in Faulkner’s works’. An issue I am having is accessing the full chapter of one of my key secondary sources, Bianca Batti’s section in Greenslade’s book Absent Mothers. I found a lot of useful sources in the footnotes of the previously mentioned text, that were published within the last twenty years which will give my paper a more modern perspective regarding ‘regulating the reproductive body’.

Batti, Bianca. “‘Speaking from Beyond the Grave: Abjection and the Maternal Corpses of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body.” Absent Mothers, by Frances Greenslade, Demeter Press, 2017. 

This text presents its readers with various negative portrayals of motherhood in literature, one of them being Addie Bundren. Greenslade dubs these women as absent and uncaring mothers, while Batti highlights her sexual and maternal roles as two that juxtapose each other.

BERGMAN, JILL. “‘this was the answer to it’: Sexuality and Maternity in As I Lay Dying.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3, 1996, p. 393. Gale Academic OneFile

Bergman highlights the narrative of Southern women being viewed only as baby making machines, as she sets the concept of Southern motherhood against the lack of bodily agency possessed by women, the shame they encounter regarding sex for pleasure, as well as the lack of contraception. 

Kincaid, Nanci. “As me and Addie lay dying.” The Southern Review, vol. 30, no. 3, 1994, p. 582+. Gale Academic OneFile.

This work focuses on the religious guilt that surrounds women in Southern culture. Women must be physically beautiful and seductive to get a husband, but they are not allowed to use their femininity for actual pleasure, lest they succumb to ‘sin’ and ‘evil’. Kincaid juxtaposes female innocence and sexuality through Addie in As I Lay Dying. 

Nielsen, Paul S. “What Does Addie Bundren Mean, and How Does She Mean It?” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 25, no. 1, 1992, pp. 33–39. JSTOR, 

This article tackles the meaning behind the singularity of Addie’s narrative, why her point of view was offered to readers so far into the book, and only after we learn about the shortcoming of the family as a whole, as well as what she has to say about herself as a sexual woman and mother. 

Wald, Priscilla. (2000). Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, eds. — “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate. 

This text explores the reasoning behind why so much of the blame within a family is placed on mothers. External and internal pressures including societal and familial obligations weigh heavy on mother’s shoulders, and when they fail to meet the unrealistlcly set expectations, they are labeled as ‘bad mothers’.

I am writing my final research paper on the primary text of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”. I plan to also use Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction” to discuss the work she does in “Mrs. Dalloway”. I found four secondary sources to employ in my research paper, which I have listed with some details below. I searched a few locations including Google, JSTOR, ResearchGate, and OneSearch. I mainly used key word searches such as “Mrs. Dalloway and Feminism”, “Narrative and Mrs. Dalloway”, and other key words such as social structure and system. I used Onesearch after I was linked to a chapter from Lisa Colletta’s book and was able to attain the chapter with interlibrary loan. After completing this annotated bibliography, I realize I may need one or two more secondary sources to build my paper so I plan to look for a few more that will support the gender issues I want to talk about.

Edmondson, Annalee. “Narrativizing Characters in Mrs. Dalloway.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 36, no. 1, 2012, pp. 17–36. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ jmodelite.36.1.17. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.

In Edmondson’s essay discusses the big theme of “Mrs. Dalloway”, public versus private. Edmondson’s argument focuses on Woolf’s use of intersubjectivity and how that contributes to Woolf’s characterization and narrative in the novel and the exploration of public versus private minds and being. I intend to employ this essay to discuss how Woolf goes about narrativizing her characters, why she does this, and why she is successful. This essay will help me illustrate how Woolf uses her characters narratives to move the plot along. 

“Criticizing the Social System: ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf’s Dark Comedy of Manners.” Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel, by Lisa Colletta, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 37–57. 

In Chapter 2 of Colletta’s book “Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel” she discusses Virginia Woolf with a focus on “Mrs. Dalloway”, exploring Woolf’s use of dark humor or gallows-humor and the novels’ function of social satire. I want to utilize this chapter of Colletta’s book to discuss and contextualize the social issues that Woolf engages with in “Mrs. Dalloway”.  

“Mrs. Dalloway’s Postwar Elegy.” Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity, by Christine Froula, Columbia University Press, 2006. 

Froula’s chapter on “Mrs. Dalloway” discusses the novel as a “postwar elegy”. Froula explains why she believes that Woolf’s novel is a postwar elegy and supports her claim with evidence from “Mrs. Dalloway” and other writings from Woolf including both her fiction and nonfiction. Froula dissects “Mrs. Dalloway”, she examines the artistic choices that Woolf makes in the novel and juxtaposes aspects of Woolf’s life with aspects of “Mrs. Dalloway” in an effort to explain the grandiose work that Woolf is doing. This chapter provides context into why Woolf characterizes her characters in the way that she does and what she is attempting to portray, which will be helpful in my final paper as I want to discuss the society that Woolf is depicting in the novel. In particular I want to use Froula’s chapter to explain “Mrs. Dalloway” as a response to the war, though the main character seems unaffected by the war. 

Montashery, Iraj. (2012). A Feminist Reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature. 1. 22-28. 10.7575/ijalel.v.1n.3p.22.  

In this short article Montashery analyzes “Mrs. Dalloway” from a feminist point of view, bringing in the critical theory written by many famous feminist writers. Montashery examines Clarissa’s complex identity in order to evaluate her ideologies regarding gender and social constructs. There were very few articles that explicitly discuss feminism and “Mrs. Dalloway” but this one will help me to discuss the novel through the scope of feminism which I believe Woolf is engaging with. This article will help me discuss the social context of the gender inequality that Woolf includes in “Mrs. Dalloway”.  

“Modern Fiction” by Virginia Woolf from McNeille, Andrew, Ed. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984.

In this essay, Woolf critiques materialists and the subjects that they chose to explore in their work. In “Modern Fiction” Woolf discusses a new kind of writing that she thinks is the future of modern literature, where the subject explored has a spiritual focus. “Mrs. Dalloway” is exactly the type of writing that Woolf expresses a desire for in her essay. I intend to employ this short essay from Woolf to show her engagement with modernist ideas in “Mrs. Dalloway”  and why she crafts the novel in the way she does.