an essay on Mrs. Dalloway
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I. Introduction
Sigmund Freud and Virginia Woolf were contemporaries. He, the founding father of psychoanalysis, and she, a psychotic genius, did have their path crossed in their life time. Virginia's husband, Lenard Woolf recognized the greatness of Freud and offered to publish his works and later Freud invited his English publisher couple to his house at Maresfield Gardens in January 1939, ten months before Freud died of cancer and two years before Virginia killed herself. There is no denying that they shared many common grounds. Both were educated, middle-class, and brought up in a patriarchy family. They were, above all, the products of the same cultural moment. Despite this, their disparity is more salient than their similarities. They were divided by their genders so that opportunities available to them were hugely different, which gave rise to their inevitable disagreement on patriarchy. Apart from that, they were ultimately separated by their irreconcilably different views on creativity. Virginia was a typical modernist with modernity in her veins, which means that she, along with other modernists like James Joyce, held an artist's creative integrity as the highest value. This, however, was severely undermined by Freudian psychoanalysis, which questions the very basic notion of creativity by pointing out that the works of an artist are not the result of his or her pure creativity but rather are spun out of their experiences and memories.
Woolf resisted Freud's psychoanalytical theory and claimed that she didn't begin reading Freud until1939. In a diary entry dated December 2, 1939, Virginia wrote: “Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age...”(The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume Five). In spite of this, Freud's influence, either consciously or unconsciously, on Woolf is undeniable.
I. Introduction
Sigmund Freud and Virginia Woolf were contemporaries. He, the founding father of psychoanalysis, and she, a psychotic genius, did have their path crossed in their life time. Virginia's husband, Lenard Woolf recognized the greatness of Freud and offered to publish his works and later Freud invited his English publisher couple to his house at Maresfield Gardens in January 1939, ten months before Freud died of cancer and two years before Virginia killed herself. There is no denying that they shared many common grounds. Both were educated, middle-class, and brought up in a patriarchy family. They were, above all, the products of the same cultural moment. Despite this, their disparity is more salient than their similarities. They were divided by their genders so that opportunities available to them were hugely different, which gave rise to their inevitable disagreement on patriarchy. Apart from that, they were ultimately separated by their irreconcilably different views on creativity. Virginia was a typical modernist with modernity in her veins, which means that she, along with other modernists like James Joyce, held an artist's creative integrity as the highest value. This, however, was severely undermined by Freudian psychoanalysis, which questions the very basic notion of creativity by pointing out that the works of an artist are not the result of his or her pure creativity but rather are spun out of their experiences and memories.
Woolf resisted Freud's psychoanalytical theory and claimed that she didn't begin reading Freud until1939. In a diary entry dated December 2, 1939, Virginia wrote: “Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age...”(The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume Five). In spite of this, Freud's influence, either consciously or unconsciously, on Woolf is undeniable.