Mrs. Dalloway By William Woolf

Characters like Peter Walsh, Sally Seton and finally, Clarissa Dalloway are centred in the novel as they highlight conflicting views of imperialism and the British empire. According to Elleke Boehmer, “in Virginia Woolf, empire is invariably associated with self-delusion, purblindness and, a self-destructive reality” (211) which is apparent in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa is centred in the novel as the embodiment of the upper-class, repression and denial. She refuses to confront the reality of the post-war world and instead, she chooses to occupy herself with parties. Her husband, Richard Dalloway is a conservative politician who himself refuses to engross himself with the thoughts of war and imperialism as he justifies it based on the idea of progress and development. He holds on to the romanticised image of colonialism that brings civilisation and light to uncivilised countries. There is also an awareness in the upper-class of their diminishing status. The detached emotional state of the upper-class thus becomes a way to cling to their temporary and short-lived power. Richard’s aspiration to historically document the Bruton family’s life is halted by Lady Bruton

I found both Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway and Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse to be very interesting characters within the topic of “masculinity.” Through these characters, Woolf gives us a different idea of what masculinity is and questions what society’s idea of masculinity is. Though they deem themselves as separate and higher than women, both Peter Walsh and Mr. Dalloway depend on women more than they’d like to admit. We begin to see that perhaps these men are not so masculine after all. Or perhaps, masculinity can take on a different form than we think.

Right before the beginning of this passage in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway on pages 154-158 we experience Peter returning home to his hotel room while day dreaming about his recent run in with Clarissa and about their long rocky past together. While on his walk to the hotel, he was a witness to the aftermath of Septimus’s suicide and as the sound of the ambulance sirens ring through his head (Woolf, 151). Peter does not know who is riding in the ambulance, nor does he know what state they are in, whether dead or alive. He is just one of the many people that happened to be out on the street at the time of the suicide, and even this does not seem to be able to clear his mind of Clarissa.

  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.

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.

Throughout her life, novelist Virginia Woolf suffered with mental illness, and she ultimately ended her life at age 59. As art often imitates life, it is not surprising that characters in Woolf’s works also struggle with mental illness. One of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman living in London, and those who run in her circle. As the novel progresses the reader sees one of the characters, Septimus, struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by serving in war. At the end of the story, he commits suicide. While there is no explicit articulation of any other character suffering from mental illness in the novel, Septimus is not alone. Through her thoughts and actions, we can deduce that Clarissa also endures mental and emotional suffering. Though Clarissa does not actually attempt to end her life in the novel, her mental and emotional suffering lead her to exhibit suicidal tendencies. To prove this, I will examine Clarissa’s thoughts and actions from a psychological perspective.

Moreover, the fluidity, represented by the thoughts of the characters, is enhanced by the form of the novel: Mrs Dalloway is not divided into chapters; thus, it does not leave behind a sense of completeness. It is largely intertwined with the narration of Clarissa and that of the other characters and the action largely takes place in the mind. This is presented in form of free indirect discourse: the narrative conveys the thoughts of the selected character. This leaves the readers with an impressionistic story. To demonstrate how different characters bring about unequal messages, here is an illustration from the work: when Clarissa is strolling the streets of London, she and Septimus both see the same car. The vehicle leads them to different thoughts: for Septimus it is seeing in it the power of the modern world, which “was about to burst into flames” (13) or rather the oppressive relationship of technology and war, which ultimately leads to his suicide. He is bound by the internal, his suffering thoughts cannot help but to be captured in the memories of the World War I he fought in. For Clarissa, hearing the noise of the car provokes her to think she has heard “a pistol shot in the street” (12) (which later turns out to be true). By using such a form of representation, Woolf points to the invisible connections of people in a dehumanised, yet technology-bound, world, which create between them a form of interaction that serves as compensation for what Septimus (and

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.

This parallels the narrative structure of the novel as being circular, discontinuous and digressive. The same can easily be said for Mrs Dalloway as the novel almost jarringly weaves through many points of view. This fragmentation appropriates the concept of history in “Midnight’s Children”, which was developed by colonizers. History works for a particular class of ideology, and therefore it will be contaminated, oblique and subjective. In Mrs. Dalloway the characters themselves are subjective commentaries on English society, and they have been subjectively contaminated by Woolfe’s opinions of who they represent.

Mrs.Dalloway, written by Virginia Woolf in 1925 is about a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she gets ready to host a party that evening. Mrs.Dalloway is a stream of consciousness story and the readers get a chance to know not only Clarissa’s though but also other character that have very different lifestyles and social/economic status from Clarissa. The story closely tracks Clarissa, Septimus Warren Smith, Peter Walsh, Miss Kilman and a few other characters. Throughout the day the different characters face different struggles and Woolf shows the reader how each character reacts to their own struggles and their thinking patterns when facing these situations. Mrs. Dalloway is a critique on the class structure and the social structure in the nineteenth century and the everyday struggles faced by people in different social and economic structures.

During the time of a young modern society, there were ideals and social standards that led people to feel isolated from their own expressions and thoughts. In Mrs. Dalloway, identity is a significant theme depicted in the novel and is prevalent between the characters portrayed throughout. One character in particular that represents the image and reflection of identity in the British society during the first world war is Clarissa Dalloway. All the attributes such as her love for flowers, her lavish entertaining parties, and the bonds she has between her friends and lovers reveal something about her identity that she discovers about herself at the end of the book. Clarissa’s personality is complex and moving as her emotions and life events are unraveled in the moment as things happen.

War is an important theme in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a post World War I text. While on the one hand there is the focus on Mrs. Dalloway’s domestic life and her ‘party consciousness’, on the other there are ideas of masculinity and “patriotic zeal that stupefy marching boys into a stiff yet staring corpse and perniciously public-spirited doctors” , and the sense of war reverberates in the entire text. Woolf’s treatment of the Great War is different from the normative way in which the War is talked about in the post world war I texts. She includes in her text no first hand glimpse of battlefield, instead gives a detached description. This makes it more incisive because she delineates the after effects in personal ordinary lives. Judith

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,”

Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses the characters Clarissa and Lucrezia not only to further the plot of the story but to make a profound statement about the role of wives in both society and their marriages. While these women are subjected to differing experiences in their marriages, there is one common thread that unites each of their marriages: oppression. These women drive the story of Mrs. Dalloway and provide meaning and reason in the lives of the men in the story; however, these women are slowly but surely forced to forsake their own ambitions in order to act in accordance with the social standards set in place by marriage for women. For women outside of many modern cultures, marriage has been a necessity for a woman’s safety and security, and it required her to give up her freedom and passions and subjected her to an oppressed lifestyle. Ultimately, through the wives in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf communicates that marriage is an institution where in women are forced to suppress their individual desires and passions in order to serve their husband and further his own ambitions as first priority.

Clarissa and Septimus both feel trapped in their lives and oppressed by the people around them, which leads to them find ways in which they can escape the negative world around them. Clarissa is described to the reader as having “a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very dangerous to live even one day” (Woolf, 17). Even as Clarissa walks down a crowded street the sense of loneliness controls her mind. Societal oppression of loneliness makes her feel distant from the rest of society. She describes herself as, “no longer being Clarissa, but simply Mrs. Dalloway” (Woolf, 11). Clarissa has lost a sense of herself and feels as though she no longer fits in. However, her parties serve as an escape from the outside world, which helps to explain why she loves