How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
There is true art in it, this command of tea and dinner tables; this animating correctness. Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects, but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed. (7.8)
Here's a Big Question for you, Shmoopers: have public conceptions of "great literature" changed very much since Virginia Woolf's time? Are big novels about politics, government, war, nation-building, and religion—areas that have been dominated historically by men and male writers—still most likely to be considered "great"?
Quote #8
Clarissa Dalloway, she thinks, will kill herself over something that seems, on the surface, like very little. Her party will fail, or her husband will once again refuse to notice some effort she's made about her person or her home. The trick will be to render intact the magnitude of Clarissa's miniature but very real desperation; to fully convince the reader that, for her, domestic defeats are every bit as devastating as are lost battles to a general. (7.9)
In The Hours, Michael Cunningham attempts to do the exact same thing with Laura Brown. What do you think, Shmoopers? Does he succeed in conveying Laura's own "miniature but very real desperation"?
Quote #9
Doesn't it matter that she's the woman in the book? (Though the book, of course, failed, and though Oliver, of course, probably reads very little.) Oliver did not say to Sally, "Be sure to bring that interesting woman you live with." He probably thought Clarissa was a wife; only a wife. (8.25)
In her own moments of sadness and self-consciousness, Clarissa Vaughan sometimes feels a lot like Laura Brown. That is, she sometimes feels as though people don't see her for who she really is, but instead see her simply as the wife of someone who is much more valuable and interesting.