The Importance of Time in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway Essay

Throughout her essay, Woolf never once describes to us her immediate surroundings. By describing only what is outside, Woolf isolates herself from the rest of the world, instead of embracing it as Dillard did. She is chiefly concerned with describing where she isn't. Her focus is on the world outside of her window. She describes the field that is being plowed, the black, net-like flock of birds flying together. These images engender a rather unpleasant feeling of dreariness.

In her memoir, Virginia Woolf discusses a valuable lesson learned during her childhood fishing trips in Cornwall, England. To convey the significance of past moments, Woolf incorporates detailed figurative language and a variety of syntax into her writing. Woolf communicates an appreciative tone of the past to the audience, emphasizing its lasting impact on her life.

The visual’s background is formed by a dark and starry night sky; stretching across the image and transitioning into a sunny day sky. This is a representation of the passage of time, life, death, and the power of memories. The nighttime depicts ageing and adulthood, whereas the daytime represents youth and life. In the poem, the narrator describes the sky, ‘Ambiguous night, ambiguous sky,’ which is symbolic for the transience between adulthood and childhood. An ambiguous sky is a sky which is unclear or undecided. The faded transition from the night sky to the day sky reflects this notion and the uncertainty of memories; displaying how the poem

Something both authors did similarly discuss the setting. Dillard was very specific with the setting of the environment she is narrating from. She states, “while warbler swung in the leaves overhead and bristle worms trailed their inches over the twiggy dirt at my feet; and I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths massed round my head in the clearing” (Dillard) She goes in depth to construe and give her readers the real visualizing feeling that they are with her as she speaks. Similarly, Woolfe depicts her setting with detail as well. She states, “Presumably it was mid-day, and work in the fields had stopped. Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there, all

‘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.

Often the descriptions, favoring the night to the day, are subtle but quantitatively apparent. The title of the book itself, is supposed to be summary of Katherine and Mary’s foil to each other, as they differ like “Night and Day.” But, Woolf’s fascination with the night sky contributes more to her favor of one character over the other. The book ends with Katherine’s engagement and overall ignorant bliss, but Mary remains a sole axis of freedom, as she denies Ralph Denham’s proposal, even though she is in love with him.

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,”

Woolf writes about life for women during that time period. She herself being a woman, found it hard to get her work to become public. During that time women are seen as property and that they must follow social norms. Things such as obeying her husband and waiting to be allowed to speak(if she were allowed to speak) were “just how things are done”. In society women are looked down on and seen as things or property rather than people who have feelings,

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

  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.

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,

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.

While Woolf makes very good points throughout her essay based many interesting points, one cannot help

This passage provides a critique of gender, but Woolf's act of undermining her own representational and syntactic styles introduces a deep ambiguity into the narrative.

The Structure, style and poetic techniques of a poem contribute greatly to the development of the central idea of a poem. Three poems with central ideas that stood out to me were ‘The Darkling Thrush’ by Thomas Hardy, ‘Days’ by Philip Larkin, and ‘Remembrance’ by Emily Brontë. The central idea of each of these poems revolve around the idea of time and change. Firstly, I will discuss how in ‘The Darkling Thrush’ the simple and traditional structure, the bleak yet straightforward style and techniques such as vivid imagery and capitalisation combine to develop the central idea of change. The same can be said for the simple structure and style used in ‘Days’ which combine with poetic techniques such as metaphors to develop Larkin’s argument against time and change. Finally I will discuss how the idea of time is developed through techniques such as vivid imagery and symbolism in ‘Remembrance’ along with changing styles and a slow, consistent rhythm.