History of Virginia Woolf

We're currently doing the class discussion on Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and my curiosity started to get the best of me, I was very interested in looking in to the history of Virginia so I decided I would do some research online to see what I could find out.

Virginia Stephens as she was known as before her marriage was born in London on January 25, 1882. She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen whom was a famous Philosopher who, along with many other literary occupations, was at was an editor for the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Stephen, whom died when she was 13, was a renowned beauty born in India, and moved to England with her mother where she worked as a model for pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones.

Virginia and her sister didn’t go to a public school; they were educated at their father’s library in their home and through the meeting of some of her father’s famous literature friends Virginia soon feel in love with literature. She began writing professionally 1900 and published her first piece of literature in 1915. In 1912, eight years after her father’s death, Virginia married Leonard Woolf. The couple in 1917 founded the Hogarth Press by setting hand printing on an old press. She published many more pieces throughout the years; so many that I was too lazy to count them all!

From all the depression she was facing from World War 2 and during the London blitz she was starting to be down on life. On the 28^th of March in 1941 she put on her overcoat, filled it with rocks and jumped into the River Ouse and drowned herself… her body was not found until April 18

Tuesday.

Dearest,

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

Gender Roles

I decided to do gender roles as my second blog post for One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest because it was a HUGE theme present in the book. Nurse Ratched as you all know by now was a very powerful women in the book, she was in control of basically all the men, she decided when they do things, how they do it, and if they didn’t behave she decided what punishment should be given. The men, all of them including RPM were powerless compared to her, they fell under her order weather they’d like to believe it or not it was true.

This is a very backwards gender role if you ask me; most the time when you think gender role, for western civilization at least you think of the male being the dominant one, however this was more back then around the time of this book, now females are too becoming successful and maintaining jobs that men have. So reading this book it was a shocker to see that this wasn’t the case. I decided to research the web to find out what gender roles were like in other places around the world!

Apparently in China the women have the higher say in what happens in the household, but tend to be less successful when it comes to careers. It also says that if a woman is successful she is looked at as powerful and unapproachable.

Apparently in India, once upon a time it was much like western civilizations views on gender roles. The male were the more dominant ones but now as we progress it says that the roles are becoming more equal, and both women and men are viewed equally capable over performing tasks.

Through much research I learned that a lot of places around the world are starting to adapt the idea that women should be treated as equals, the should be given the equal opportunity to shine in society. Personally its just a weird thing to see when the woman is the one fully in charge cause I’m so used to men being in that position, but I’m not saying that this is a bad thing!

Early Insane Asylums!

          As you all may know, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest take place in an insane ward/asylum. This got my brain thinking; if this is what was depicted in the book, what was it actually like in an asylum in these times. So what did I do? I researched it on the Internet. I thought you guy would want to know what I found out. First off I would like to point out that I was shocked that all the methods stated in the book were actually used in the mid 20^th century as treatments for the mentally ill:

Some therapies used:

EST (electroshock therapy)- is a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Some effects of this treatment are, Memory loss, effects of the brain structure, effects on pregnancy etc. It is still used today but rarely.

Lobotomy – is a neurosurgical procedure, a form of psychosurgery. It consists of cutting the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex, the anterior part of the frontal lobe of the brain. Some side effects of this procedure are, convulsive seizures, distractibility, childishness, facetiousness, lack of discipline, and post-operative incontinence.

Its crazy to think the things that RPM went through in this novel were realities for some individuals in this time.

Today insane asylums no longer exist; I guess you can say we live in a lucky era. Nowadays modern medicine treats the people who have mental disabilities, therefore the mental hospitals are not much different than the everyday hospitals you see in most every town.

"The Wars" by Timothy Findley

    
    My opinion about the novel "The Wars" by Timothy Findley would be good. Out of all the novels that we currently discussed in class it was one of my favorite thus far. It was well written and it wasn't, in my opinion, the typical war novel. This novel gives the reader an alternate look into just how harsh the lifestyles of deployed troops were during this war, the things that these men had to face on a daily basis is appalling. Personally I don't think I would be able to go to war because just the idea of the unknown routine alone would cause me to over react and probably die from stress.

     This may be a bad way to put it but I do not like reading in the slightest, but this book had the power to draw me into its catchy plot and I wasn’t able to put it down after I had started. I guess it could be because of my fascination towards these types of things; just the types of things people had to face in order to get to the society we're living in today.

     It almost like the reader grew this attachment to Robert, the reader almost dreads the idea of something bad happening to this young man, just starting to experience the world really. Its really a sad thing to see his innocence stripped from him, without it being his own wish. Another thing that was hard to bare on top of all that is going on with his life was the scene when Robert was raped by his fellow soldiers, this was probably in my opinion the hardest scene of the novel. It left Robert, whom was already lost of majority of his innocence to someone having none is a sad thing.

    Overall it was a great, easy read and I would definitely recommend this to anyone with an interest in this area of history, Timothy Findley does a miraculous job getting his message across and proves that he is an amazing Canadian author!