Analysis of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, is a romantic drama with deep psychological approaching in to the world of urban English society in the summer of 1923, five years after the end of World War I.
The book begins in the morning with the arrangements for a party Clarissa Dalloway will give and it ends late in the evening when the guests are all leaving. There are many flashbacks to tell us the past of each character, but it does not leave the range of those few hours. It presents several stream-of-consciousness devices: indirect interior monologue, time and space montage, flashbacks and psychological free association based mainly on memory, with the support of imagination and the senses (mainly sight).
We can compare the book to a tapestry where there are two strings being weaved together, separated from the narrative:
- Clarissa's party and all day long of arrangements;
- The craziness and finally Septimus' suicide.
To abolish the distinction between dream and reality; the writer effects this by mixing images with gestures, thoughts with impressions, visions with pure sensations. The language is short and dense, she writes in a flow of consciousness, floating from the mind of one character to the next.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf used the non-linear time. One can compare this with surfing on the Internet where we can jump from place to place in a non-linear pattern. Despite its apparent discontinuity, Mrs. Dalloway has a pattern provided by several factors: unity of character, unity of time (everything takes place in one day and is centered on Clarissa's party) and the leitmotif: the sound image of Big Ben followed by the sentence "the leaden circles dissolved in the air...
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...ill" Clarissa, instead she decided that the double of Clarissa constructed in the form of a man destroyed by war and society, would take his own life in order for the rest of Clarissa's being can appreciate the life she had. She also analyses other kinds of death besides physical extinction: death of a friendship, by change, and death of the mind, by absence of change.
We know more about Clarissa from the comments and thoughts made by others, by memories discovered, and by symbolic reference. The postmodern novel is a simulation of reflections, alternating narration, poetic allusion, direct prose, metaphor, dialogue, and character development. Like the hat Clarissa and her husband made together, plenty of layers of emotion, feeling, logic, character, and motivation create the design. The moment of creation is thus a culmination of life and significance in the novel.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights share similarities in many aspects, perhaps most plainly seen in the plots: just as Clarissa marries Richard rather than Peter Walsh in order to secure a comfortable life for herself, Catherine chooses Edgar Linton over Heathcliff in an attempt to wrest both herself and Heathcliff from the squalid lifestyle of Wuthering Heights. However, these two novels also overlap in thematic elements in that both are concerned with the opposing forces of civilization or order and chaos or madness. The recurring image of the house is an important symbol used to illustrate both authors’ order versus chaos themes. Though Woolf and Bronte use the house as a symbol in very different ways, the existing similarities create striking resonances between the two novels at certain critical scenes.
Nineteenth century Britain was a dominate empire across the globe. Despite the country’s loss of a major colonial force — the United States — the country still dominate world trade, allowing for a sense of pride to be installed within the hearts of the English. As exposed throughout Virginia Woolf’s, Mrs. Dalloway, the mindset of the British was one of grand superiority. Due to the success of the British empire's colonial expeditions, many British citizens felt as though their country was the greatest and most advanced in the world, creating a sense of superficial, self-centered, pride, as reflected through the character of Clarissa. This pride, however, had many dangerous side effects later in history. British Imperialism, combined with unnecessary pride, caused many racial issues for England that would be fought over for centuries to come.
1966 was a turning point in American history. It was the height of the Space Race as well as the Vietnam War. In the entertainment industry, The Beatles had released the album Revolver, the show Star Trek premiered on television, and the play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? was adapted to film. This film was controversial for several reasons, including its depiction of violence and drinking, as well as its theme of sexuality. For a movie to take on such bold scenes and topics requires other bold cinematic choices as well. These choices included casting glamorous actors and actresses in not so glamorous roles, filming in black and white as opposed to color, and using unique cinematic film shots in various scenes. The choices that the filmmakers
Laura Brown is a fragile middleclass housewife and mother in 1951. She lives a miserable life trying to play the model suburban housewife. Throughout The Hours, Laura is reading Mrs. Dalloway, which is Virginia's novel. Her obvious mental illness doesn't allow her to always connect and understand her environment. Situations that seem simple to the average person, such as making a cake, are beyond difficu...
El-Madini writes this entire text as an interior monologue, a stream of consciousness with no physical setting until the very end. Coined by the American psychologist William Jones, this representation of the narrator’s consciousness includes perceptions, impressions, thoughts incited by outside sensory stimuli, and fragments of random, disconnected thoughts. All these are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often such writing makes no distinction between various levels of reality – such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts, or real sensory perception. El-Madini chooses the stream of consciousness approach as it creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on the flow of conscious in the character’s mind, gaining intimate access to their ...
Severin argues that Smith, who breaks away from the traditional mold, is still a modernist writer and that her books are more important because in them she attempts to break free of social norms. The article focuses mostly on The Holiday by Smith, however the breaking of social norms is a familiar themes that runs throughout Novel on Yellow Paper. Severin explains, “Each of Smith’s novels marks an assault on the romance plot, although the techniques she employs are remarkably varied. Novel interrupts the romance first of Karl and heroine Pompey, then of Freddy and Pompey, with disruptive interludes – lists of quotations, fantasies, retold versions of the classics” (462). In The Holiday, Smith is taking an even more radical approach than her previous works, and in doing so she is shaking up the “social agenda” by breaking from narrative conventions and enabling her characters to not fall into romance, and instead come to terms with their own form of society: “According to Smith, a new world can only come about through the relinquishment of all forms of possessiveness, the psychological as well as the materials” (464). In Novel, Pompey is able to begin to break free from the societal norms because of her determination to be intelligent and her desire to avoid a marriage in which she would be merely a housewife. Smith allows her characters to
The entire basis of this book deals with communicating from both character to character, and narrator to reader, on a very high cerebral level. Because of this analytic quality of the book, the most important events also take place on such a high level. In fact, the major theme of the novel, that of the narrator searching for his past self, as well as the cognitive change between the "...
The heroine, Mrs. P, has some carries some characteristics parallel to Louise Mallard in “Hour.” The women of her time are limited by cultural convention. Yet, Mrs. P, (like Louise) begins to experience a new freedom of imagination, a zest for life , in the immediate absence of her husband. She realizes, through interior monologues, that she has been held back, that her station in life cannot and will not afford her the kind of freedom to explore freely and openly the emotions that are as much a part of her as they are not a part of Leonce. Here is a primary irony.
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.
...raps the sounds around each other, showing that language, even at its most freeing, is still confining. But the image is enough, and through this the Milky Way creates an anti-gravity field that lifts the characters out of their bodies: "The limitless depth of the Milky Way pulled his gaze up into it" (165). It is in this non-Newtonian manner that Kawabata directs our attention to the plot outline of his novel. We may focus on one moment, but it is infinitely refracted throughout the text, and at each moment we linger on the image, the reflected image, or the idea of the image; the plot is always there, but not always the primary image.
Class is something that is stressed in the twentieth century. Class is what identified someone to something. These classes could have been money, love, having a disability and many others. In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway there are many different types of relationships. In the novel, the reader learns that Clarissa’s husband Richard and her party planning is dominating her, as where Lucrezia’s husband, Septimus, is dominating her. The domination seen in these two ladies is love. Love is an overwhelming power that can influence someone to do something they might have not thought about all the way through, which can ultimately affect their life in the future.
Howard, Maureen. Foreward. Mrs. Dalloway. By Virginal Woolf. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1981, vii-xiv.
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 Hattaway remarks that “Woolf’s view of the war is different. It does not figure in terms of mud and barbed wire but rather through its points of contact with the ordinary life left behind and in its destruction of a secure past. Woolf actually looks at the ways in which the war has changed contemporary ways of looking at history, social structures, identity and boundaries.” Formally the war is over but in so many ways – the after effects, devastation that has not been compensated for, the horror that lingers in people’s minds – the war persists. As Mrs. Dalloway walks along the streets of London, she makes a very naïve statement, “for it was the middle of June. The War was over “but for people like Septimus Smith the war continues in the form of its everlasting destructive impact on their mind, their body, and their lives.
“The New Dress” is a 1994 short story by Virginia Woolf. The story features Mabel Waring, who goes to a party wearing a yellow colored dress. The dress is newly made purposely for this occasion. The story is about the dress that Mrs. Warning wore and felt that it is not good. My first reaction to the story is that the story is about the dress, and it caused large discomfort to Mabel Waring. The discomfort of Mrs. Waring was not mainly caused by the dress, but the writer used the dress to symbolize the social displacement Mrs. Waring was, that she felt that she was out of place due to her social class. The writer uses some stylistic devices to bring out the message of the story and to make it appealing to the reader. "The New Dress" was the
Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse' is a fine example of modernist literature, like her fellow modernist writers James Joyce and D.H Lawrence. This novel in particular is of the most autobiographical. The similarities between the story and Woolf's own life are not accidental. The lighthouse, situations and deaths within the novel are all parallel to Woolf's childhood, she wrote in her diary 'I used to think of [father] & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind ….(I believe this to be true – that I was obsessed by them both, unheathily; & writing of them was a necessary act). Woolf, Diary, 28 November 1928) Woolf like many other modernist writers uses stream of consciousness, this novel in particular features very little dialogue, preferring one thought, memory or idea to trigger another, providing an honest if not reliable account of the characters lives. There novels motifs are paired with many of the novels images. The novel features two main motifs that Woolf appears to be interested in examining, firstly we notice the relationships' between men and women and the other appears to be Woolf's use of parenthesis. The novels images only become apparent once these motifs have been explored, allowing the reader to examine the relationships between the different characters.