Modern English novel
Theme:
"The importance of time in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway"
As human beings, we are unique in our awareness of death. “We know that we will die, and that knowledge invades our consciousness…it will not let us rest until we have found ways, through rituals and stories, theologies and philosophies, either to make sense of death, or, failing that, to make sense of ourselves in the face of death.”
Attaching significance to life events is a human reaction to the sense of “meaninglessness” in the world. Fearing our ultimate annihilation, we form belief systems to reassure us in the face of death.
Religion provides us with elaborate rituals at times of death and faith assists believers in mourning and coping with
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Dalloway (Woolf, 1996) in 1925, the modernist writer and critic Virginia Woolf released one of her most celebrated novels upon the literary world. Examining ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ (Woolf, 1948, p 189) Woolf explores the fragmentary self through ‘streams of consciousness’, whereby interior monologues are used to tell the story through the minds of the principal characters. Told through the medium of omniscient narration, this story about two people who never meet has no resolution and the characters remain where they started, locked in their own heads, in a constant state of flux.
As a contemporary study of post-war Britain, however, Mrs Dalloway mirrors the fragmentation that was taking place within her own culture and society, and provides a “delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human experience really lay.”
A number of themes and motifs are explored, but this essay will consider the representation of time within the novel. For Woolf, time is a device with which she not only sets the pace of the novel, but with which she also controls her characters, setting and plot. It is also used to question ‘reality’ and the effect of that on the individual characters within the story as they journey through their day. As these different modes are uncovered, psychological time will be revealed and its impact on the main characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith will be
The 1920s exist in the popular imagination as a time of freedom and wild energy, a time where social mores were discarded and independance embraced. This perception hardly fits with the reality. As with most eras the 1920s had a multitude of conventions and taboos. As with most eras, those who broke with such things were frowned upon. While parts of society were changing, conformity was still very much valued, as explored in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Through the character of Clarissa Dalloway and her parallel found in Septimus Smith, Woolf portrays oppressive conformity and the inner self it hides, especially as related to queerness and compulsory heterosexuality; all this serves to illuminate the themes of conventionality and conversion
‘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.
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.
Everyone has experienced some sort of loss, heartache, or tragedy in their life. These situations can cause a major toll on the human mind and the way that it deals with tragedy and loss. Throughout her life, author Virginia Woolf had to handle situations like being sexually abused by her half-brothers, and the deaths of her mother, father, half-sister, and older brother. How a person handles death, rejection, and loss on a mental level is called coping. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, coping is evident through the death of Septimus Warren Smith, the thought of rejection in society and in love, and the denial of love that both Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh feel towards each other.
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,”
Even though Woolf tried often to hide her feelings, many knew of her distress, as she makes these inner battles obvious through her short story, Mrs. Dalloway. This story is of Clarissa who is throwing a grand party shopping and Septimus who is a man who had to leave the war on account of him slowly losing his sanity. Septimus commits suicide when brought back from the war. The two characters’ lives are connected when the doctor who was treating Septimus arrives at the party and tells Clarissa about the tragedy that has just occurs. The connection between the main character and the author can be made when she contemplates and admires a man for having the courage to throw him out of a window to end his suffering.
“ The coffee was very slow … until Mr Whitbread had finished ... Hugh was so very slow” the agonising sense of immediacy both draws our attention back to clock time whilst allowing us to delve into Clarissa’s past as she recalls that Hugh is always so absurdly slow. As reality is blurred in psychological time, external time punctuates the novel “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical, then the hour, irrevocable” this reminds the reader that this story is in fact occurring in a single day and every event experienced outside of this timeframe is a figment of a characters memory. Woolf makes these memories the focus of the novel rather than external time to create a mobile reality where she fabricates the sense of movement by traversing time through the consciousness of her characters. These memories therefore are from a specific point of view and therefore exclude some properties of the remembered moment and parts of said reality may simply be “dissolved in the air” as the memory fades with ongoing time.
Inspired by Virginia’s Woolf renowned novel, Mrs. Dalloway, the movie is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours. In it, we get to glimpse a singular day in the lives of three women, who are contemplating suicide as they read the novel, whose protagonist’s struggle mirrors their own. The first woman depicted is Virginia Woolf herself in 1920s England. Although we first see her suicide, the movie than backtracks to examine her in a depressive episode, a product of her bipolar disorder. Woolf’s mental illness puts tension on all of her relationships as well as her artistic process, which can be seen in her difficulties when writing Mrs. Dalloway. Comparatively, Laura Brown is a 1950s housewife in LA and is pregnant with her second child. So clearly discontent with her life, Laura proceeds to do various underwhelming tasks before dropping her son off and heading to a hotel. She begins to commit suicide, but is suddenly unable. She returns home, but is still clearly depressed, which is only amplified once her husband comes home. The final woman that we get to follow is Clarissa Vaungn, a modern New Yorker, who is preparing for a party in honor of the work her friend, Richard, just published. Her story is very much inspired by the novel that the movie is centered around. As she organizes the event, her apparent distress slowly is revealed regarding her dissatisfaction with life and suicidal thoughts, which is amplified by Richard’s suicide. It is
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.
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.
Mrs. Dalloway, written by modernist author, Virginia Woolf reflects the disbelief and sense of loss that is represented in its modernist period, just after World War I. The novel follows the streams of consciousness of the main characters’ over the course of one day in contemporary London. Despite the rigid social structure which exists within the novel due to its British influences, Woolf highlights the awareness of the characters’ mortality and their desire for human connection. Ultimately, individuals are able to discover their true identity that is heavily influenced by Woolf’s values, attitudes and writing style mirrored by the contextual elements evident within Mrs. Dalloway.
Although the entire novel tells of only one day, Virginia Woolf covers a lifetime in her enlightening novel of the mystery of the human personality. The delicate Clarissa Dalloway, a disciplined English lady, provides the perfect contrast to Septimus Warren Smith, an insane ex-soldier living in chaos. Even though the two never meet, these two correspond in that they strive to maintain possession of themselves, of their souls. On this Wednesday in June of 1923, as Clarissa prepares for her party that night, events during the day trigger memories and recollections of her past, and Woolf offers these bits to the reader, who must then form the psychological and emotional make-up of Mrs. Dalloway in his/her own mind. The reader also learns of
"Mrs. Dalloway" written by Virginia Woolf is about the fictional life of a character by the name of Clarrisa Dalloway, who is seen to be this high class woman living in an era after the war, who is preparing for a party that she is to be hosting later on. Virginia Woolf seemed to use time as a main part of the setting of her story too by setting it in the morning and ending the next day at three in the morning. Using time like this is significant because then now the reader must really pay attention since every detail seems important. For example when characters reflect on past incidents that happened in their lives and then the story suddenly turns back into the present and in reality of the story a few minutes have only gone by. An example of that is when Clarrisa reflects her youth, "What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges,
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.