“Dubliners” is a collection of fifteen short stories written by James Joyce in which the author analyses the failure of self-realisation of inhabitants of Dublin in biographical and in psychological ways. The novel was originally turned down by publishers because they considered it immoral for its portrait of the Irish city. Joyce treats in “Dubliners” the paralysis of will in four stages: childhood, youth, maturity and public life. The paralysis of will is the courage and self-knowledge that leads ordinary men and women to accept the limitations imposed by the social context they live in. In “Dubliners” the style is both realistic - to the degree of perfectly recreating characters and idioms of contemporary Dublin - and symbolic – giving the common object unforeseen depth and a new meaning in order to show a new view of reality. Joyce defines this effect “epiphany” which indicates that moment when a simple fact suddenly explodes with meaning and makes a person realise his / her condi
James Joyce (1882-1941) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) belonged to the first generation of Modernists and it’s possible to make a comparison between their literary production analyzing their masterpieces: Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway.
Ulysses is one of the greatest examples of reworking of myth in Modernist literature. Joyce uses the epic model to stress the lack of heroism, ideals, love and trust in the modern world.
The plot utterly takes place in Dublin in a single day which involves the life of three characters: Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent, Sthephen Dedalus, a sensitive young man with literary ambitions, and Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife.
Leopold Bloom, compared to Homer’s Ulysses, makes common actions: he wanders throughout the day in the streets of Dublin making errands, stopping at the advertising office and joining a funeral. He is distressed with two deep emotional burdens: the unsolved grief over his baby son’s death and the crumbling relationship with his unfaithful wife.
Ulysses
The plot utterly takes place in Dublin in a single day which involves the life of three characters: Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent, Sthephen Dedalus, a sensitive young man with literary ambitions, and Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife.
Leopold Bloom, compared to Homer’s Ulysses, makes common actions: he wanders throughout the day in the streets of Dublin making errands, stopping at the advertising office and joining a funeral. He is distressed with two deep emotional burdens: the unsolved grief over his baby son’s death and the crumbling relationship with his unfaithful wife.
Stephen Dedalus, compared to Homer’s Telemachus, has only a brief unsatisfactory meeting with Bloom, particularly at the brothel, and at the end they go their separate ways.
In this novel the author masters all his different writing techniques going from the stream-of-consciousness to the cinematic technique transposed in literature with flash-backs, close-ups, dramatic dialogues, or the juxtaposition of events and creating the collage technique, through which he brings unity and order from the apparent randomness of the events narrated.
The language is full of symbolism along with a richness and wide range of vocabulary and images.
Mrs Dalloway takes place in London on a single day, during which the protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, is busy running errands and making plans for the evening dinner party.
Virginia Woolf focuses her narration pointing out the depths of human nature through the various characters that Clarissa runs into that day, or simply brushes during her daily activities.
Woolf’s characters are also described, while carrying out their day, as engrossed in their flow of thoughts providing the readers with fragments of their past experiences in order to give her characters a more round and profound existence even if apparently concerned with the immediate happenings of their day.
As in Ulysses, three main characters are involved in the plot:
On the one hand, Septimus is unable to separate outside reality from his inner personal responses, he relies on his wife for stability and expects her to protect him from difficulties related to human life. In fact, he decides to kill himself because of his inability to react and his psychological collapse.
Clarissa, on the other hand, is always aware of the fact that the external world is totally separated from her inner consciousness and, at the end, she does come to terms with her delusions, accepting the passing of time.
Molly Bloom is different from Penelope: she hasn’t slept with her husband since the death of their little son Rudy, and she has been unfaithful to Leopold Bloom with her concert manager.
In this novel the author masters all his different writing techniques going from the stream-of-consciousness to the cinematic technique transposed in literature with flash-backs, close-ups, dramatic dialogues, or the juxtaposition of events and creating the collage technique, through which he brings unity and order from the apparent randomness of the events narrated.
The language is full of symbolism along with a richness and wide range of vocabulary and images.
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf focuses her narration pointing out the depths of human nature through the various characters that Clarissa runs into that day, or simply brushes during her daily activities.
Woolf’s characters are also described, while carrying out their day, as engrossed in their flow of thoughts providing the readers with fragments of their past experiences in order to give her characters a more round and profound existence even if apparently concerned with the immediate happenings of their day.
As in Ulysses, three main characters are involved in the plot:
- Clarissa Dalloway, a lady married to Richard Dalloway, a Conservative Member of Parliament. This marriage forced her to give up her true love for Peter Walsh. She is battered between her need for independence and self-fulfillment and class consciousness. She is obsessed with the perfection of her home and her strenous effort to live up to her ideal of womanhood; she forces herself to deny her most natural emotions limiting them to the point that she is in constant inner conflict.
- Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s first love, who visits her home unexpectedly bringing back memories of their past mutual feelings and who also casually sees Septimus Warren Smith and his wife going to Sir William Bradshaw’s for an interview;
- Septimus Warren Smith, a soldier of World War I, is described by Woolf as a sensitive young poet who enlisted to join the war for patriotic reasons and is berated by guilt because of his best friend’s death in the war. Despite the medical treatments, he suffers from panic attacks and a sense of inadequacy that will drive him to committing suicide immediately after his interview with Dr. Bradshaw.
On the one hand, Septimus is unable to separate outside reality from his inner personal responses, he relies on his wife for stability and expects her to protect him from difficulties related to human life. In fact, he decides to kill himself because of his inability to react and his psychological collapse.
Clarissa, on the other hand, is always aware of the fact that the external world is totally separated from her inner consciousness and, at the end, she does come to terms with her delusions, accepting the passing of time.
Analysis
Both Joyce and Woolf use the narrative technique of the interior monologue with some differences.
Joyce’s characters show their thoughts in an incoherent way and the author sometimes use a syntactically wrong way; in fact, in Ulysses, to convey the life of an individual in a single day, Joyce uses the “stream-of-consciousness” and the interior monolgue in order to show the chaotic flow of thoughts in the human mind, characterized by juxtaposes disparate and apparently incongrous images.
Dislike Joyce, Virginia Woolf never lets her characters’ thoughts flow without control and she maintains grammatical structure of sentences; in addition to that, in Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf doesn’t use the interior monologue to describe characters’ psyche, but to express characters’ emotions. Moreover, Joyce uses the first singular person, while Woolf uses the third singular person.
In their works, Joyce and Woolf introduce the new conception of time developed by the philosophers James and Bergson. They make a distinction between historical time, external, chronological and objective, and the psychological time, internal and subjective.
Finally, the epiphany’s technique used by Joyce is similar to Woolf’s events of being, moments during the characters can see reality behind appearances.
Joyce’s characters show their thoughts in an incoherent way and the author sometimes use a syntactically wrong way; in fact, in Ulysses, to convey the life of an individual in a single day, Joyce uses the “stream-of-consciousness” and the interior monolgue in order to show the chaotic flow of thoughts in the human mind, characterized by juxtaposes disparate and apparently incongrous images.
Dislike Joyce, Virginia Woolf never lets her characters’ thoughts flow without control and she maintains grammatical structure of sentences; in addition to that, in Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf doesn’t use the interior monologue to describe characters’ psyche, but to express characters’ emotions. Moreover, Joyce uses the first singular person, while Woolf uses the third singular person.
In their works, Joyce and Woolf introduce the new conception of time developed by the philosophers James and Bergson. They make a distinction between historical time, external, chronological and objective, and the psychological time, internal and subjective.
Finally, the epiphany’s technique used by Joyce is similar to Woolf’s events of being, moments during the characters can see reality behind appearances.
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