Mrs. Dalloway

Clarissa is a seemingly disillusioned socialite whose mood fluctuates: Her overall affect suggests suppressed symptoms of depression. Unexpected events occur—a car emits an explosive noise and a plane writes in the sky—and incite different reactions in different people. Soon after she returns home, her former lover Peter arrives.

The two converse, and it becomes clear that they still have strong feelings for each other. In a moment of shared vulnerability, Peter asks Clarissa if she is happy. Before Clarissa can answer, her daughter, Elizabeth, interrupts them. Perspectives switch, and the narrator inhabits Septimus Warren Smith, a World War I veteran suffering from shell shock what today would likely be identified as post-traumatic stress disorder , or PTSD. He is waiting with his wife, Lucrezia, to see a psychiatrist named Sir William Bradshaw. The reader is informed that Septimus has been suffering greatly since returning from the war, and his suffering is something the other characters are unable to grasp.

In a fit of passion, Richard wants to run home and tell Clarissa he loves her. However, he finds himself unable to do more than give her flowers. Clarissa acknowledges that she respects the gulf between herself and Richard, as it gives both of them freedom and independence while also relieving them of paying attention to certain aspects of life.

Septimus would rather die than see himself inside such a place, so he throws himself out of a window and becomes impaled on a fence. She is primarily concerned with entertaining her guests, some of whom are very esteemed. Sir William Bradshaw arrives with his wife, who announces that Septimus has killed himself. Clarissa, though at first annoyed that Mrs. In a small room, by herself, she identifies with how overwhelmed Septimus must have felt.

She respects him for choosing death over compromising the integrity of his soul by allowing it to be confined. In light of what he did to preserve his soul, she feels ashamed of the ways she has compromised her own soul in order to go on living. Thus chastened, she returns to the party as it is winding down. Many critics believe that, in writing this novel, Woolf found her voice, which she further refined in her following novels.

Her style was a reaction to the narrative style of much popular Victorian literature, which was linear and deterministic. Woolf, like many other Modernist authors writing in the aftermath of World War I, felt that such a style did not truly depict life as the disjointed mess that it was. Dalloway is no exception. Woolf, through Septimus, forces the reader to engage with shell shock firsthand and to grapple with the internal and external effects it can have.

This was something few authors had done before. Dalloway , through its depiction of Clarissa and Septimus, who can be seen as foils for each other, and of the political atmosphere in Britain during the s, explores the fragmented yet fluid nature of time and the interconnectedness of perception and reality across individuals and social spheres.

Clarissa, a woman of high society, is primarily concerned with giving a good party—perhaps as a means of affirming life and fending off death. She appears at times to be concerned only with the surfaces of things, but her seeming disillusionment with reality can be understood as a coping mechanism. Clarissa tries to ignore the uncomfortable realities of her surroundings—the residual horrors of World War I and her own implied mental illness—and instead engages at the superficial level of societal rules and expectations. Septimus, on the other hand, represents the breakdown of such a society: Clarissa does not face the same sort of confinement, but her freedom is shown at times to be an illusion.

She does not commit suicide of the body, but, by shielding herself from uncomfortable realities, she commits emotional suicide, some critics argue.

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It also seems to relieve her of her disillusionment, if only momentarily, as she praises Septimus for having the courage to escape the confinement that she sees in her own life despite her efforts to ignore it. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. In the past, Clarissa rejected his marriage proposal. Now he has returned to England from India and is one of Clarissa's party guests.

He plans to marry Daisy, a married woman in India, and has returned to try to arrange a divorce for his current wife. Hugh Whitbread is a pompous friend of Clarissa's, who holds an unspecified position in the British Royal household. Like Clarissa, he places great importance on his place in society. Although he believes he is an essential member of the British aristocracy, Lady Bruton, Clarissa, Richard, and Peter find him obnoxious. In Mrs Dalloway , all of the action, aside from the flashbacks , takes place on a day in June It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, freely alternating her mode of narration between omniscient description , indirect interior monologue , and soliloquy.

Woolf laid out some of her literary goals with the characters of Mrs Dalloway while still working on the novel. A year before its publication, she gave a talk at Cambridge University called "Character in Fiction," revised and retitled later that year as "Mr. Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce 's Ulysses , a text that is often considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century though Woolf herself, writing in , denied any deliberate "method" to the book, saying instead that the structure came about "without any conscious direction" [7].

In her essay " Modern Fiction, " Woolf praised Ulysses , saying of the scene in the cemetery, "on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. While in the initial reading process, she recorded the following response to the aforementioned passages,. An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page ," [9] D 2: Woolf's distaste for Joyce's work only solidified after she completed reading it.

She summed up her thoughts on the work as a whole:. Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water.

The book is diffuse. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.

Three more from Virginia Woolf

The Hogarth Press , run by her and her husband Leonard , had to turn down the chance to publish the novel in because of the obscenity law in England, as well as the practical issues regarding publishing such a substantial text. The novel has two main narrative lines involving two separate characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith ; within each narrative there is a particular time and place in the past that the main characters keep returning to in their minds.

For Clarissa, the "continuous present" Gertrude Stein 's phrase of her charmed youth at Bourton keeps intruding into her thoughts on this day in London. For Septimus, the "continuous present" of his time as a soldier during the "Great War" keeps intruding, especially in the form of Evans, his fallen comrade. Time plays an integral role in the theme of faith and doubt in Mrs. The overwhelming presence of the passing of time and the impending fate of death for each of the characters is felt throughout the novel.

A constant stream of consciousness from the characters, especially Clarissa, can serve as a distraction from this passing of time and ultimate march towards death but each character has a constant reminder of the inevitability of these facts. However evident time and death may be throughout the novel, only a day passes over the course of the entire story, not nearly enough to be worried about death that much.

Although it seems random, it only demonstrates the infinite number of possibilities that the world can offer once connected by the individuality of each person inside.

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Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the treatment of mental illness and depression. Rezia remarks that Septimus "was not ill. Dr Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him. Woolf goes beyond commenting on the treatment of mental illness. Using the characters of Clarissa and Rezia, she makes the argument that people can only interpret Septimus' shell shock according to their cultural norms. Clarissa's reality is vastly different from that of Septimus; his presence in London is unknown to Clarissa until his death becomes the subject of idle chatter at her party.

By never having these characters meet, Woolf is suggesting that mental illness can be contained to the individuals who suffer from it without others, who remain unaffected, ever having to witness it. Her use of Septimus as the stereotypically traumatised veteran is her way of showing that there were still reminders of the First World War in London in Dalloway and readers spanning generations.

Shell shock, or post traumatic stress disorder , is an important addition to the early 20th century canon of post-war British literature. There are similarities in Septimus' condition to Woolf's struggles with bipolar disorder. Both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek , and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of a window as Septimus does. Woolf committed suicide by drowning, sixteen years after the publication of Mrs Dalloway. Woolf's original plan for her novel called for Clarissa to kill herself during her party.

In this original version, Septimus whom Woolf called Mrs. Dalloway's "double" did not appear at all. When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life. Most of the plot in Mrs Dalloway consists of realisations that the characters subjectively make. Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasised as a woman who appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and create happy moments.

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Her charm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of joie de vivre , always summarised by the sentence: As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial " Angel in the House " and embodies sexual and economic repression and the narcissism of bourgeois women who have never known the hunger and insecurity of working women. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a patrician politician, but she is still able to express herself and find distinction in the parties she throws.

Her old friend Sally Seton, whom Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent woman — she smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag, and made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted to Sally Seton at Bourton.

Thirty-four years later, Clarissa still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about Sally "as men feel," [16] but she does not recognise these feelings as signs of bisexuality. Similarly, Septimus is haunted by the image of his dear friend Evans. Evans, his commanding officer, is described as being "undemonstrative in the company of women. Kennard notes that the word "share" could easily be read in a Forsteran manner, perhaps as in Forster's Maurice , which shows the word's use in this period to describe homosexual relations.

Kennard is one to note Septimus' "increasing revulsion at the idea of heterosexual sex," abstaining from sex with Rezia and feeling that "the business of copulation was filth to him before the end. Dutch film director Marleen Gorris made a film version of Mrs Dalloway in