Mrs. Dalloway : Identity And Social Standards Essay

In Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa and Septimus smith have various similarities. Clarissa eventually triumphs over her issues/depression in her life unlike Septimus that eventually loses and commits suicide. Mrs. Dalloway an upper class 50 year old British wife the central character of the novel, struggles constantly to balance her thoughts and world. Her world consists of a fabulous lifestyle such as fine fashion, parties, and aristocratic society, but as she the novel goes on she looks beneath the glamour of her life and searches for a deeper meaning. Looking for privacy, Clarissa has a tendency toward introspection that gives her a capacity for emotion. She is always concerned with appearances around other people and no matter the pressure she keeps herself composed. She uses a lot of useless talking and activity to keep her ideas and emotions safe and locked away, which can make her seem shallow even to those who know her well.

I. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, was published on May 14, 1925 in London, England. The novel follows Clarissa Dalloway and a variety of other characters throughout the span of one day in their lives in 1923 London. Woolf utilizes a narrative method of writing. With the novel’s structure, the narrator possesses the ability to move inside of a character’s mind and compose her thoughts and emotions immediately as events occur throughout the day. The novel’s main character, Clarissa, is a middle-aged woman who belongs to the upper-middle class in society and is well-married to a Member of Parliament—Richard Dalloway. Clarissa’s day is full of arrangements for a dinner party she plans to host that evening. During the novel, numerous other

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.

In this passage the past and present are clashing with each other. It keeps going back and forth between details about the party and remembering the past or comparing something to the past. The paragraph reflecting on the past seems nostalgic as Clarissa remembers all the fun and crazy times she had with Sally, and how Sally does not seem like who she used to be. Clarissa is almost comparing the present Sally to the Sally of many years ago who did not have a care in the world. To me, Clarissa seems to get caught up thinking about the past and having to refocus on the present and what is happening around her. It makes me wonder if she is not quite happy with her life and is thinking back to how it could have been different. She does not really

Women and Expectations in the 1920s Virginia Woolf expresses a lot of different aspects of characters in Mrs. Dalloway, and one of them is the relation of the characteristics of Clarissa Dalloway and women in the 1920s in general. In this story, Clarissa Dalloway is a character who most likely to be expressed as mellow and miserable. She is miserable and sad because she is most likely stuck in her previous life, regarding her previous relationship and memories with somebody. She has been thinking about it every single day and she cannot get rid of it. Her unhappiness is caused by her lack of activities and social life, and she was encouraged to choose quick decision by her mindset at that time period.

However, enforced cultural notions of gender differences prohibit Clarissa from blossoming a lesbian attraction towards Sally Seton. Progressing through the novel, Clarissa asks “had not that, after all, been love?” in regards to her relationship with Sally. She makes it obvious she was stifled in her homosexual love, due to her conservative attitude and society’s standards. Many critics believe that Sally Seton represents Virginia Woolf’s love for Violet Dickinson. To further elaborate, Clarissa feels that a sexual dimension in her life is now irrevocably lost, due to her understanding of her own capacities for bisexuality. Similar to Virginia and Leonard’s relationship, Clarissa and Richard are no longer sharing a bedroom, as sexual relations

It is after coming to terms with his death, Clarissa looks at her life and sees that happiness that her hours have contained. Subsequently, she chooses to live and celebrate her life and be happy rather than dwell on what she cannot change and be

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

In Grier English classes, we have discussed about the change of identity in many different books, for example, Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Sometimes, the mental activities experienced by the characters that are facing great transformations resonate with our life. Within all of these books we read and suffered through with countless tests and projects, I find a very important lesson in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

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

Mrs. Dalloway takes place in an England which was recovering from the ravishes of the first World War. Following the war, many people began to lose faith in organized religion because they could not fathom how an all-loving and

One of Clarissas most important parties shows the prime ministers attendance. His presences is noted by every other attendant at Mrs. Dalloway's party. This act is a clear representation of the English society's blind allegiance to their royalty, “majesty passing; this symbols of what they all stood for, (Woolf 172). This shows that the upper class as a whole has no real remorse of war. It also shows they have no real connections to the war which leaves them with an unrealistic view of English royalty. Clarissa is given the privilege to walk the Prime Minister around her party. This act should give her great pride, however; “these triumphs had a hollowness… they satisfied her no longer as they used (Woolf 174). This shows clarissas dying faith in her position in Britain's society, and in her country's pride. She is beginning to recognize the true pain the upper class has truly cause, and never had to feel, but the lower class has felt it all this time.At this same party a tragic event becomes known, however; the event is not the important favor

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.

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

They fail to express to the outside what it is exactly that they feel inside. The problem of expression is one of the reasons the characters fail at communicating with each other. It is central to the character of Clarissa Dalloway who feels isolated in many ways as “She had a perpetual sense...of being out, out, far out to sea, and alone” (Woolf 7). She enjoys her marriage to Richard although sometimes thinking whether it would have been a better choice to marry Peter Walsh. As she contemplates her relationship with Richard, she admits to lacking “something central” in their marriage: the feelings of attraction that are “a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush” like “an inner meaning almost expressed”(Woolf 26) but she believes that "in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people...which Richard gave her, and she him…But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable" (Woolf 6). This shows how important privacy is to Clarissa and the importance it takes in her relationship with others. Peter himself described Clarissa as having a “coldness” and “woodenness” about her that creates an overall “impenetrability” (Woolf 50). Unlike Peter who wanted to know all about Clarissa, all her inner thoughts, Richard gives her the necessary space because he believes that