Female Relationships in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway Essay examples

She constantly has an inner war that is relentless due to regrets of the past, sexual confusion, and continual interruptions that bring such curiosity of what would have happened if the interactions continued. She embodies a way of thinking that represents someone that goes against all gender conventions and she supports the reform for women and men’s freedom to be sexually free. “And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when — oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!” (Woolf, 6) This quote shows the constant turmoil that Clarissa’s brain is experiencing. She tells herself, “nonsense, nonsense” and it shows that she doesn’t trust her way of thinking to be acceptable to others in her society. She cares about the opinion that Miss Pym and others possess. “It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain,

Likewise the intercuts of footage also reveal in Sally and Brian a relationship which will never last. As their eyes meet across the room, Fosse deliberately pans back to show the extreme distance between the characters. And although their relationship is now sexual, Brian's echo of Sally's feminine self concept 'doesn't my body drive you wild with desire?' reflects a man as tentative about his sexuality as Sally is about anonymous domesticity.

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,

Clarissa is a creditable character in the story. This is because she has such a different set of mind than everyone else and proved that when she talks to Montag about the daisies and her family. Also she has a huge impact on Montag because she makes him question whether or not he likes his job. This moves the story forward and stirs up things.

Clarissa remembers what she claims is “the most exquisite

Virginia's inability to interact with servants in a perfect manner grants the reader a deeper understanding of the intricacies of Clarissa Dalloway. Clarissa so elegantly talks to others in an almost perfect manner, she even has the ability to interact with her servants perfectly, but in reality her desire for perfection in social interactions leaves her feeling internally judged and criticized. Her internal struggles are noticeable in her interactions with Peter. While visiting Peter, Clarissa feels judged as she thinks of her life and says to herself, "what have I made of it? What indeed?

Rather than just offering the empathy, she understands, what Septimus's final act means, the death is a kind of availably form of the powerful self – expression, which makes Septimus “plunged holding his treasure” (Woolf 184). The internal peace that he aims for, and also allows Clarissa realizes how meaningless that her material life has been. While you die, none material objects you can carry on; however, the spirit/ mind can be the thing that carries forever. She recognizes Septimus’s death not as the escape of life, but blooming of the flower of self – consciousness. Although she still seemingly surrenders in the end of the novel to get back the party, Woolf speaks through Peter’s words, “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”

Along with that, Mrs. Dalloway’s decision to buy the flowers on her own highlights her inherent feeling of wanting more as she chose to do the task independently rather than sending her help. Virginia Woolf uses Clarissa’s character as a statement for what is wrong with society, and makes her readers question whether the influence of class and standing is is evident within their own environments. Woolf’s ability to convey her message on reputation and make the reader reflect on their own life is a key element that makes her book

Virginia Woolf is a married woman who had public affairs with women and who shares a chaste kiss with her sister during her narrative. Woolf is also the author of Mrs. Dalloway, a novel that centers on Clarissa Dalloway, a woman who feels the same way "as men feel" (Woolf 36) about women, yet marries a man as society dictates.

Though they both questioned how their lives could have been if they had been together, they know that in the end for Clarissa at least it was the best decision. ”She would marry a prime minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess.” Peter Walsh said to Clarissa (Woolf, 7). Clarissa’s personality and the way she has lived her life gives off the impression to Peter that she could never make it out of a life of being an at home wife and hostess. .”And then the horror of the moment when someone told her at a concert. “That he had married a women met on the boat going to India!”(Woolf, 8) The Level of depth in Clarissa heart for Peter really shines through, she feels jealous and a little bit of loneliness knowing he has a chance to move on and settle down instead of waiting for her to love him. The decision was final she couldn’t string him along any further and keep his heart wrapped around her finger. Charisa and Sally’s: ”Their kiss, given just a fraction of a paragraph in the novel, has provoked question after question regarding Clarissa’s sexuality. Regardless of what their kiss means to various critics, it is clear what it meant to Clarissa. The kiss serves as a sort of symbol of their affections, of their camaraderie.”(Lane). This shows at one time Charisa was adventurous but not fully comfortable with that thought and role in life. “”She felt she

Throughout the novel, there are flashbacks of Clarissa spending her summer at Bourton and her living in the present of wartime Britain. This is significant because most of the time Clarissa reflects on the past and she connects it to her current life while all of these events are happening in a single day. In the beginning of the novel Clarissa buy flowers for the party she is hosting later on in the evening, the flowers being symbolic in the novel representing her love and joy for them. “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did,

Mrs. Dalloway mentions many points of views. During the summer at Bourton, it shows both Clarissa and Peter’s points of views. When Peter proposed to Clarissa, it at first showed

A conflict between character personalities demonstrates this theme yet again in the novel. When Elizabeth's friend Charlotte becomes engaged to a man named Mr. Lucas, the topic of marriage views becomes evident once again. Charlotte does not have an extremely high income, and she feels that marriage is the simple answer to her quest to live a desirable lifestyle. She has no passion to spend the rest of her life with someone whom she actually loves. The narrator states, "Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want" (166). Because of this statement, the reader understands that these were the conventional ideas of

V. Ivbulis (23:1995) stresses that in Modernist fiction an individual in this technologically developed world has become trivial. The world-wide market of goods, the fake blaze of the mass culture, the variety of the offers on TV and radio, and the developing power of all this over an individual has made him small. Also in "Mrs Dalloway" Clarissa is of less importance than the position she holds in the society. Everyone who comes to the party is interested only in the luxuriance and the possibility to be at least for some time in the higher levels of the society. For example, Ellie Henderson, who is a cousin of Clarissa, is very poor, but still she would find something to wear on and to be among those people from the higher levels of society: "It was an event to her, going to a party. It was quite a treat just to see the lovely clothes." They go to this party at Mrs Dalloway's to show off, to show themselves in a possibly richer way. They do not go there to meet Mrs Dalloway. She is as if only a person to meet them at the entrance.

Mrs. Dalloway in a sense is about this inadequacy of language; the book is characterized by silences, ‘of what people don’t say’. In a double plot Woolf builds up two central characters of the text, by how they view the world and how restricted they are in communicating their thoughts; particularly Septimus which links up to the larger idea of madness in Woolf’s life and her novels. Nonetheless, to say Clarissa and Septimus double each other would not be absolutely correct, since most characters become the face of the other, mirrors the other and in the process reveal something about the other, in fact interestingly enough many critics have read Septimus being the objective correlative of Woolf