Comparing Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Edward Thomas’ And As the Team’s Head Brass, and the film Hedd Wyn :: Comparison Compare Contrast Essays

Comparing Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Edward Thomas’ And As the Team’s Head Brass, and the film Hedd Wyn The wars of the Twentieth century have had a marked impact on the views and actions of societies all across the world. The impacts of World War I can be viewed vividly through the literature of the time period. In this period, each author had his or her own way of illustrating the effects of the war on their public. Three works dealing in particular with this representation are: â€Å"As the Team’s Head Brass† a poem by Edward Thomas, â€Å"Mrs. Dalloway† a novel by Virginia Woolf, and the film â€Å"Hedd Wyn.† These three works illustrate a common ground in general, of their representation of war, but each offers a particular emphasis of the impact of WWI in Europe more vividly. In the common realm, each work illustrates that every member of society was affected by the war. Each of these works detail a society in which the general tone is a somber one, a tone plagued by worry over the loss of loved ones, and the inability to understand the meaning of the destruction of the war. These three works illustrate the representation of war from three types of people. First, there are the people who had no direct contact with the war themselves, though perhaps a loved one or a friend of theirs may have died, they were not directly involved. The attitudes of those characters that were not directly involved in the war are distinctly different from those who have returned from participating in the war. Those not directly involved in WWI paint a much less terrorizing representation of the war than those who fought in it. In the last group are those who died fighting in the war. The impressions that war left on this group of people are illustrated through the letters and poems that they wrote during their time in the war. These last two groups represent war in a similarly dark fashion. In Mrs. Dalloway, we are exposed to the general conscious of the London community through a variety of characters; most of them are members of the first group, those who were not directly involved in the war. Most of these characters are depicted as interested in getting on with their lives.