The most fascinating aspect of this story to me is the ways that WWII damaged the collective psyche of all countries involved in really irreparable ways. It’s also interesting how people delve into their delusions, dreams, and fantasies to try and escape their horrors of their day to day realities. We touched on this by discussing lucid dreaming which can come from your body going into defensive mode and trying to protect your mental stability by processing the disastrous and confusing world around you. Going on the Blitz walking tour today really brought some of those horrific realities of the characters from “Mysterios Kôr” to life for me by learning the history of the air raids over London. There was nothing I could compare the panic and sense of anxiousness of surprise raids to in my own experience or American history and I find it interesting to think of how a culture could be affected by such a thing.

Being in the former house of Virgina Woolf was incredible! After our discussion this morning I felt that I had a much better grasp on the flow of Mrs. Dalloway-I had not considered that it was not stream of consciousness but rather free and direct discourse. From a craft perspective I find that technique extremely interesting because it offers a wide range of persepctive while maintaining the voice of an individual character. I wish we had gone more into Peter because I have a completely different read on his characer after hearing about his potential sexual aggression. I wonder about the failure of his marriage with his first wife coupled with the aggression and the repeated phallic symbol of the knife suggesting impotency. The entire conversation was extremely interesting and I feel like I should go back and reread the novel!

What I found most interesting about the discussion today was Margaret’s role throughout the novel as an intermediary. Because Margaret is surrounded by mostly ineffectual people she is often running interference between two characters, delivering unsavory news usually. The reason this interests me is because it exemplifies how Margaret wields power through ways that are considered traditionally feminine. Taking charge and getting things done are read as masculine traits and Margaret does this with delivering the moving news to her mother, keeping secrets for her mother, and delivering death news. However, the spreading of information (chatting, gossiping, so forth) are “feminine” pastimes and so is the comfort necessary after the giving/sometimes receiving of information. Margaret uses the status of being a woman intelligently to wield power creatively which is what I feel makes her an interesting heroine.

The Darkest Victorian London tour we went on today was extremely fascinating. I was appalled at both the living and working conditions of the lower classes in the Victorian era; I always knew there was a class disparity but the information we were given about poor people living 150 people to one house and having to work almost exclusively in life-risking labor shifted my perspective on how large the disparity was. It also made me enjoy Glaskell’s North & South as a political commentary as we discussed today in class. I had initially felt bogged down by the lengthy economic explanations but after realizing their purpose of both informing readers of economic theory as well as showing her own knowledge of it I was glad this novel was written that way. North & South was written to catch the interest of upper and middle class people with a traditional Victorian love story and (intially) heroine and uses the opportunity to get the ball rolling on a social conversation about the abuses the poor suffered. I think that knowing and seeing the specifics of how horrible being in a lower class during this time was made me more appreciative of the fact that this treatment was addressed in the book and therefore made me more appreciative of the book as a whole.

Going on the East End walking tour today really brought Brick Lane to life for me; seeing all of the shops and vendors when I was walking around made me think of Nazneen running around while she was pregnant with her son. She travels down to the very end of brick lane which I walked three quaters of today and she talks of a lot of the general sights I saw that are usually common to brick lane like the bustling people and all of the restaurants with the waiters standing out front “with their tight black pants…holding out menus and smiles” (38) though she mentions it is deserted while she’s traveling it. I also saw flats that gave me a visual idea of how Nazeen was able to just look out of her window and see the tattooed woman sitting on her patio. That was particularly interesting to me because when reading it I had a hard time picturing what she meant because it’s less common to sit out on patios back home, especially in an apartment.