Virginia Woolf; Syntax

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Ariel Stroud Virginia Woolf. Two Meals. Food can symbolize many different things. It can stand for lavishness or poverty, frugality or profligacy. It is something that we often overlook, but if you pay attention it can help you understand ones’ standing in society. Virginia Woolf compares two meals, one at a womens’ college and one at a mens’ college. She uses the meals as an extended metaphor to indirectly compare both sexes’ societal positions by her use of diction and imagery. Virginia Woolf describes the first meal, which is the men’s dinner, with exuberant adjectives and comparisons. The dinner is portrayed as carefree and jovial. Woolf compares potatoes to money, and sprouts to rosebuds, expressing their beauty and value through imagery. She makes the dinner seem very extravagant and like there was a lot of effort put into it by using lines such as, “partridges, many and various”, and, “To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.” Woolf talks about laughter, friends, and wine around the room. At the end she states, “How good life seemed, how sweet it’s rewards”, making you feel like you could forget all of your troubles and problems on this night. The second dinner is the womens dinner and Virginia Woolf makes it seem plain and unimportant. All of her eloquent language is gone in this segment. Woolf describes this dinner in short sentences, and without appeal. The gravy was a “transparent liquid” which you could see through to the plate that had no pattern and was “plain”. She emphasizes on the poor quality of the food through statements such as a “homely trinity”, “bargaining”, “cheapening” and “there are people whose charity even embraces the prune”. This makes it seem as if women are at the bottom of society and are of the poorest and insignificant. The sprouts are now “curled and yellow at the edge”, having beauty
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