This essay contends that Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway explores how a radical novelistic empathy might thaw the frozen paralysis that grips British society. Clarissa Dalloway's empathy is reserved most for the unbalanced, overly emotional character of Septimus Smith, yet less understood is the lifelong nature of her empathy: she is a habitual empathizer and has been her entire adult life. Critical opinion generally considers Clarissa's empathy for Septimus an exceptional moment that she experiences only in isolation. But her social inclination to bring others together makes this empathy possible. By recourse to Lewis Hyde's seminal work on the gift and Elaine Scarry's work on the ethics of perceiving beauty, I argue that, in kissing Clarissa, Sally Seton “transmits” her empathy and love of life to Clarissa, who in turn throughout her life passes it on to others who need help in their suffering, setting up communities of care that are represented by her party. Woolf wants us to attain a critical empathy for the author herself and her characters on the supratextual level yet also judge them according to the two-part process of empathetic reading outlined in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?”
This essay argues for the necessity of a critical reconsideration of Brian Friel's short fiction both because of its own merits and since its depiction of emplaced communities struggling with aspects of modernity anticipates such conflicts in the major plays. Although Friel does not believe that rural culture was ever pristine and unadulterated, he nonetheless hints how modernity's advent into his chosen milieu of northwestern Ireland/Northern Ireland can create problems among its inhabitants such as destruction of community. ‘The Diviner’ and ‘The Saucer of Larks’ valorize the organic epistemology practiced by inhabitants who are outsiders to a local culture but become more in tune with local rhythms and landscape — the flux of place identified by phenomenologist Edward Casey — than many of the original inhabitants. In some situations, such as those he explores in short stories such as ‘Kelly's Hall’ and ‘Among the Ruins’, he offers positive portrayals of mechanized culture's ability to unify communities when that new technology is properly controlled, while in others, such as ‘Foundry House’, ‘The Potato Gatherers’, and ‘Everything Neat and Tidy’, he shows the debilitating effects of technology.
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