How does Virginia Woolf create a convincing portrayal of post-World War One England through the use of symbolism?

Seeing invalids walk through Westminster directly recalls the war for some individuals, but performing insignificant tasks like preparing for a party also reveals how the war permeates their consciousness in more subtle ways.During the Victorian and Edwardian Era it was widely believed that «war was the highest form of sport»and these sports are to inculcate in young boys characteristics such as courage, leadership, and ideals of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the team. Game strategies were used for military education as well. This romanticizing and comparing of war to sport allowed civilians to believe on August 4, 1914, when England entered the war that it would «involve cavalry charges and combat between heroic individuals.» Instead of being a noble exhibition of heroism and chivalry, the Great War was a brutal force that indiscriminately killed more soldiers than any other war to date. Within a few months «casualties had been shocking, positions had been settled into self-destructive stalemates, and sensitive people now perceived that the war, far from promising to be «over by Christmas», was going to extend itself to hitherto unimagined reaches of suffering and irony.»The war quickly wove itself into the everyday lives of the British, wherein much energy was focused on supporting the war effort through rationing, labor or fighting. As the war preceded the number of causalities soared, especially in offensives. Countless British citizens lost brothers, fathers, and or their husbands on the front. These deaths and the lack of progress made on both the battlefield and home front caused civilians and soldiers alike to become embittered and disillusioned with the Empire. As a result, Victorian ideals were being recognized as out dated and thus, when the war ended, soldiers returned to what seemed like a foreign country; class relationships were changing, the symbolism of royalty was fading, and a literary offensive against the war, the older generation, and the current governing elite occurred. Stark inequalities, a rigid class hierarchy, and a strong class-consciousness marked.In August 1940, Woolf wrote an article Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid. It was a political speech. Woolf calls for the end of the war, the aggression, and the «desire to dominate and enslave».Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: she is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted – and sometimes almost dissolved – in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.For Woolf, writing remained a source of professional fulfillment and self-doubt, joy and misery. Writing and living were inseparable pursuits. This is especially true since Woolf utilized her observations of the people around her as a primary source of subject material. Only one other realm of experience was of equal, perhaps superior, importance: the rigorous self-examination of her own thoughts and strivings that is so evident in her amazing diaries.After completing the manuscript of her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. During the World War II Virginia had fear for her husband who was Jewish, besides, her nephew Julian,her most adorable nephew,died in Spain. The writer suffered from the fact that she was not a mother, their house in London was destroyed during the bombing, the magnificent library was lost, and Virginia with her husband had to move to Rodmell in Sussex.Woolf battled depression throughout her life and had survived several earlier suicide attempts. The outbreak of World War II affected her spirits profoundly. She noted in her diary that the declaration of war in September 1939 was«the worst of all my life’s experiences … One merely feels that the killing machine has to be set in action».As Hitler’s «killing machine» blitzed its way across Europe, Woolf’s worst fears were coming so close to her doorstep that she had to lie face down on the lawn of Monk’s House as Luftwaffe bombers roared overhead on their way to bomb London. She and Leonard planned on committing suicide if the Nazi forces landed in Sussex, as they seemed poised to do in the fall of 1940. But by the spring of 1941, as the Germans became increasingly engaged in Greece and North Africa, the prospect of invasion was fading. As Woolf explained in her letter to Leonard, once she began hearing voices again, her ability to write suffered immensely. The ability to read and write was of incredible significance to Virginia, so tremendous that she decided she could not go through another period the numbing anesthetic the rest cure prescribed her. Instead of sacrificing her mind and her abilities, she placed stones in her coat pocket and drowned herself in the River Ouse.Virginia Woolf faced the fact that her healthy mind would fine no purchase in this new world order either. Sick or well, Woolf was trapped. So for the first time in her life time of struggle with depression, it was not just a matter of Woolf getting well… the world would still remain ill regardless.Woolf’s mind, like Britain, was under siege. Might a greater horror than fear of German paratroopers or of her own helplessness have haunted her thoughts? Prophet that she was in so many respects, she saw that the world was turning into a permanent armed camp. The minds and spirits of the young were being warped by their very devotion to fighting Fascism. This had happened to her nephew, Julian Bell, who recklessly threw his life away during the Spanish Civil War. Perhaps it was the spectacle of seeing her loved ones, her friends and her country settling in for a «good war» that caused Woolf to write in her suicide note, «…I know that I shall never get over this…»She tried to forget all the previous experience, having gone to work on Between the Acts. But she could work only being in a state of deep depression, her strange visions and sounds, as voices of birds singing above the olive trees in ancient Greece, came back again. On 28 March 1941, Woolf walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Her body was not found until 18 April 1941. In her last note to her husband she wrote: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... I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer… 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 Woolf is regarded as one of the most important women in the modernism movement. She was the nucleus of early twentieth century literary culture in Great Britain. As a writer, feminist, and literary critic, her contributions to literature were impressive and enduring. Woolf is the most typical representative of the English modernism of 20s and the most significant writers of this trend. Woolf collects her works from the fragmentary impressions and emotive moments experienced by different characters. She refuses from art developed plot and realistic descriptions. Her novels are so called the internal monologues of a writer, turning into a «stream of consciousness», the sophisticated game with time, with nocanonicalusabilityof traditional poetics. Her novels, written in the stream of consciousness mode, took James Joyce’s new form of writing, exemplified by his novel Ulysses, and perfected it for the public. Through Virginia’s novels we get a glimpse of how life was changing in post-war Great Britain. These changes, «This sense of the radical difference between the «modern» world and the «Edwardian» one, or more broadly the world before and after the First World War, became a major theme of Virginia's fiction» and are not only in Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse, but also in almost every single one of her works.Woolf utilized her perceptions and reflections to create a kind of literary alchemy. Her novels and stories are vivid slices of life, delicately attuned to the characters and aspirations of her protagonists. And in an uncanny way, Woolf was so extraordinarily sensitive to life that her words exude awareness of the characters and aspirations of her readers, including those born long after she wrote her final sentence.BibliographyBazin, Nancy Topping and Jane HamovitLauter. "Virginia Woolf's Keen Sensitivity to War: Its Roots and its Impact on Her Novels." In Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, edited by Mark Hussey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1991.Bell, Alan, Stephen, Sir Leslie (1832–1904), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004.Beja, Morris, Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf, 1985.Briggs, Julia, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Harcourt, 2006.Davis, Hugh H. "The Horologium and Symbolism." The Classical Weekly 49, no. 6 (1956).Friedman, Ellen G. & Fuchs, Mariam. Contexts and Continuities: An Introduction to Women’s Experimental Fiction in England // Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton, 1989.Harris, Alexandra, Virginia Woolf, Thames & Hudson, 1990.Hasler, Jörg. "Virginia Woolf and the Chimes of Big Ben." English Studies 63, no. 2 (1982).Himmelfarb, Gertrude, From Clapham to Bloomsbury: a genealogy of morals, 2001.Hynes, Samuel L. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London, UK: Pimlico, 1992Lee, Hermione: Virginia Woolf. Knopf, 1997.Meyer, Robert, Case Studies in Abnormal Behaviour, Allyn and Bacon. 1998 // Jones, Christine Kenyon; Snaith, Anna, «Tilting at Universities»: Woolf at King’s College London», Woolf Studies Annual, volume 16, 2010.Oxford Dictionary of British History: Virginia Woolf // A Dictionary of British History, edited by John Cannon, Oxford University PressPanken, Shirley. Oh that our human pain could here have ending Between the Act. Virginia Woolf and the «Lust of Creation»: A Psychoanalytic Exploration.1987.Pearce, Brian Louis. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in Twickenham. Borough of Twickenham Local History Society, 2007.Poole, Roger, The Unknown Virginia Woolf. Cambridge University Press, 1978.Robb, George. British Culture and the First World War. 1st ed. New York, New York: Palgrave, 2002.Rose, Phyllis. Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. Routledge. 1986.Spalding, Frances, Virginia Woolf: Paper Darts: the Illustrated Letters, Collins & Brown, 1991Svendsen, Jessica,Lewis,Pericles. "Virginia Woolf." The Modernism Lab at Yale University (2010).The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1925-1930. L, 1980. The Hours DVD, «Special Features», «The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf», 2003.Ward, J V. Virginia Woolf. A post-symbolist writer who relies on symbols? 2003.Woolf, Leonard. A Writer's Diary. New York, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company. 1953.Woolf, Leonard. Downhill all the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Richmond, London, United Kingdom: Hogarth Press, 1925.External linksLawrence's Approach to Characterization//www.bibliomania.com/ 1/7/32/1935/25832/1/frameset.html. Retrieved 26 March 2014.Modernist Literature in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway//voices.yahoo.com/modernist-literature-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway-1959866.html. Retrieved 27 March 2014.Tales of abjection and miscegenation: Virginia Woolf's and Leonard Woolf's Jewish stories // Twentieth Century Literature, Fall 2003, by LeenaKore Schroder// www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_3_49/ai_n6130106/pg_17. Retrieved 27 March 2014.The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, by Christopher Baldick, Oxford University Press //www.answers.com/library/Literary+Dictionary-letter-1S-first-51#ixzz2xFK4NYuY. Retrieved 27 March 2014.Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,www.wikipedia.org// www.answers.com/topic/symbolists#ixzz2xFKVB93x. Retrieved 26 March 2014.