Contrasting Hemingway and Woolf

          The Sun Also Rises is written in an almost completely different style and method than Mrs. Dalloway. It is interesting to see how authors that were contemporaries and are dealing with similar issues about how the Great War affected people can characterize and represent their characters in such distinct styles.
          Hemingway is focused almost solely on the outside world and how Jake interacts with others. Despite Jake being the narrator of the book, he seldom if ever tells us what he is really thinking, I instead only narrating what is going on or what is said. Because of this, we have many ambiguities about Jake’s feeling towards the other characters in the book. Some things he says suggest that he is fine with them and gets along with them fine, but there are lines in between and descriptions that make the picture a little murkier. His description of Cohn that opens the book is almost scathing in his dismissal of Cohn’s accomplishments, it seems like he is trying to dispel any notions of Cohn being an extraordinary person despite him having written books and been boxing champion at Princeton. Similarly, he talks negatively about Brett to Cohn, even though this seems more to dissuade Cohn from trying to go talk to her and build a relationship. Brett in some ways seems to use Jake since she knows that he is always going to be there. She skips her meeting with Jake because she is hanging around with the Count, later claiming she was too drunk to remember, but there seems to be a sense of Brett taking Jake’s love for granted to a certain extent. Jake rarely ever thinks to himself, even when he is alone there is a sense of him giving a description of everything that is going on without making any effort to explain what his feelings are about the situation. Yet, despite Jake never delving into his feelings, his actions give us clues that let us infer how he is feeling. As we talked about in class, it seems like his anger at the gay men hanging around with Brett stems from his war wound and what it entails for his personal life. We can see how his feelings and emotions are affected by the things that occur and are explicitly narrated to us.
          In contrast, Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway is represented in a completely different light. She is always thinking, especially when she is alone, and she is pondering deep questions that wouldn’t be expected of anyone in her place in society. It seems like we are given a deeper insight into her brain, yet her relationships with Richard, Peter, and Sally are in many ways just as ambiguous. She constantly thinks about them but she wavers back and forth, almost arguing with herself as to how to think of them, and we get the sense she isn’t totally at peace with decisions that she made so many years ago. Woolf also doesn’t explicitly tell us what Clarissa is feeling in a certain situation but since we are given a window into her mind, we can infer by what she is thinking about and contrast it with what she says. One example of this is the first time she meets Peter in person where they are both attempting to be cordial and yet mocking each other in their heads. However, they also can’t stop thinking/caring about the other has to say. This complex relationship is developed through the ideas in the characters’ brains which are narrated to us. This is in contrast with the specific scene with Jake and Cohn talking about Brett where the tensions in the scene quickly come out instead of staying veiled like in Clarissa’s meeting with Peter. In this way, we can see how Clarissa’s feelings and emotions are indirectly stated through her thoughts.
          We can see that unlike Hemingway, Woolf is primarily concerned with the inside of a character. Jake can be said to represent male soldiers who in some way lost their identity of masculinity in the war. In some ways, Hemingway’s book seems to be about defending his generation, saying its’ still very much vibrant and alive despite the tragedy Jake and others suffered during the war. Meanwhile, Woolf is concerned primarily with making her characters not conform to any symbolic status or societal expectations. Clarissa constantly grapples with questions that she doesn’t need to concern herself with according to society norms, and as a result, she is given her own identity separate from the many other women in her position. Jake’s wound separates him from others in his generation, but unlike in Mrs. Dalloway, he seems to represent a larger group of soldiers who were harmed by the war.

War in Mrs. Dalloway

               War is portrayed in a strange way in Mrs. Dalloway. While five years have passed since the official endpoint of the war, the shadows of the war still loom over London and this is especially evident through the scenes in Mrs. Dalloway. The most obvious implication of the war is how it changed Septimus, but this is far from the only time it is mentioned. Despite the actual portrayal of Septimus being at war lasts one paragraph which mostly depicts his relationship with Evans, its’ clear that in the aftermath of the war, it affects everyone in different ways. From the very beginning of the book, Clarissa thinks about all of those she knows who had lost family and friends in the war, and we are introduced to Septimus quite early as well. When we first meet Septimus, he seemed to be a character who was mentioned just to represent the many veterans who had returned from the war but still had not managed to integrate themselves back into their daily lives.

                Clarissa seems to think about the war in the past tense. While she acknowledges the loss that it created, she also seems willing to dismiss it as something that happened in the past and not something that continues to impact their daily lives. I think Septimus as a character shows that London as a whole is still impacted every day, and despite the high society families like the Dalloways who were relatively unaffected by the war, there is still an undercurrent of people recovering from the greatest conflict in human history to that point.  Even Mrs. Kilman’s identity is partially defined by the war. Her German ancestry leads her to get fired from her original teaching job and maybe contributes to why she is poor and envious of Clarissa.
                 It is interesting to note that Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941. That time period was filled with warfare, including the Blitz which involved German planes bombing London and other British cities for the better part of 3 years as part of WWII. While this is obviously not the only reason she decided to take her own life, I think that the war may have affected her in much the same way it affected her characters. I think we can see Virginia Woolf critiquing the idealism that many went to war for by giving us the example of Septimus. He went to war to save Shakespeare’s England and came back scarred mentally. Instead of a returning hero, he is simply a crazy citizen, and according to many in that time such as Holmes, even cowardly. One message the book seems to give is that being patriotic doesn’t necessarily mean going to war for your country, and Woolf seems to constantly criticize the notion of young men going to war for the ideals of the nation by representing the realities of what war does to different people.