Big Ben As An Unbroken Reminder Of Inevitable Death

The Modernist skepticism is vivid in Woolf's portrayal of a woman, Isabella, who has not conformed to society's accepted norms and would seem to be - at first glance - all the better for it.  But, upon closer inspection it is with a sigh of resignation that Virginia recognizes the illusion that her fanciful exploration created for her.  Isabella (possibly representative of Virginia herself or of womanhood in general) is elevated and

Analyzing her newfound appreciation sanctions Woolf to remind herself that life is precious. Reminding herself of life 's grandeur enables Woolf to then transfer the tone into her writing. Conveying the value of life, changes Woolf’s perspective. She values life more, but as she has learned earlier from the moth, sadness is inherent; sadness is brought by tragedy, like dying. Conclusively, Woolf’s use of pathos in her writing enabled her to present a clear tone, which contributed to the theme that death is inevitable.

Life is a constant struggle against the ever present chill of death. Fear, betrayal, and cowardice all stems from life’s distaste of death. Human beings naturally rebuke the unknown, so it is only logical that people fight the inevitability of death. However, most people are ignorant of the reality of one day dying, prompting writer Virginia Woolf to write the essay, “The Death of the Moth”, in order to convey the frailty of life whilst also showing the awesome might of death. In the essay, her main purpose is to show that the moth embodies the human race, and that death is an inevitable fact of life no matter how much the human race struggles to stay alive. Woolf is able to get her purpose across by

‘Mrs. Dalloway’, by Virginia Woolf is a derivative text of ‘The Hours’, written by Michael Cunningham. The novels both share an important theme of mental health. The circumstances of mental health are commonly sympathetic, and empathetic. The characters Septimus and Clarissa in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and Richard, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf in ‘The Hours’ show the strongest symbols for this theme. Most of the problems and treatments these characters face are in direct result of the age they live in. Both novels express a relationship between era, illnesses and treatments.

Another small but important window scene takes place after Clarissa returns home to discover that her husband has been invited to Millicent Bruton’s lunch party but she has not. After reading the message about the party on a notepad, she begins to retreat upstairs to her private room, “a single figure against the appalling night.” As she lingers before the “open staircase window,” she feels her own aging, “suddenly shriveled, aged, breastless… out of doors, out of the window, out of her body and brain which now failed…” Again, there is a hint of danger as death is portrayed as a somewhat alluring transcendental experience,

In the novel Mrs Dalloway, Woolf conveys her perspective, as she finely examines and critiques the traditional gender roles of women in a changing post-war society. Woolf characterisation of Clarissa Dalloway in a non linear structure, presents a critical portrayal of the existing class structure through modernist’s eyes. Titling her novel as Mrs Dalloway presents Clarissa’s marriage as a central focus of her life, drawing attention to how a women’s identity is defined by marriage. Despite the changing role of women throughout the 1920s, for married women life was the same post war. Clarissa experiences ‘the oddest sense of being herself invisible…that is being Mrs Dalloway…this being Richard Dalloway,”

Big Ben and St. Margaret’s represent different rates of time: one marching straight ahead without looking back, the other gently making its presence known. Woolf’s use of Big Ben serves two purposes. First, its concise tolling indicates the time that we lose each day. It shows the constant forward movement of the hours. Second, the fame of Big Ben suggests that the mark we leave on the world be something grand, something renowned. The bell of Big Ben agitates Clarissa: “The sound of Big Ben flooded Clarissa’s drawing-room where she sat, ever so annoyed, at her writing table; worried; annoyed” (Woolf 117). The clock tells her she is running out of time and reminds her of her middle-age. Its toll reminds her that she has done nothing civilization

Daldry approaches Woolf’s tunnelling technique with sensitivity and subtlety in order to unify Virginia, Laura and Clarissa. The repetitive musical score by Philip Glass creates a sense of the cyclical nature of time and is evocative of the relentlessness of time. This too creates an illusion of both time and timelessness as the regular rhythm simulates that of a clock as

taxi cabs, of being out, out, far to sea and alone; she always had the

From the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf establishes that Clarissa’s bright and hopeful spirit has become dulled and burdened when subjected to the oppressive nature of marriage. During a glimpse into her younger years, the reader is able to see Clarissa. With each flashback into Clarissa’s youth, the reader is provided another image of Clarissa before marriage, one that highlights her passion and curiosity for life. While Clarissa felt a passion and connection with Peter, she could not bear to live in a marriage where her freedom was something she had to sacrifice. The decision she makes is logical in some ways, but her choice also brings into question the fault of her marriage in the first place. In Clarissa’s world, the option for passion and the security of her freedom was not available nor would it ever be; therefore, she was forced to choose between the two. Men, however, were not forced to make such decisions and were given the liberty to wait well into their later years to find a spouse suitable to their liking. By choosing to marry Richard over Peter, Clarissa forsook the option of passion in

  Clarissa Dalloway, the central character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, is a complex figure whose relations with other women reveal as much about her personality as do her own musings. By focusing at length on several characters, all of whom are in some way connected to Clarissa, Woolf expertly portrays the ways females interact: sometimes drawing upon one another for things which they cannot get from men; other times, turning on each other out of jealousy and insecurity.

Post World War I London society was characterized by a flow of new luxuries available to the wealthy and unemployment throughout the lower classes. Fascinated by the rapidly growing hierarchal social class system, Virginia Woolf, a young writer living in London at the time, sought to criticize it and reveal the corruption which lay beneath its surface. Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s fourth novel, was born in 1925 out of this desire precisely. A recurring focus in many of Woolf’s major novels is the individual and his or her conscious perceptions of daily life. Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses this technique, known as a “stream-of-consciousness,” to trace the thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith during one day in London five years after the Great War. It is exactly this narrative technique which allows Woolf to compare the lives of these two characters which belong to different social classes to argue that social placement has a negative effect on one’s life and psychological being.

From the very beginning of the novel, the reader is confronted with thoughts of death from the main character, Clarissa Dalloway. When running her errand, she plummets into deep thought about her death and what would follow it,

In the book Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted to cast the social system and bash it for how it worked. Her intricate focus is focusing not on the people, but on the morals of a certain class at a certain historical moment.

In her own writing on the novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf stated, "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…“ In this essay, I shall use this quote as a means to examine the theme of love and solitude in one of her most famous novels which follows a set of characters that go about their day. Virginia Wolf was able to illustrate the isolation one experiences within its own mind and the importance of one’s soul and ways in which souls connect through different memories and events. Even though independency is highly valued, the inability for people to communicate and build meaningful relationships is the most important aspect in the novel.