Flowers for Virginia online scarf designs, tributes to the writer Virginia Woolf and her masterpiece, Mrs Dalloway
A celebration of flowers. A celebration of life. A tribute to the delicious novel by Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway." Digital original designs printed on sheer polyester chiffon, made in the USA. Two designs: square blue and purple long.
Mrs. Dalloway, the novel by Virginia Woolf, is not complicated, in the same way that a gorgeous jewel is not complicated. There is a clear order and necessity to it. Reading it is like letting your mind wander, except that it isn't your mind. It is another mind—or minds. While that mind-that-is-not-your-mind wanders into its past, the physical presence to that mind is also wandering through space: a particular city on a particular day, the hours of which are marked by the tolling of the bells.
What launches this wandering? It is the getting of flowers. Clarissa Dalloway is buying flowers to have at the party she is hosting that evening. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Going out into the world from the shelter of her home is a decisive act, exciting and life-affirming. “What a lark! What a plunge!”
Virginia Woolf made it easy for me to find compelling imagery for these scarves, because what could be more gorgeous than flowers? Not only are they visually gorgeous, their names are also musical and sensuous in the mouth. It is a lore that any gardener tries to master: botanical name and common name. Every spring I dig into my memory to extract the names for the little green points pushing inevitably up through the soil. Flowers and their words are all about life, but every gardener also knows that death and decay is tied up with all that. Which is true in this book.
Every major character in this novel has an interaction with flowers. It is my opinion that each interaction shows how that character approaches female power.
There is a grid, a structure in time and personality, underlying this novel, and there is also a grid system underlying these scarf designs. It is a series of interlocking circles that is sometimes called “The Flower of Life.” I drew this array of circles using drawing software, placing each circle, its center at the intersection of two arcs, to build a field of petals. It occurred to me that each circle is like the consciousness of a character, and when it intersects with another circle, it is like the way Woolf has the point of view shift from one character to another, so that the reader's perceptions wander through selves. This gave me the idea to have the text follow curves on the long scarf, so that the words are literally wandering in a fashion similar to the narrative consciousness and the characters. I chose two text excerpts (two paths) for the long scarf, one about the flowers in the flower shop, and the other about how people love life (fleshing out the ideas behind Clarissa Dalloway's exclamations: What a lark! What a plunge!)
The field of circles also relates to an idea of Clarissa's about people being connected, and achieving a kind of immortality because our selves are distributed socially. This is also part of why Clarissa loves having parties, because she can connect people, which for her is life.
Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of interior monologue as a narrative device. As an essayist, she framed in flawless prose many feminist issues that had not been articulated before.
Woolf was born into an affluent middle class household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight which also included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. Her father was an intellectual and a literary historian. Like many women before her, Woolf mostly educated herself in her father's library. Although she profited by the tutelage of her father and several other professional tutors, “the fact remains that she was uneducated because [her father] did not want to spend the money on her.”*
After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' university friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Ho-garth Press, which published much of her work, as well as the works of other important writers. They rented a home in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. Woolf was a lesbian and had a long-standing relationship with Vita Sackville-West, who was also an author.
During the inter-war period, Woolf was an important part of London's literary and artistic society. In 1915, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, and in 1925 she published Mrs. Dalloway. She is also known for her reviews and essays, including the highly influential A Room of One's Own (1929). Woolf published nine novels and many essays and pieces of short fiction online and memoir.
A large body of literature is dedicated to Woolf's work and her life, and she has influenced many artists, writers, and thinkers. She made a foundational case for women's experience being worthy of intellectual attention.
Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by mental illness. She was in a hospital several times and attempted suicide at least twice. Her illness was characterised by symptoms that today might be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, for which there was no effective intervention during her lifetime. In 1941, at age 59, Woolf died by drowning herself in the River Ouse at Lewes.
(Adapted from Wikipedia. *Quote is from Hermione Lee's Biography of Woolf, Virginia Woolf, 1996)
The Wandering Texts on the Long Scarf
Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood . . . turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer's day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!
The list of flowers on the square scarf (Flowers named in Mrs. Dalloway)
hydrangea
syringas
hibiscus
delphinium
sweet pea
lilac
carnation
rose
iris
arum lily
evening primrose
tobacco (nicotiana)
hyacinth
lily
violet
orchid
hollyhock
dahlia
tulip
camellia
geranium
clover
rhododendron
crocus
daisy
cherry pie (heliotrope)