So far, we've had three presentations on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and they were all fantastic! Each provoked discussion, due in part to the fascinating topics that the groups chose, and also in part to the considerable ability of the presenters! My only problem with them (the presentations, not the presenters), and this is a problem that I've been dealing with for a long while now, is my complete skepticism with regards to symbolism.
While I think it's fascinating to try to figure out exactly what the author meant by their work, I find it almost impossible to believe that they intentionally built a story around an elaborate secret scheme that the author is leaving for critics to find years later. I could see Virginia Woolf keeping the dynamic of the Demeter/Persephone myth in mind as she's writing Mrs. Dalloway, but I doubt that she's sitting at her desk thinking, "Okay, seventy years after my death, I want these kids to do a presentation on how I modeled every single character's relationship with another character off of this myth."
I know I'm exaggerating, but I've always struggled with symbolism. A lot of the time, I wish people would be able to read the book or other piece of literary with for what it is, and not try to read a whole lot of stuff (which, frankly, I believe is not there) into it.
But that's just me, and I don't mean, in any way, to demean the presentations; I thought they were all great and I enjoyed them immensely!!!
2 comments:
I didn't hear the presentation you're talking about, but I definitely see where you're coming from here. As interesting as I think symbolism is to discuss, I can never help but think we're probably just reading too deep into the text and creating something out of nothing. However, I still think it's a valuable thing to talk about and that's because, even if it doesn't necessarily shed light on what Woolf was going for when she wrote the actual novel, at least it still serves to shed some light on each individual reader and what they get out of the text—you know? It always fascinates me how different people can take completely different things away from reading the same piece of literature, so I think it's interesting to talk about symbolism and hear what individual people might think a particular character or concept is supposed to represent because at the very least it's insight into what's going on in their mind as they read, even if that's not the same as what was going on in Woolf's mind.
This is always an interesting question for me, as I've had to listen to students complain (with varying degrees of tact and validity) about "reading too much into" literature since I started teaching (and even as a student). And we've all experienced the seemingly insane, obligatory "so-and-so is a Christ figure" kind of interpretations. The question of what an author *intended*, however, is a sticky one, as an author's intentions are embedded in the text and nowhere else (whatever they might say in interviews years after the work is published), and "symbols" or metaphors or parallels to myths can *be in the text* without the author being fully aware of it. It's always essential, as a reader of criticism and as a student, to have an active "BS detector," but also to have an open mind: the questions are, Does this reading *make sense*? Is the evidence persuasive? Most importantly, does it *add anything* to my interpretation of the work? In this instance, even in VW were to say (via a Ouiji board?), "I certainly never intended any such connection to Demeter/Persephone!" is it still possible that such a parallel exists? And might the parallel have something to offer toward our understanding of these characters and their dillemas?
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