Mrs. Dalloway

By Virginia Woolf

Life

• Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London on January 25, 1882, one of four children, daughter of biographer and critic Leslie Stephen (later Sir Leslie) and Julia Jackson Duckworth. educated at home by her father. voracious reader of books in father’s library.

• married Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics and politics. Virginia Woolf, her husband, her siblings, and their friends became known as the Bloomsbury Group. 

• In 1917 the Woolfs founded Hogarth Press 

Life tragedy

• Her mother’s death in 1895 trigger the first mental breakdown. When father died in 1904, suffered a second breakdown and attempted suicide by jumping out of window. On Match 28, 1941, she left notes for her husband Leonard Woolf and sister Vanessa before drowning in the River Ouse.

Major Works

• Woolf's early novels—The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob's Room (1922)

• To the Lighthouse (1927)• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)• Orlando (1928)• The Waves (1931) • A Room of One’s Own (1929) • Three Guineas (1938). • The Common Reader (1925) and The Common Reader: Second Series

(1932). • The Diary of Virginia Woolf.

Stylistic Features

• Stream of consciousness (interior monologue, soliloquy)

• Time schemes• Symbolism and imagery: thin thread of human con

nection, mesh, net for human relationship (p82)• Loose syntax• Multiple narrative voices• Coherent device• Irony

Style 1

• 1.       portrayal of subjective world: Though not in the first person, reader immersed in the subjective mental world of various characters, their motivations and prejudices. Mental arguments

• 2.       flow of consciousness, floating from the mind of one character to the next (eg in part 2, Maisie Johnson, a girl from Edinburgh asking the couple directions to Mrs. Carrie Dempster, an older woman who notices Maisie and is reminded of her youth to Mr. Bentley, a man awed by the privileged invited into St. Paul’s Cathedral.)

Style 2

• 3.       two time schemes: physical and actual time vs. subjective and mind time. Linear time vs. circular time. Past and present mingled (the novel takes the reader through only one day in Clarissa and Septimus’ lives, and yet reveals much about their characters and about humanity in general)

• 4.       feminine sensitivity and consciousness reflected in Clarissa

Style 3

• 5.       symbolism and imagery: rippling waves, sea, (plunge: the feeling of jumping into a pool of water; opening the windows of life and plunging into it); time (Ben Clarissa as well as Septimus sending ripples outward, affecting others around)

• 6.       theme: life and death, sanity and insanity, human connection and separation

• 7.       loose syntax, plot and narrative voice

Thematic Concerns

• Feminine consciousness and sensitivity

• Difficulty of human relationships: connection and separation, possibilities and limits of communicativeness

• Life and death

• Sanity and insanity

• Criticism on social system

Theme 1

• 1.       As Woolf explained in a preface she wrote for the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway published by Random House (New York City) in 1928, “I want to give the slipperiness of the soul…I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.”

Theme 2

• Irene Simon: “It is just the purpose of Virginia Woolf to abolish the distinction between dream and reality; she effects this by mixing images with gestures, thoughts with impressions, visions with pure sensations, and by presenting them as mirrored on a consciousness.”

Theme 3

• communication and connection people long for but fail to achieve especially between people who are apparently close: wife and husband, parents and children, acquaintances and friends. Sally: “Are we not all prisoners?…despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult)…” (p140)But there exist secret, hidden path to other people beneath conventional social relations: Clarissa and Septimus, Peter and Lucrezia with beggar woman who mourns for dead love. Septimus and Mrs. Bradshaw: shut up, suppressed, narrowed, victim of the same force.

Theme 4

• People don’t say what they feel. What people said “superficial” and “fragmentary” (p89) Lucrezia does not confess her unhappiness to anyone; Peter almost asks Clarissa what she really feels, but interrupted by Elizabeth; Clarissa does not voice the real feelings running through her head; Septimus says what he feels and is considered insane. Clarissa when young feels that “it was the only thing worth saying –what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.” (p139) But unable to do so with Peter, Kilman, Elizabeth, Richard, and the guests at the party.

Theme 5

• Clarissa’s parties: she reminds everyone she sees to the party, “Remember my party.” except maybe Ellie Henderson, poor cousin, actually the one who really needs and enjoys the party. It seems silly, frivolous. Sensitive to beauty of the moments and details of human experience. parties way of sharing moments of pleasure with others. “offering” with something to help people remember her by after her death. Woolf once described insanity as a form of death because its intense loneliness created a human void for the sufferer. In parties, Clarissa fights this emptiness. Brings people together, create human dialogue, life and sanity.

Theme 6

• Mrs. Dalloway simultaneously supports two opposing ideas: the world has meaning and the world has no meaning. Meaning is not inherent, but constructed by human beings. No single interpretation as the only legitimate one. Past events give meaning to the present, and the present also inflects and modifies one’s interpretation of the past.

Characterization--Clarissa

• 52 upper class wife; conventional, “perfect hostess”, pale after the illness; emotional mood swing; love of life, the moments, the hours; skeptic of the existence of God; parties as an offering; alienated from husband and daughter. In Peter’s eyes, snob, prude, superficial. In Lady Bruton’s eyes, too much charm, to use for men’s political life. In Kilman’s eyes, useless class. Peter and Sally remember her when young: in white with bunches of flowers, generous, effusive.

Characterization--Septimus

• like surname “Smith” ordinary man; before the war, idealist, romantic; his defense of the Empire led him to kill; discover the idealism and fellow feeling for man which he had believed to be the essence are what British society wants him to destroy in himself: supposed to kill, and not grieve. Spiritual, emotional and intellectual wasteland.

Characterization--Doctors

• unfeeling, unable to empathize or sympathize, which society as a whole is guilty of. climb social ladder. Force patients (or rather victims) to see things his way. Stand for something horrible—cruelty of human nature. The one who judges, rules and inflicts. (p108) treat patients with condescension but will not listen. After Septimus kills himself, Woolf writes, “[Rezia] saw the large outline of his body standing dark against the window. So that was Dr. Holmes.” (p109) a symbol of darkness and destruction.

Compare Clarissa and Septimus

• upper class wife, sociable; veteran, patient at the verge of insanity; different life experiences.

Things in common

• 1.       hate conversion. To Clarissa, the “cruelest thing” (p92) when pondering Kilman. Love and religion would destroy the privacy of the soul. Peter’s love of her too demanding. Of the married woman degrading passion; Kilman’s religious belief makes her callous. To Septimus, medical practice means to convert the patient into submission.

• 2.       love of beauty of the moment• 3.       obsessed with death: incapacity of the life to be lived to t

he end (p134)• 4.       homosexual ecstasy: Clarissa with Sally; Septimus with

Evans• 5.       dislike Bradshaw: people like him made life intolerable

Impression of London

• Landmarks: Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, St. James Park, Pall Mall, Burlington Arcade across Piccadilly St. and Bond St. Oxford St. Regent’s Park, Harley St. Trafalgar Square. Buckingham Palace. Fleet St. St. Paul

• Prosperity vs. poverty (beggars, street girls) • Solitary traveler on the streets of London• Tradition vs. modernism• Woman’s rights• Conservatism vs. rise of the Labor Party• Decline of Empire, aristocracy and colonialism, unrest in I

ndia and rise of the middle class• Impact of the war