Posthumous Virginia Woolf’s Dilemma: A Culture of Social Media and Literature
Z. I. Mahmud
Bangladesh
*Corresponding Author E-mail: zimahmud_anan@yahoo.com
Virginia’s suicide notes to Leonard read:
“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So, I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
Virginia was later cremated and her remains were buried under one of the two intertwined Elm trees in her backyard, which she had nicknamed “Virginia and Leonard.” Leonard marked the spot with a stone tablet engraved with the last lines from her novel The Waves:
“Against you I fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
The waves broke on the shore.”
As a young girl, Virginia was curious, light-hearted and playful. She started a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, to document her family’s humorous anecdotes. However, early traumas darkened her childhood, including being sexually abused by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, which she wrote about in her essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate. In 1895, at the age of 13, she also had to cope with the sudden death of her mother from rheumatic fever, which led to her first mental breakdown, and the loss of her half-sister Stella, who had become the head of the household, two years later.
Shakespeare’s sister Virginia Woolf as a postmodernist felt a middle class woman cannot be accomplished in a movement of acknowledgement, even if she had brains and character to dispense.
Mary and Elizabeth were always having contradictory opinionated conflicts among themselves as postmodernist writers. Mary and Elizabeth were admirers of different writers: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath respectively.
Mary said, “I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience the social networking dating sites.”
Elizabeth felt the excitement and enthusiasm within her explode and having a soliloque while Mary had left her at her summer cottage on a midsummer day in July. “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush scenery of air, mountains, trees and people. I thought this is what it is to be happy.” --- This was a picture of Sylvia Plath’s reminiscence on the desktop calendar photoframe.
While analysing a literary assignment she was being monotous and bored, thus leaving the books and pens to spend some time in the dales and brooks along the stony alleys and pathways in the moonlights night: a solitary walk. The soliatry walk concludes with the sentiment and reflection being contemplated with Mary’s perception of social media and literature.
What Elizabeth wants is what Mary’s worst enemy to creativity: self doubt and desire the things which will destroy in the end. Elizabeth claims to have made Matthew up inside her head. If I didn’t think I wouldnt be much happier without Matthew.
“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little? for all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that-I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much-so very much to learn.” These were the very lines exchanged in email between Elizabeth and Mary.
Matthew entered the apartment of Mary and found her asleep on the couch. “What’s wrong! I’d say go to hell, but I never want to see you again.”
Mary picked up a bottle of whiskey from the fridge and poured down the two silvery wine cups laid on the table. Well, how much of a brain is willfully agreeable and confessing? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person. Because we share affection and love with our words as if we are just doing in speech but not in our deeds. She began to narrate the letter she had written to Richard while Matthew embraced her gently stroking her synthetic reddish brown hair.
August 16
Dear Richard,
Thank you so much for your amazing letter. We have got a nanny for the babies so can live here with easy heart. We plan to take the train to Kashmir tuesday night, cross to Great Himalayas, say hello to Aishwarya and come by train to Shimla by Wednesday evenings. Shall call as soon as we arrive. We would love to stay in your cottage. I don’t know when I have looked forward to anything.
Warmest good wishes
Mary
Matthew kissed her voraciously and dragged Mary to the bed whereby they had no idea of what they were about to commit: blasphemy and extra marital affair. Mary was fond of being a social media writer and author with a popular facebook fan page, a twitter account, a website, a blog, a youtube channel, an instagram profile and journal anthology web.
Mary’s delicate fingers are curled around Matthew and both of them sit down on the edge of the bed and look altruistic and have been talking about their destination honeymoon to America; the next step before they leve up their jobs and homes in Shimla. Gradually Mary pulled away from the embracing to take off her shirt. Showing her velvet silky pinkish coloured bra she had on. I smiled to excitement and that was what I had dreamed of whispered Matthew. His hands floated to her bra , and unsnapped it and sliding it off to show her beautiful boobs.
As the shiny ilvery grey sky appeared with a thunbdering sky and downpour the romantic mood of Mary enchanted her lover with the recitation of a sentimental and emotional poetry... A Mad Girl’s Love Song:
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes, they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
The mystified romanticised narration filled the homely cottage with ecastasy. The fragrance of those roses seemed to have been dull as the morning sky is grey and darkly painted black and her lover is detested with unimaginable confrontation and defrontation because her damsel beauty somehow failed to give him eternal pleasures. She’s exploring the heartache of being deserted and banished from her lover.
As Matthew went awy, she took the sleeping pills and hid in a crawl space, where she lays. Mary was very much a typical college girl and was obsessed with finiding love on social media.
Elizabeth was frozen to discover the sad plight of Mary as she came to visit her on the purpose of knowing what had happened to her telephone. From the age of 13 Mary suffered periodic mood swings from sever depression to manic excitement, including psychotic episodes, which the family referred to her as madness. Her orphange became her greatest disaster that could ever happen. In the sanatorium, Elizabeth was informed that any mental, emotional or physical strain resulted in a reappearance of her symptoms. These began with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to race. Her remedy was simple, to retire to bed in a darkened room, eat, and drink plenty of milk, following which the symptoms slowly subsided. But Elizabeth as a clinical psychologist as well as a novelist felt that she had been assualted with sexual abuse.
Virginia Woolf would have said truly a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction..... Elizabeth was stunned to hear the words of Mar who said, “A woman must have internet connection and a laptop of her own if she is to write fiction .... she would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.
Don’t let people treat you like a cigarette, they only use you when they’re bored and step on you when they’re done. Be like drugs, let them die for you.
Date someone who is interested in you. I don’t mean someone who thinks you’re cute or funny. I mean someone who wants to know every insignificant detail about you. Someone who wants to read every word you write. Someone who wants hear every note of your favourite song, and watch every scene of your favourite movie. Someone wants to find every scar upon your body, and learn where each one came from. Someone who wants to know your favourite brand of toothpaste, and which quotes resonate deep inside your bones when you hear them. There is a difference between attraction and interest. Find the person who wants to learn every aspect of who you are.
The glimpses from the Is Social Media Killing Literature By Francesca Baker published in the London Magazine April 30 2014 reads like this:
The brevity of social media messages, and the lack of formalised grammatical structure could well be considered to be proof that it cannot be a form of literature. Haikus are famously succinct, most fitting within a tweet due to their minimalist use of words. Concrete poetry completely breaks away from standard form, and you only need to consider the work of E. E. Cummings, or even James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to recognise that lack of perfect structure does not mean no literary worth. The fact is that most people do have busy lives and an expectation of short form and immediate entertainment rather than length and depth. It’s also a fact that novelists tend to reflect, in both style and subject, the society in which they and their readers live in and engage with. We muse and mumble about the sanctity of language, but this is how people talk and think – the modern-day stream of consciousness. Or as Scott Hutchins who used photographs to tell his San Francisco noir thriller at the aforementioned Twitter fiction festival, said: ‘Useless verbs fall away on Twitter.’ Everyone loathes a useless verb.
It’s one thing to create new literature in this fashion, by reducing Shakespeare to a tweet or Austen to a YouTube video we may be reducing their work to a fraction of its intended worth. But, with libraries closing and art budgets decreasing, perhaps this the best way to get more people engaging with the arts. After all, ‘Books are social. We share them, we discuss and debate them, we cite them, and we gather in places like libraries and bookstores that collect them.’ (Brienza)
REFERENCES:
https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/is-social-media-killing-literature-by-francesca-baker/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/poem/madgirl/
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/sylvia-plaths-mad-girls-love-song-from-mademoiselle
Quotations extracts from Sylvia Plath and facebook Literature posts...
Accepted on 15.06.2019 ©A&V Publications all right reserved International J. Advances in Social Sciences.2019;7(1-2):35-38. DOI: 10.5958/2454-2679.2019.00008.2 |
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