O humano e sua voz: um diálogo comparativo entre Mrs. Dalloway de Virginia Woolf e Rei Lear de William Shakespeare

Abstract

The present dissertation aims at discussing how the reading of the work of the poet and also dramatist William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) had influenced the literary project developed by the writer Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941), in order to establish a comparative dialogue between the novel Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, and the tragedy King Lear, written by Shakespeare in 1605. We believe that by means of a critical process expressed in the reading Virginia Woolf did about the shakespearean text, the voice of the English bard dissolves into the poetic writing of the author and is assimilated and transformed by it, till the moment it becomes a single and distinct voice, namely, the woolfian voice. To support our analysis, we are based on some fundamental categories such as the concept of tradition discussed by the critic and also poet T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and individual talent” (1968); of intertextuality presented by the professor Julia Kristeva (1974) based on the notions of polyphony and dialogism developed by Mikhail Bakhtin (2002); and the concepts of influence, (mis)reading and of human discussed by the American critic Harold Bloom in his books The anxiety of influence: a theory of poetry (1991) and Shakespeare: the invention of human (2000). With this in mind, we did our comparative analysis focusing on the two protagonists of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, and their dialogue with the characters king Lear and his clown. This way, we intend to show how the shakespearean voice of these two characters are evoked and then transformed by the protagonists of the novel, constituting, therefore, a process of (mis)reading of the play studied. In this sense, we conclude that the shakespearean voice of Virginia Woolf is a voice that, at the same time, is conscious of the new necessities required by her present time and also of the importance of centuries of tradition expressed, mainly, by the legacy left by Shakespeare to English and universal literature.