Catalin's 20th Century Novels

The Sun Also Rises  is not a book that has a lot of female characters. The majority of the characters are male, so is the narrator Jake. The only memorable female representation we see is Frances (Robert Cohn's girlfriend) and Brett. Even though Lady Brett has a very big role in the book, we still only see her story from a biased view of Jake's. We can't learn much from an unbiased viewpoint about these female characters, but we can learn a lot about how Hemingway portrays these characters through Jake eyes. Brett is the perfect woman. All the guys love her: she is beautiful, easy-going, funny, and loves to drink. As the male characters often say, "She is one of the guys." Most of the men in Paris are in love with her, and she has many admirers in other parts of France as well. Brett's attractiveness seems to received universally, with there not being many male characters that don't like Brett in one way or another. This becomes a problem because Brett d...

I didn’t know what I was getting myself into by watching this movie. Already the first scene of the movie shocked me, depicting Virginia Woolf’s suicide. I was wrong to believe that this would be the last tragic suicide to happen in this film, with Richard committing suicide later on as well. I really enjoyed the parallels that the film made to the book. It was great that we saw Virginia Woolf’s story played out in this movie as her own story. Contrary to the novel Mrs. Dalloway , where we only learn about her in connection to the inspiration behind Clarissa and Septimus’ stories. We talked in class about how Virginia Woolf struggled with mental illness herself, but I had no idea that she actually committed suicide and I had no idea that she did so by drowning herself. This was very interesting because it helped me see the book she writes from her own perspective. We talked in class about if Clarissa was really meant to be portrayed as unhappy and depressive in the book, but a...

Right from when we first met him, Septimus Warren Smith was an interesting character. His personality and his problems throughout the novel differed greatly from some of the other characters we are introduced to in the novel Mrs. Dalloway. With Septimus, it is both important and fascinating to look at his character from the viewpoint of Virginia Woolf writing this person into the story. Woolf depicts Septimus's illness and consequent suicide in a very passive and introspective way. We learn mostly about his own experiences with his mental health from his own thoughts-- not from another character diagnosing him. The only other characters that know about Septimus and his illness are his doctors: Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, and his wife Lucrezia. We don't learn much from Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw as they are pretty useless with this case of mental illness -- as many doctors in that time were. Their idea that Septimus just needs some rest obviously is a faile...