Selected articles and book chapters
“Loving Maidens and
Patriarchal Mothers: Revisions of the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter and Cymbeline in Mrs. Dalloway” Woolf Studies Annual 17 (2011).
Written a few years after the end of World War I, Mrs. Dalloway imagines the complexities of a future for Britain in the aftermath of soul-numbing destruction.
As she makes clear in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Woolf understood war as intimately connected to patriarchal forms of domination and envisioned a renewal of life for Britain in feminist terms. Woolf’s practice of engaging with earlier literary models is well-documented by critics like Jane de Gay, and her engagement with the Greeks in particular is explored by Emily Dalgarno in Virginia Woolf and the Visible World. Several literary texts are alluded to in Mrs. Dalloway, but here I would like to focus on revisions to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which, when framed by references to Cymbeline, opens up a complex feminist response to the aftermath of World War I.
[...]
Given the context and background of this quotation (“Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages”) how should we read it in relation to
the narrator’s question about what Clarissa is trying to recover as she looks in the shop window, and how does it relate to World War I? The final line of Cymbeline provides a clue; the play ends with the word “peace”: “Never was a war did cease (Ere bloody hands were wash’d) with such a peace” (Shakespeare 5.5.484-5). At the end of the play, the rightful king is a ratifier of pax romana, and the elements who wanted war with Rome—the Queen and her son Cloten—are dead. After a period of disorder, Britain is revived by the rebirth of the three royal children. “In the same vein, Imogen’s dramatic ‘revival’ from death in Wales is a visual allusion to the cosmic renewal about to occur during the Augustan peace” (Simonds 246). Similarly, Mrs. Dalloway features war in the background and a happy ending in which rebirth is emphasized in Clarissa’s return to life during her party, and as in Cymbeline, there is an analogy between the heroine and her nation. These parallels between Mrs. Dalloway and Cymbeline suggest that a restoration of peace and life are imagined possibilities in Mrs. Dalloway. I argue that it is this “cosmic renewal” that Clarissa is dreaming and this harmony she is trying to recover, not just for herself, but for the culture and country for which she stands in. This renewal is imagined through Woolf’s revisions to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which, I argue, should be read through the lens provided by the novel’s revision of Cymbeline. (pages 83, 86)
“A Third Sense of Ethics between Fiction and Philosophy” Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays. Eds. Simone Roberts and Alison Scott-Baumann. McFarland Press, 2010.
In the face of the ever-growing mass of Murdoch criticism, a new collection of essays is welcome indeed, for here is a chance for linked polyvocality, breadth and range. The theme and title of the book –Murdoch’s ‘moral imagination’ –is usefully wide, and while this idea is not without a few minor pitfalls, for the most part this is an engaging and exciting study.
[...]
It is not possible within this space to devote equal time to each essay, and the great variety of ideas raised. The most important thing that must be said, though –and the really striking thing about this work –is that it proves that it is still possible to strike out new ground in Murdochland. Notable examples of this are Peter Mathews’s linking of Murdoch and Nietzsche, John Hacker-Wright’s discussion of how Murdoch’s dismissal of scientific naturalism should not be taken at face value, Frances White’s clear and convincing paralleling of the work of Murdoch and Hannah Arendt, and the unexpected but winning conjunction of Murdoch and Irigaray by M.F. Simone Roberts. Anne Rowe makes a worthy case for seeing Zadie Smith as Murdoch’s successor through ethical uses of art; and in one of the strongest essays in the collection, Amy Smith suggests that the apparent (and often worried-over) gap between Murdoch’s ideas about character and fiction, and her execution of them, can be resolved by remembering that ‘myth is an integral part of how we see ourselves and live’ (p.48).
Excerpt from Nick Turner's review of Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays in The Iris Murdoch Review. (2011)
Written a few years after the end of World War I, Mrs. Dalloway imagines the complexities of a future for Britain in the aftermath of soul-numbing destruction.
As she makes clear in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Woolf understood war as intimately connected to patriarchal forms of domination and envisioned a renewal of life for Britain in feminist terms. Woolf’s practice of engaging with earlier literary models is well-documented by critics like Jane de Gay, and her engagement with the Greeks in particular is explored by Emily Dalgarno in Virginia Woolf and the Visible World. Several literary texts are alluded to in Mrs. Dalloway, but here I would like to focus on revisions to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which, when framed by references to Cymbeline, opens up a complex feminist response to the aftermath of World War I.
[...]
Given the context and background of this quotation (“Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages”) how should we read it in relation to
the narrator’s question about what Clarissa is trying to recover as she looks in the shop window, and how does it relate to World War I? The final line of Cymbeline provides a clue; the play ends with the word “peace”: “Never was a war did cease (Ere bloody hands were wash’d) with such a peace” (Shakespeare 5.5.484-5). At the end of the play, the rightful king is a ratifier of pax romana, and the elements who wanted war with Rome—the Queen and her son Cloten—are dead. After a period of disorder, Britain is revived by the rebirth of the three royal children. “In the same vein, Imogen’s dramatic ‘revival’ from death in Wales is a visual allusion to the cosmic renewal about to occur during the Augustan peace” (Simonds 246). Similarly, Mrs. Dalloway features war in the background and a happy ending in which rebirth is emphasized in Clarissa’s return to life during her party, and as in Cymbeline, there is an analogy between the heroine and her nation. These parallels between Mrs. Dalloway and Cymbeline suggest that a restoration of peace and life are imagined possibilities in Mrs. Dalloway. I argue that it is this “cosmic renewal” that Clarissa is dreaming and this harmony she is trying to recover, not just for herself, but for the culture and country for which she stands in. This renewal is imagined through Woolf’s revisions to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which, I argue, should be read through the lens provided by the novel’s revision of Cymbeline. (pages 83, 86)
“A Third Sense of Ethics between Fiction and Philosophy” Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays. Eds. Simone Roberts and Alison Scott-Baumann. McFarland Press, 2010.
In the face of the ever-growing mass of Murdoch criticism, a new collection of essays is welcome indeed, for here is a chance for linked polyvocality, breadth and range. The theme and title of the book –Murdoch’s ‘moral imagination’ –is usefully wide, and while this idea is not without a few minor pitfalls, for the most part this is an engaging and exciting study.
[...]
It is not possible within this space to devote equal time to each essay, and the great variety of ideas raised. The most important thing that must be said, though –and the really striking thing about this work –is that it proves that it is still possible to strike out new ground in Murdochland. Notable examples of this are Peter Mathews’s linking of Murdoch and Nietzsche, John Hacker-Wright’s discussion of how Murdoch’s dismissal of scientific naturalism should not be taken at face value, Frances White’s clear and convincing paralleling of the work of Murdoch and Hannah Arendt, and the unexpected but winning conjunction of Murdoch and Irigaray by M.F. Simone Roberts. Anne Rowe makes a worthy case for seeing Zadie Smith as Murdoch’s successor through ethical uses of art; and in one of the strongest essays in the collection, Amy Smith suggests that the apparent (and often worried-over) gap between Murdoch’s ideas about character and fiction, and her execution of them, can be resolved by remembering that ‘myth is an integral part of how we see ourselves and live’ (p.48).
Excerpt from Nick Turner's review of Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays in The Iris Murdoch Review. (2011)