Analysis Of Clarissa Dalloway

Addie Bundren’s voice strikes prominently after her death, enriching her lamentation from the grave with the woes of the inexpressible life that is suffocated by the maternal role she must play. Words stifle Addie and so do the duties of motherhood. She perceives all children and the spring through a lens of hatred for her enslavement to procreation, deeming early spring “the worst” and a student by his “dirty snuffling nose” (Faulkner 169). Birth is essential to children and early spring, which serve a constant reminder to her of her duty to produce. To Addie, children lead a “secret and selfish life” because they suckle the life out of her and are the parasites that prevent her own prosperity (170).
Adversely, the continuation of birth and

Her story starts out in a defiant tone, suggesting her strong character and insistence of her own capability: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” (Woolf 3). This provocative opening prompts questioning, such as, who usually buys the flowers for Clarissa Dalloway and what makes today special, eliciting her trip to get the flowers herself? The narrative descends into a reminiscence of Clarissa’s eighteen-year-old self in the Burton garden, giving way to the meaning behind the power of the opening line. Amongst the garden’s bright flora, Clarissa is comparatively “solemn, feeling as she did… that something awful was about to happen” (3). The flowery surroundings connote femininity, then shadowed by a sense of impending death. This juxtaposition of femininity and death sets the stage for Clarissa’s forthcoming battle with her own individuality in marriage, which is brought on by an ever-present awareness of her own

Similarly, she encounters Hugh Whitbread who also brings with him a reminder of death due to his wife’s continually failing condition, Clarissa adding, “Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera… the Whitbreads came ‘to see doctors’” (6). This offhand comment reveals an anxiety about the consuming nature of depreciation, to which Clarissa and those around her fall prey to as they