WHAT AN EXTRAORDINARY NIGHT! - Virginia Woolf page 536

Exercises and Analysis

Comprehension:

- What is the passage about? Put the following into the right order:

·Clarissa is told Septimus's death and imagines him throwing himself from a window;

·She reflects on life and on death;

·She imagines the meeting between Septimus and Sir William Bradshaw;

·She contrasts her easy and successful life with the death and suffering of other people;

·She thinks of her happiness at Bourton and o f the pleasure one derives from the activities of day-to-day life;

·She walks to the window;

·She parts the curtains and sees an old lady looking at her;

·The sky is not as Clarissa had imagined it;

·She watches the old lady going to bed;

·She thinks of Septimus again but does not pity him;

·She decides to go back to her party.

Interpretation:

- What is Clarissa's first reaction to Septimus's death (par.1)?

·She disapproves the Bradshaws' talk on death during her party, she is scared, her body burns and her dress flames.

- What is her view on death (par.2)?

·She thinks that death is a defiance, an open disobedience, it is also an attempt to communicate.

- What is Clarissa's view of Bradshaw (par.4)?

·He is a great doctor, but he is a powerful man who could make life intolerable.

- What struggle characterizes Clarissa's life (par.5)?

·The struggle that characterizes Clarissa's life is between living with serenity to the end and her desire to escape.

- In the last paragraph Clarissa is at the centre of the contrast between her social life and the world outside. Then suddenly a new thought comes to her and she experiences a "moment of being". What does she suddenly realize?

·While the clock strikes she thinks on the man who had killed himself, she realizes she must go back and she has to find Peter and Sally. But she feels like the young man and she is somehow glad that he had killed himself. She has a new attitude towards death.

- Can you link the two quotations from Shakespeare to Clarissa's moods?

·"If it were now to die, 'twere now to be must happy" and "Fear no more the heat of the sun": Clarissa's moods is linked to Shakespeare's quotations by the same attitude on life and death. They evidence the unstable condition of mankind and the inevitability of death. Death is a relief.

- Focus on the language. Can you explain why many sentences are "loosely constructed", with lots of repetitions and conjunctions?

·The reader can better understand Clarissa's mood and the reason why she suffers. The sentences are "loosely constructed" because they follow Clarissa's thoughts, her interior monologue. This is a new writing technique typical of Modernism.

- Go back to the extract from the essay "Modern Fiction" (p.531). Do you feel Virginia Woolf's style manages to convey "life" in a way traditional novel do not?

·Yes, I think Virginia Woolf's style tries to manage life in an unconventional way. She thinks that the tasks of the novelist is to try to give the unknown spirit of life as little mixture of external as possible. She tries to catch the essence of the life of her characters.

Analysis of "What an extraordinary life" by Virginia Woolf

This writing is an extract from "Mrs Dalloway", a novel written by Virginia Woolf. In this pages the novelist wants to underline the disapproval of Clarissa on Bradshaws' news.  This guests of her are talking about the self murder of a young man (Septimus), and they are doing this during her party. The reader can easily  understand Clarissa's thoughts on death. On her point of view, death is a defiance and an open disobedience.

In this extract there are two quotation from Shakespeare's dramas, one from Othello ("If it were now to die, 'twere now to be must happy") and one from Cymbeline ("Fear no more the heat of the sun"). By this two quotations the reader can evidence the author's opinion about the unstable condition of mankind and the inevitability of death. Death is a relief.

The language used in this novel is quite simple and helps the reader to understand Clarissa's mood and the reason why she suffers. Virginia Woolf tries to analyze the myriad of impressions that an ordinary mind receives, and to do that she uses the interior monologue. In this way she explains better Clarissa's feelings.