5 - Moments of Being and the Everyday
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
Summary
Here is nothing out of the way … a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner … But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all the happiness of life has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence. (Woolf 1962a: 178)
The preceding chapters have explored Woolf's emphasis throughout her writings on the notion that the individual's average everyday mode of Being-in-the-world comes to be defined and ‘held in place’ (‘Sketch’: 92) by the typically veiled forces, conventions and prescriptions of the social order, including the often overlapping discourses of patriarchy, religion, nationalism and history. As discussed, such an approach to the relationship between self and world may be contrasted with Heidegger's ontological emphasis in Being and Time. In this chapter, the focus shifts to the crucial role that moods and sensations play in Woolf's textual representations of the individual's experience of Being-in-the-world. This notion will be explored from the perspective of Heidegger's understanding that
Dasein's openness to the world is constituted existentially by the attunement of a state-of-mind … Indeed from the ontological point of view we must as a general principle leave the primary discovery of the world to ‘bare mood’. (BT: 176, 177)
As Heidegger's assertion reflects, moods provide the potential means by which each individual's relationship to the world comes to be disclosed. Thiele observes that, from a Heideggerian perspective, ‘Far from standing between us and our world, moods are what first and foremost bring us into the world, into our “there”’ (1997: 497). In Being and Time, Heidegger emphasises that ‘we are never free of moods’ (BT: 175); as such, the individual always already finds him or herself in one mood or another. Such an understanding of moods as the inevitable, inescapable and ever-changing conduit through which the individual's relationship to the world is situated and revealed is also reflected throughout Woolf's writings.
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- Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-worldA Heideggerian Study, pp. 182 - 228Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017