Unmethodical criticism: Trilling, Wilson and Leavis

Lionel Trilling

 Modern literature is shockingly personal: it asks us all sorts of personal questions - including
the central question of salvation
 It opens a quarrel between individual and community and presents us with a wide range of
anti-heroes
 It points out that the ideals of modern culture (such as those presented in Arnold's essay:
well-being, rationality, tolerance) are hypocritically betrayed; 'its order achieved at the cost
of extravagant personal repression, either that of coercion of that of acquiescence'.
 In his essay on Freud, Trilling points out that the general culture often does not have an
accurate knowledge about the self. 'In almost every developed society, literature is able to
conceive of the self and the selfhood of others, far more intensely that the general culture
ever can.'
 Freud's life and theories suggest that there is a point beyond culture which the self can
occupy: different traditions, the biological component of being, and the idea of death (Sartre,
E. M. Forster)

Edmund Wilson

 Romanticism: the arena of literature transferred to the individual soul; against mechanistic
ideas and the pervasive philosophical dualism (mind/matter, body/soul): man is not apart
from the Universe he observes, but involved in the same great entity.
 Ibsen: romantic conception of one's duty to one's own personality vs. the conception of one's
duty to society. The project of Naturalism: emphasis on biology, heredity and environment
(bourgeois drawing-room as a typical stage setting)
 Symbolism: a protest of withdrawal; experiments and exploration only in the field of
literature, as opposed to the Romantic experiments in life; the poet feels overwhelmed by
the omnipotence of the utilitarian world, and loses all hope that his private values can be
reintegrated into community; no new ethic - only an aesthetic.
 Two extreme reactions to the modern civilization: Axel (complete withdrawal into one's
private, subjective world) and Rimbaud (experiments with drugs and other intoxicants,
aimed at 'derangement of all the senses'; life of pure action and escape into the primitive)

F.R. Leavis

 Poetry at the turn of the century: 'not so much bad as dead'; preoccupied with the creation of
a dream-world
 'Poetry matters because of the kind of poet who is more alive than other people... He is, as it
were, at the most conscious point of the race in his time... His capacity for experiencing and
his power of communicating are indistinguishable.' But the poetry and the intelligence of the
age must not lose touch with each other.
 The importance of Eliot's poetry, which does not exclude the 'stress of cerebral muscle'.
Marxist Criticism: Lukacs

G. Lukacs

 Modernist literature is hopeless; hope is a moral obligation (Dostoevsky, The House of the
Dead). In line with the ideas of Wilson and Leavis: the possibility of the artist's reintegration
in the general culture gradually decreases.
 The basic question of literature (revealing the worldview underlying a writer's work): What
is man? Traditional literature: man as zoon politicon; modernism: man as a solitary,
ahistorical being; human existence as 'throwness-into-being' (Heideger). Static vision of the
human condition: no development, no origin and no goal. (Waiting for Godot: representing
progress as an illusion)
 Abstract and concrete potentiality: choice as the moment of self-realization
 Terminus a quo (starting point): 'the corrupt society of our time'; terminus ad quem
(destination): 'escape into psychopathology'. Destination in Marxism: the establishment of a
new order.
New Criticism: Richards, Ransom and Eliot

I. A. Richards

 Pseudo-statement: 'a form of words justified by its effect in organizing our emotions,
impulses and attitudes'. Religions and myths of the past as pseudo-statements: 'countless
pseudo-statements... have suddenly become impossible to believe as for centuries they have
been believed.
 Scientific statement: justified by its truth; description of factual reality. The 'how' of natural
phenomena. Neutralization of nature: our inner needs are being driven back upon their
biological justification.
 The pseudo-statements of poetry: the 'why' of human life. The way to organize our emotions
and urges and attain a sense of direction. (Michael Lerner: 'human beings do not yearn only
for a just distribution of material wealth, but also for connection to the deepest truths of the
universe, for a world that has meaning and love, for a sense of aliveness, energy and
authenticity; for a life embedded in a community in which they are valued for who they
most deeply are, and feel genuinely seen and recognized; for a sense of contributing to the
good.')

J. C. Ransom

 Idea (reduces the world to a manageable, simple formula, tames it; the 'world's body'
reduced to skeleton) vs. image (a manifold of properties, appealing to our whole sensibility
and imagination). Science/philosophy can manage the image only by equating it to one
property (D.H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters')
 Platonic impulse: 'We love to view the world under universal or scientific ideas to which we
give the name truth; and this is because the ideas seem to make not for righteousness but for
mastery.' Reducing images to ideas turns us into 'habitual killers'. Our habitual recourse to
conceptual logic: psychologically founded on the ego's need for domination. Platonism and
human destructiveness. (Sam Keen: enemy as an abstract category)
 Metaphor: initiates the act of perception; unique physical image inseparable from its
metaphysical meaning. Unprejudiced experience of the concrete and individual.

T. S. Eliot

 Anti-individualist (Catholic, royalist, traditionalist). Selfish/ generic self - material,

physiological needs - ego; genuine/ significant self - transcendence of egotism, surrender to
love/ spiritual realm
 Modern society encourages the selfish self (Trilling)
 In the realm of literature: to acquire the historical sense ('a perception, not only of the
pastness of the past, but of its presence' - presence of the spiritual values of the past). To
surrender to the creative process: catalyst - fusion of various elements into a new whole.
 'Dissociation of sensibility' in modern poetry; Eliot's tradition: Shakespeare, the
metaphysical poets.
Structuralism: Northrop Frye

 Two worlds: 1) World of inner desire; 2) Objective reality. The third world: created by man;
transformation of reality prompted by inner desire; imagination as the source of meanings.
Myth, culture, civilization: built in the image of human desires and anxieties. The desire to
recapture the lost sense of harmony with the natural world, but also to transform necessity
into freedom.
 To contextualize literature as a whole into the culture as a whole: myth as the integrating
principle. Two elements of myth: ritual (voluntary effort to synchronize the rhythm in
nature and the rhythm in human life) and oracle (epiphanies, moments of insight);
corresponding to the narrative and meaning of a literary work.
 The central myth of literature is the quest myth: the resolution of the opposition between
the desire and reality. Plato: art as 'a dream for awakened minds'. We see the hero's quest in
terms of its fulfillment: comic vision (pulling away from the rotary cycle of nature; triumph
over nature and mortality: Christianity) and tragic vision (hero defeated by the forces of
nature; the quest takes the form of a cycle: myths of Dumuzi, Attis, Adonis).
 Myth of concern (proposes a system of values for the whole community) and myth of
freedom (new values proposed by dissatisfied individuals). In Blake's time, the rise of
science exposed Christianity as an oppressive myth of concern: a conservative and
authoritarian construct. Newtonian and Darwinian crisis: concerned with the perception of
space and time. The third crisis: to distinguish 'the ordinary waking consciousness of
external reality from the creative and transforming aspects of the mind'.
 Blake: an attempt to recover the mythological universe for the human imagination.
Resurrection of imagination: to stop projecting the mythological universe on an external
order and external authorities; imagination as a means of achieving social and individual
freedom. The ascending movement: Prometheus and Eros (social and individual freedom).
Anxiety about authority: distrusting any kind of liberation that institutions cannot control;
anxiety about Eros. (Orwell, Joyce)
 Jung: a progress from the ego to the individual; in alchemy: from materia prima to the
glowing stone. Works of art: not icons, but mandalas; 'possible techniques of meditation,
ways of cultivating, focusing and ordering one's mental processes on a basis of symbol
rather than concept'. In a work of art, the unconscious material finds its form of expression.
 Conventional notion: arts as a secondary social luxury, enjoyed and possessed by the ego.
Arts are really 'a primary human need that has been smothered under false priorities'.
Psychoanalysis: Freud

 Freud questioned the ideal of the 'fully-functioning, conscious, adult male mind'. Ego-
consciousness: a small portion of the psyche. 1) Super ego: system of social demands; 2)
Ego: mediator; 3) Id: the unconscious.
 Daydreams: dissatisfaction with the culture; artist: excursion to fantasy - a confession of
discontent; makes fantasying plausible. Daydream: a moment of recovering the blissful state
of unity with the mother (pre-natal period or very early childhood). The father's law: the
law of separation. The child must substitute the desire for the mother with some socially
acceptable desire; the entire culture based on institutional suppression of incestuous desire,
around which super-ego is structured. Eros compells us to keep substituting one desire for
another throughout life.
 Frye: desire is socially acceptable; it is a plan to change reality. Freud: pleasure principle
and reality principle. Reality is inescapable and cannot be changed: those who don't fit
become neurotic.
 Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Eros and Thanatos (desire for the unconscious state).
 Trilling: Freud made a polarization between things which actually for a totality; he
'discovered the darkness, but never endorsed it'. Freud: 'Where id was, there shall ego be.'

C. G. Jung

 The basic driving force motivating us from the unconscious: not incestuous desire, but
spiritual aspiration: a need to become in-dividual (capacity for inner growth: tree
symbolism). Freud's method: retrospective; Jung's method: prospective (neurosis as the
starting point for the inner quest). The path of individuation: to heal the split between ego
and the unconscious; between one's own ego-consciousness and other human beings/the rest
of creation.
 Personal unconscious: psychological elements which have been suppressed because they
do not fit into the conscious attitude (and/or the social persona). The realm of personal
shadow: moral issues; making these contents conscious helps 'humanize a man and make
him more modest.' (Jung)
 Collective unconscious: an inherited brain structure, observing the law of phylogeny:
universal human experiences reaching back to the very beginning of the psychic
development of the ancient humanity. These psychic contents are common to all human
beings: they provide basis for the experience of solidarity and compassion with people
worldwide. Instinctive experiences we share with 'animal ancestors'; 'central energy'.
Objective psyche which cannot be influenced: 'a bedrock of decency'.
 Archetypal images: manifestations of the collective unconscious. (In dreams, eclipses of
consciousness, narcotic states, insanity; also in the artistic vision and the state of
inspiration.) Their purpose: to bring a one-sided state of consciousness into equilibrium.
Psychological and visionary mode of artistic creation. Archetypal images: significant not
only for one individual, but for the whole culture, or even for mankind in general.
 By integrating the contents of the collective unconscious one transcends egotism and
becomes focused on the welfare of humanity: 1. value of individual; 2. awareness of One
Humanity. This transformed consciousness is called the Self: ego no longer experienced as
the center of the universe, nor the center of one's own being. The Self: both the experience
of psychic wholeness and its subject. Mystical experiences of the transpersonal, timeless and
boundless: the divine center of being; Atman (Hindu) or 'the God within' (Gnostic).
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt

 Peer Gynt and the concept of the Self; New Testament: 'If you gained the whole wide world,
but lost yourself...'. Fromm: the difference between self-interest and Self-interest; Lawrence:
IT - one is only free when one listens to the inner voice. Eliot's transhumanization: from
'selfish self' to the 'genuine self'.
 Jung's concept of self-realization, i.e., individuation: journey from ego to the Self. The first
phase: encounter with the Shadow (the dark, morally inferior side of ego). Encounter with
Anima/Animus (complementary, contrasexual part of the psyche; image of the other sex
that we carry in us; achieving wholeness through hieros gamos - the sacred marriage of the
opposites). Anima as the guide to one's deepest Self (mystical centre of being; experience of
unity with mankind; life's 'higher calling')
 Peer Gynt: escape from unbearable reality, but also from life's 'higher calling'. Gynt is a
master in lying, 'devil's story-teller'. Ase's fairy-tales. Conversation with the green-clad
woman: fantasy which eventually leads to the reversal of reality. Trolls: living completely
in the realm of fantasy; giving vent to one's lowest urges and bestial instincts (tail); 'to
thyself be enough' (egotism) vs. the human maxim: 'to thyself be true' (the true, innermost
human nature).
 Boyg: Gynt's Shadow, reality about his self that he cannot encounter. Without facing it, he
cannot proceed on the path of self-realization: 'The great Boyg conquers, but does not
fight... Go roundabout.' Also Shadow figures: the brat and the shadow anima created by his
thoughts and desires.
 Solveig: Gynt's Anima, guide to his soul. 'The path I have trodden leads back nevermore.'
Unafraid to reach 'a point of no return'. Peer: 'fleeing from trouble', evading sorrow,
obligation, conscience ('Soria-Moria castle').
 The Gyntish Self: ego; 'the host of wishes, appetites, desires, claims'. Gynt defines self in
terms of wealth (merchant), influence (prophet), pleasure-seeking, possessiveness and desire
for mastery (seducer: 'you shall live for me alone'), ambition (scientist). Lunatics and the
self: seclusion, confinement of each egotistic self (Eliot's 'prison'): Gynt proclaimed the
'Selfhood's Kaiser'.
 Peer Gynt's 'kinsman in spirit': young peasant who mutilates himself, refusing to serve the
King. Negative and positive notion of being 'mastered'. Gynt peeling an onion, layer after
layer of persona: the Self is not within the boundaries of ego. The Button Moulder: the
custom to prevent loss of good material. 'You were designed for a shining button/ On the
vest of the world; but your loop gave way.' 'To be oneself: to stand forth everywhere/ With
Master's intention displayed like a signboard.'
 Final scene with Solveig: 'Where was I, as myself, as the whole man, the true man?' 'In my
faith, in my hope, and in my love.' Return to Solveig and return to God.
G. B. SHAW

 'The Quintessence of Ibsenism': ideals - man-made, imperfect structures of society, whose

purpose is to make people accept the existing state of affairs. (Ibsen: marriage. Ibsen as a
social reformer.) Idealists (299), philistines (700) and realists (1). Realists: strip life of all
the masks. The greatest enemy of the realist is the idealist. The growth of man should be the
growth of courage and spirit, man should attain progressively more courage to unmask
reality, to love and trust.
 'Don Juan in Hell': Realist (also called Superman) develops the mind's eye in order to
understand the will of the Life Force. Hell - illusion; Heaven: inhabited by the masters of
reality. ('In Hell you drift, in Heaven you steer.') Realists dedicate their lives to the
movement of the Life Force and willingly turn themselves into instruments of its goal.
 'The New Theology': creative will inherent in the process of evolution (Lamarck). God is the
immanent goal towards which evolution moves; not the beginning, but the end. A positive
religion and reliance on human reason: Shaw as a socialist and evolutionist.
 Saint Joan: Joan is a Realist who obeys her inner voices. 'My business is God's business'
(Life-Force business). Idealists: the feudal system and the church. Rebellion against
authorities and institutions, and for the supremacy of one's private conscience. 'A protest of
the individual soul against the interference of priest or peer between private man and his
God.'
 Joan as a nationalist and a protestant: progressive ideas for her age. 'Must a Christ perish in
every age to save those who have no imagination?' New rebels always come to point the
direction to the future.
S. BECKETT, ENDGAME

 Waiting for Godot is a 'despairing play about hope', Endgame is a 'despairing play about
despair'. Godot: two pairs of characters/ relationships - Vladimir and Estragon (freedom,
friendship, hope); Pozzo and Lucky (master and servant; destructive). Endgame: only one
type of relationship - Hamm and Clov (master/slave, hammer/nail, father/son,
dominant/submissive)
 Hamm: selfish proprietor; story about the beggar; incapable of compassion; 'you're on Earth,
there's no cure for that'. Clov: 'I'm leaving you'.
 Endgame: series of movements in chess when the outcome is already known; Clove and
Hamm - red; Nagg and Nell - white; Hamm - king (immobile, vulnerable); Clove - knight;
end of the play: stalemate.
 Stage setting: skull; two windows - eye sockets; Nagg and Nell - parents (remain in one's
mind). The world outside: after nuclear or ecological catastrophe - also spiritual wasteland -
'zero'.
 Circularity: echoing Dante's Inferno (characters repeating rituals). Individual grains - 'the
impossible heap' - human life - never a final product to scrutinize. Fear that humanity might
start all over again: flea, rat, the little boy.
 Boy: symbol of resurrection. Hamm: son of Noah (flood and regeneration).
 Nell: did not laugh because of the story, but because she was in love. 'The lake was deep...
you could see down to the bottom... So white. So clean.' Clear vision of meaningful life
through love. Final words: desert. Nagg: 'We moved you out of earshot.'
CARYL CHURCHILL

Cloud Nine

 Colonialism: replacing one myth with another; Joshua: rejects his matriarchal tradition. Eve:
'door through which evil entered the world'. Churchill: the play deals with the parallel
between colonial and sexual oppression.
 The Other: both the dark continent and the dark feminine lust which threatens to destroy the
rigid male identity. White man has severed his connections to his dark origin.
 Betty, Ellen: privacy given over; sex, marriage, love, channeled into duty. Heterosexual
relationship: prescribed, rigid, conventional. All characters betray their loyalties, their illegal
dreams.
 Act 2: the present. Confronting the inner damage; the characters try to establish their true
sexual identities. Invocation of the Great Goddess (Edward, Lin, Victoria): 'give us the
history we haven't had, make us the women we can't be'. The ghost of Lin's brother.

Owners

 Fromm, To Have or to Be: having as an existential choice. Two forms of having: existential
having (natural impulse) and characterological having (pathological; result of the impact of
social conditions). Capitalism: not only appeals to human avarice and greed, but generates
them to sustain itself. Marx: alienation of physical and intellectual senses; only the
utilitarian appropriation is considered relevant (e.g.: Tennyson on flower). Patriarchy:
owning living beings.
 Marion in Owners: originally considered property; rebelled against her passive role. The
most highly cherished quality: not creativity, but making a profit. Marion identifies with the
mainstream patriarchal tradition. ISAs (family, education, health service): she remains a
subject. 'If you want a girl I'll buy you one.' Final loss of the capacity to love: 'I might be
capable of anything.'
 Alec: 'Learning things wasn't any use.' A movement beyond language and culture: 'the
bottom fell off a pail'. The Buddhist tradition: absence of craving for material possessions;
need to give up possessive love. Alec's new attitude to love: altruistic, selfless love; willing
sacrifice. Worsley: overall failure of life and death.
J. CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

 E. Fromm, 'Malignant Aggression' from The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness: the

disequilibrium inherent the human condition. 'Gifted with self-awareness and reason, man is
aware of himself as a being separate from nature and from others... He is a part of nature,
subject to her physical laws... yet he transcends nature... He cannot go back to the pre-
human state of harmony with nature, and he does not know where he will arrive if he goes
forward.' Two modes of resolution: destructive (destructiveness directed either towards the
Other or towards one's own consciousness); constructive (striving to attain more
consciousness and regain wholeness at a higher level).
 Imperialism: separateness and need to dominate/destroy the Other; 'robbery and murder on a
great scale'. Continuity of imperialist tendencies: Romans. 'What redeems it is the idea only':
the Workers, 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways'. 'The labourer is
worthy of his hire': ivory. Self-delusion: subjective and objective dynamic of imperialism.
 J. Conrad, 'Preface' from The Nigger of the Narcissus: philosophy and science speak to our
intelligence, but also to our prejudices, fears and egotism; they can be misused by ideology
for 'glorification of our precious aims'. The artist speaks to our deepest Self, 'to that in us
which is a gift and not an acquisition', to our sense of pity, fellowship with all creation and
solidarity which binds together all humanity.
 J. Conrad, Lord Jim: man is required to remain faithful to his dream in a moment of crisis;
divorce between dream and reality; to recognize one's own capacity for betrayal. Heart of
Darkness: Kurtz's dream is from the onset the dream of arrogance, superiority, domination;
'Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs'; 'Exterminate all the brutes!'. Absence of
external restraints in the wilderness (the butcher, the policeman, the terror of gallows and
asylums); cannibals. 'His intelligence was perfectly clear... but his soul was mad.' Kurtz's
final recognition of his moral downfall.
 Marlow: ability to recognize the humanity of Africans and his 'distant kinship' with them.
Two realities: man-made (the book, the ship) and natural (the jungle). The invasion:
fantastic, unreal. 'The fool, the saint and the rest of us.' Marlow's integrity: work; 'I have a
voice, too'.
D. H. LAWRENCE, St Mawr

 Conrad: the character of Kurtz suggests that the archaic energies and instincts have been
suppressed from the conscious outlook of Western civilization, and consequently become a
potential source of destructiveness; this 'dark element' must be recognized and controlled.
In the writings of Lawrence, this same element is viewed positively: source of our vitality
and creativity. 'Spirit of the place': 'IT chooses for us and decides for us'; positive freedom -
to be mastered by this flow of natural energy. Fromm: 'freedom from' and 'freedom for'.
 'Why the Novel Matters': 'I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or
an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of
these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part... For this reason, I am a novelist... To be
alive, to be whole man alive; that is the point.' 'The Death of Pan': Pan as the irrational,
instinctive force of all living things; consequently degraded into a devil. 'It is useless to
glorify a savage': we cannot go back. 'Man still has his windows, only bricked in, or nailed
up.' To become conscious of Pan in other living entities.
 The central scene of St Mawr: the horse falls over the rider. Conscious will (the unworthy
rider) on top: modern man has tried to control the flow of natural energy. Betrayal of the
hierarchy of being: to undermine the strong ones (individuals who are in touch with the
source). Lawrence's Apocalypse: 'spiritual aristocracy'.
 St Mawr: the agent of transformation; creature in whom Pan is still alive. Lou gets in touch
with her inner being: 'the walls of her own world have suddenly melted away'. England:
'eunuch civilization'.
 Lou and Rico: 'the friction of two wills'; 'modern men wholly contained in their well-shaven
heads'; Rico's head: 'a thing complete in itself'. Mrs. Witt: 'hardly anybody in the world
really lives, so hardly anybody really dies... I want death to hurt me.' 'The terror of too late!'
Lewis's hair.
 Lou: 'Wouldn't a man be wonderful in whom Pan hadn't fallen'; a 'mystical man' who would
have 'blood knowledge' (intuition - presupposing link with the object of knowledge). Nature:
not a romantic unity but struggle; Lou becomes a 'Vestal Virgin': 'it's my mission to keep
myself for the spirit that is wild'.
JAMES JOYCE

 Modernists - Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce: against patterning and overstructuring which petrify
modern life. Static and rigid patterns prevailing in social life, politics, human relationships
and at the psychological level. Lawrence: a modern novel whose meaning is absorbed with
one's entire sensibility. Woolf: stream of consciousness consisting of myriad impressions
which are shaped and given meaning by the activities of the mind.
 Joyce's epiphanies: epiphany - originally a religious term (manifestation of Christ to the
Magi); in Joyce's writings - mental, moral and spiritual uplift of a character, influencing his
development. Meaning achieved by the activity of imagination. (N. Frye on the importance
of oracle in a literary work.) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: epiphanies leading
Stephen Dedalus towards personal liberation and decision to become an artist; each
epiphany increases the feeling of power and independence.
 Ireland: 'an old sow that eats its farrow'; 'a priest-ridden country'. Stephen deconstructs the
false relationships between himself and the world and creates new ones by the force of
creative imagination. ('The eagles will pull out his eyes'; episode with Father Dolan.) The
sin of disobedience: Non Serviam. ('I will not serve that in which I no longer believe
whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself
in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can...')
 Relationship with women: bodiless heroines of popular novels; encounter with a prostitute
(alluding to a pagan ritual): 'he had awakened from a slumber of centuries'. Sense of sin and
guilt. Conversation with the director. Epiphany on the beach: decision to fall and become 'a
priest of eternal imagination'. The girl on the beach: 'angel of mortal youth and beauty'; a
seabird, a dark-plumaged dove. The identity of Dedalus.
 Gabriel's epiphany in 'The Dead': unlike Michael Furey, he is incapable of 'passing boldly
into the other world', 'in the full glory of passion'. 'As though he and Gretta had never lived
together as man and wife.' 'Sick of his country', yet incapable of escaping. The whole
country of Ireland covered in the 'silver and dark' snowflakes of death. 'Journey westward':
two possible meanings.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, MRS DALLOWAY

 'Modern Fiction': 'Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous
halo'; the task of the novelist: to convey this varying, unknown and uncircumscribed spirit –
against literary convention, to capture life of spirit; inconclusiveness of the Russian novels
and stories, and their capacity to sympathize. 'Sympathy with the heart'.
 Woolf's diary: 'My discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters... the
caves shall connect... my tunneling process.' Tunneling: to see behind social masks (name-
surname)
 Clarissa Dalloway: Lady Bruton has not asked her for lunch; attic room; disrobing;
memoirs. Sally and Peter: kiss. 'Epiphany' with women; parties – substitute for real
communication. Emotional repression of the upper class society: 'sealed with wax over the
deeper sources of life'. 'The death of her soul' – 'illness of the heart' – 'perfect hostess'.
 Septimus: self-educated (books borrowed from public libraries), devouring Shakespeare,
dreaming of becoming a poet; went to war 'to save an England which consisted almost
entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole'. 'Congratulated himself on feeling very
little and very reasonably' upon the death of his friend Evans. Visions: 'trees are alive; there
is no crime (the only sin: that he could not feel); universal love'.
 Holmes and Bradshaw. Holmes: middle-class English masculine conduct (porridge and
cricket). Bradshaw: Proportion (binary opposites: mad/sane, seclusion of lunatics; 'rest
cure') and Conversion (working classes, colonies; repression concealed by ideals). How
Lady Bradshaw submitted. Bradshaw: either convince people to uphold proclaimed values
(family, honour, career, courage) or resort to the use of force (police, asylums).
 Shakespeare: 'If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy'; 'fear no more the heat of
the sun'. The motif of sacrifice: Clarissa threw a shilling into the Serpentine; Septimus's
death – heroic defiance.