...Final Critical Essay | Mrs. Dalloway: Perceptions of One’s Life | Brittney Davey | In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf involves two main characters whose personalities and life styles are on complete opposite’s sides of the spectrum, which do not know one another but are linked through the concept of different ways each person views the world they live in. Clarissa Dalloway is a high-class, wealthy woman who cares about what others think of her so she indulges herself in parties to be commonly liked, yet struggles with her internal thoughts and memories to the outside world. Septimus Warren Smith is a man who survived the war with severe post-traumatic stress from witnessing many tragic events including watching his friend Evans die from an invasion. Through each of these individuals experiences, and what they both have been through – tragic or sane – they have perceived the world differently, therefore, they both have one view of the world. These two characters were most important in the sense of perception of two different worlds because not every life is the same, many people grow up in a terrifying neighbourhood, whereas others grow up in a wealthy secure home, others witness death and others never break a bone in their body. It depends on how and where you were raised, what background you came from, what hobbies interests you, which group of friends you fall into, every step can lead to a different life, but it is the independent persons choice on which...
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...Virginia’s London Complex in Mrs. Dalloway Fang Yuling Introduction Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an experimental novelist, critic and essayist of the 20th century, has been regarded as a major modernist writer, whose great contribution to the innovative techniques is undeniable. Susan squire once said: “Whether she thought it "the most beautiful place on the face of the earth" or "the very devil," to Virginia Woolf the city of London was the focus for an intense, often ambivalent, lifelong scrutiny.” (488) Ever since Woolf was born in London in 1882, not only did she make her home there for nearly all of her fifty-nine years-first in the narrow streets of Kensington and then in the spacious square of Bloomsbury-but she found it a powerfully evocative figure in the literary tradition within which she wrote. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, we can clearly see that Woolf elaborately arranges Clarissa Dalloway’s one-day life in the City of London. By a simple description of Mrs. Dalloway’s buying flower for an evening party, the reader has been actually taken around London, a city etched in Woolf’s memory. Woolf makes repeated mention of the landmarks or detailed street names in the City of London such as Oxford Street, Bond Street, the Regent’s Park, St. James Street, the Abbey, and the Big Ben, which are all quite familiar to readers. This article is attempting to, under the guidance of the cultural symbol of London itself and several major landmarks in the novel, figure out Woolf's...
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...It moves without any logic or reason from present to past and future. Simply, in our mind past, present and future can be experienced at the same moment. In his theory of duration, Henri Bergson explains that there are two times: private, or internal time, which is the real authentic time, and standard, public or clock time, which is, in fact, a mere social, artificial construct.[1] Modernist writers, such as James Joyce or Virginia Woolf were fascinated by the theories of time, which influenced greatly their works. In Mrs Dalloway, (1925), which may be considered 'the first important work of the literary period initiated by Ulysses'[2], Woolf is concerned with both, public and private time. In Mrs Dalloway, the public, or the clock time, is represented by the striking of Big Ben, the symbol of England and the precise time. The striking of the hours is repeated throughout the novel as a reminder of time, which restricts the lives of the characters, reminding them constantly of the time and their life passing, of their mortality. Clarsissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh are in their middle ages, period of lives, when they tend to think about their past and contemplate if they had made the right decisions. The constant presence of the hours striking interrupts their thoughts and warns them that the time passes: 'Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning; musical; then the hour,...
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...Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen, in 1882. She suffered immensely as a child from a series of emotional shocks (these are included in the biography of Virginia Woolf). However, she overcame these incredible personal damages and became a major British novelist, essayist and critic. Woolf also belonged to an elite group that included Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. Woolf pioneered in incorporating feminism in her writings. “Virginia Woolf’s journalistic and polemical writings show that she made a significant contribution to the development of feminist thought” (Dalsimer). Despite her tumultuous childhood, she was an original thinker and a revolutionary writer, specifically the way she described depth of characters in her novels. Her novels are distinctively modern and express characters in a way no other writer had done before. One reason it is easy to acknowledge the importance of Virginia Woolf is because she wrote prolifically. Along with many novels, she wrote essays, critiques and many volumes of her personal journals have been published. She is one of the most extraordinary and influential female writers throughout history. Virginia Woolf is an influential author because of her unique style, incorporations of symbolism and use of similes and metaphors in her literature, specifically in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Virginia Woolf’s eccentric style is what causes her writings to be distinct from...
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...writers depiction of urban life ‘Why do I dramatise London so perpetually’ Woolf wondered in the final months of her life. This essay will seek to examine Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Eliot’s The Waste Land to observe their perpetual fascination with expressing metropolis as a vision of modernity. It will attempt to scrutinize the overwhelming nature of urban life, urban life’s effect on humanity, metropolis being the forefront of society, and also the depiction of a single urban consciousness. Through examining these depictions of urban life, this essay aims to observe the effects rapid urbanisation had on the modern movement and its respective authors. Woolf presents Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness as a vessel to voice the overwhelming nature of urban life and the problem of anxiety experienced in modern metropolis. Immediately in the first paragraph Clarissa’s anxieties are voiced as she embarks to the city to prepare for her party. Clarissa’s consciousness jumps to her memory of a ‘girl of eighteen’ and the solemn and ‘feeling that something awful was about to happen’. The contrast to her feeling of excitement to a feeling of anxiety is stark. The protagonist begins by exclaiming ‘how fresh how calm’ and then to experiencing feeling threatened as her attention reverts from the natural to the ‘uproar of the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans… she loved; life; London’. Woolf plunges the reader into Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness, where the protagonist experiences both awe and anxiety...
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...The ongoing relationship between the literary movements of modernism and post-modernism is encompassed by the intertextual relationships between Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”. These relationships communicate the inadequacy of previous writings to convey trauma, cultural crisis and the deep fragmentation within their respective societies. The immediate context of these social dialogues creates a clear division between each text, however the intertextual similarities between minor and major characters create an effective parallel to traverse decades, years, months and days. This is in order to assess the lasting impacts of society on an individual’s desire to escape either physically or metaphorically. Woolf’s 1923 novel “Mrs Dalloway” reflects on the need for a new convention to express the struggle of coming to terms with the lasting and catastrophic effects of modern warfare. Woolf achieved this through the binary oppositions of the inside and outside self. Woolf creates two alternate personalities within Clarissa through the use of parenthesise, punctuating the otherwise flowing modernist technique of free indirect discourse with Clarissa’s personal thoughts and opinions. The sub-commentary on the events offers the reader an alternate perspective to that provided by the narrator where upon Peter Walsh’s unexpected arrival “(she had been quite taken aback by this visit – it had upset her)”, and thus offers an insight into the private feelings...
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...Perception is Reality in Virginia Woolf's 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 Clarissa Dalloway through the thoughts of other characters, such as her old passion Peter Walsh, her husband Richard, and her daughter Elizabeth. Septimus Warren Smith, driven insane by witnessing the death of his friend in the war, acts as Clarissa's societal antithesis; however, the reader learns that they often are more similar than different. Thus, Virginia Woolf examines the human personality in two distinct methods: she observes that different aspects of one's personality emerge in front of different people; also, she analyzes how the appearance of a person and the reality of that person diverge. By offering the personality in all its varying forms, Woolf demonstrates the compound...
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...Treatment of time in Mrs Dalloway. In 1925 Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway was published. Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway about the perambulations of a middle aged woman on a sunny June day in London, and it became one of the main Modernist classics. One of the most prominent themes in Mrs Dalloway is time and the distinction between two types of time. The clock measures time, but on the other hand time is represented by the duration of experiences as the human consciousness registers them. The time told by the timepiece of the mind is called psychological time, a term taken from the philosopher Henri Bergson. There are two different types of time: the time the clock tells and time in the human mind. These two types of time have distinct characteristics, which clearly separate one from the other. Clock time governs the relentless progress of life, ordering events in a chronological, linear sequence according to when they happened in time. It is what history is made of. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, years and centuries are all indicators of clock time. The other type of time is the temporal experience in the human mind: it is flexible; it is constantly in flux and can be compressed or extended. A period that is compressed in the mind seems to pass very quickly in comparison to clock time: an event took more clock time than the human mind perceived. When time is extended, the actual time span of an event was much shorter that experienced. Time on the mind is also referred...
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...understand this. However, few could articulate it as well as the 20th Century author, Virginia Woolf. Woolf grew up in a time that did not encourage women to pursue academics, but that didn’t stop her from becoming an author — in fact, it encouraged her. She wrote first as a childhood passion, then to cope with depression, and later as a way to push the boundaries of the medium. Yet, above all else, she wrote because of one thing: Tradition. Woolf deplored repressive traditions. Especially as a woman in the early 20th Century, she was a victim of many oppressive cultural boundaries. For instance — unlike her brothers...
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...everything is relative. Things take a new shift and the absolute truths vanish, leaving room for multiple interpretations and personalized opinions which are presented now, in writing. But how can one define something that has no clear conclusion? An element of this sort cannot have a finality, therefore, it is understood according to one’s personal background and experience. Modernist literature will always raise serious issues concerning the purpose and form of literature, questioning its former aspects. What are the reasons for writing a novel and what should a novel consist of? For example, the notion of “novel” becomes ambiguous in the mind of Virginia Woolf, who declared after writing “Mrs. Dalloway” that “I’m glad to be quit this time of writing a novel, and hope never to be accused of it again.” Next to Virginia Woolf which is believed to be one of the greatest modern authors, the faithful readers come across names like James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, or as in the case of the Romanian literature: Camil Petrescu, George Calinescu etc. These are the main symbols of the modernist era which changed the course of literature in a significant manner. However, the balance seems to hang in favor of the British literature which has brought to surface some of the icons of modernism: James Joyce,...
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...texts reveals similarities in their concerns and their contexts” The last hundred years have been characterised by wide scale and extremely rapid change: both Modernism and early 21st century United States were shaped by extraordinary social, cultural and political upheaval. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Daldry’s “The Hours” (2002) show overlapping and interwoven ideas that reveal their contextual concerns – decay of faith in authority (such as God, politicians and doctors), changing ideas about gender equality and sexuality, and how our perception of time shapes our lives. Both the novel and film convey these ideas through the appropriate techniques of the Modernist and Post Modern contexts. In Britain during the early 20th Century, and again in the USA late in the century, a declining belief in authority figures and religion was expressed in the work of many creative composers, as well as in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf expresses this shared belief through Septimus, and the conflicting values of Miss Kilman and Mrs Dalloway. In the introduction, the motor car with its unknown entity inside symbolising authority and upper class privilege slowly drives through the crowd of working and middle class. Woolf establishes the tendency of the upper class to float over the middle and working class, and their tendency to not connect with anyone of lower class which implies that they never really gain a clear understanding of those that are not of equal class. This is further explored...
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...Hours and Mrs. Dalloway “There are still the flowers to buy”, are the first words uttered by two different “Clarissas”. The first time was in Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway”, the second time in Cunningham’s novel “the Hours. Subsequently Clarissa rushes into the city to buy the flowers herself. There are many more ways in which Cunningham induces the aura of Woolf’s novel; however, the main similarity, which can be seen, is the stream of consciousness form of narrative, which encompasses the length of one day. With this opening scene being repeated in both novels we see our “Clarissas” plunge into the city to buy flowers. Virginia Woolf is known for being a modernist novelist in the same way that Michael Cunningham is known for his postmodern writing. If you have read Mrs. Woolf’s novel you are immediately meant with a striking de ja vu, in the opening scenes of “the Hours”, only to be meat with a striking difference: The Hours is based around the lives of three different women, in comparison to Mrs. Woolf’s novel. One can argue that the story of Virginia in “the Hours” is a retelling of Mrs. Woolf’s writing process, while the story of Laura is an example of the reception of Mrs. Woolf’s novel, and the Clarrissa is a modernised retelling of Mrs. Dalloway’s day. This addition augments the novel, because it focuses the reader’s response on several aspects of the novel. Mrs. Dalloway’s perfect party is what the whole novel focuses on when it was written by Woolf, however by...
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...Adeline Virginia Stephen was born January 25, 1882, in London, United Kingdom. Sadly, at the age of 59, Virginia Woolf died due to suicide in the River Ouse in Rodmell, Sussex, United Kingdom. Once Virginia’s body was found two weeks after her suicide, her body was cremated. Therefore, her husband spread her ashes around their house (Biography). Virginia was a feminist writer, a women’s rights advocate in her time, and a journalist. Her well-known novels include: Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and A Room of One’s Own. Virginia had a lot of hurt in her life and used writing to cope. Virginia Woolf grew up in a home with seven siblings and parents with connections to artistic icons. In the Britannica Biography of Virginia Woolf the author says, “Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent literary figure and the first editor (1882–91) of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Jackson, possessed great beauty and a reputation for saintly self-sacrifice; she also had prominent social and artistic...
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...Locks Virginia Woolf and Man in a Cage Virginia Woolf, on realising her admittance to an Oxbridge chapel would be prohibited, delights in the building’s exterior. Her vantage point is from the outside of the established patriarchal institutions and from there her critical work interrogates the structures that lock her out. The narrative essay A Room of One’s Own begins at Oxbridge, a mythical institution based on Oxford and Cambridge. There, being a women means she is physically prohibited from entering the library and the chapel. Even the bounds of the university lawns are restricted to her when a flapping, irate beadle responds automatically to her presence by ushering her from the grass to the gravel path. These white haired old dons, men with “tufts of hair growing on their shoulders,” run when another whistles and unthinkingly defend their stronghold of learning against the presence of a woman. In a Room of One’s Own, Woolf progressively unfolds an allegory of two sexes, both trapped in cages, where being locked in or out is detrimental to the society. The thinking of the hairy old dons at Oxbridge is set in stone, like the foundations of the great buildings at the university. To them men and women have different and separate roles to play– men in the public sphere and women in the domestic. The skeleton of the meta narrative which informs their thinking continues thus: men create and build empires; women support and nurture men in the home, men are the bastions of...
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...her own journey inward in Virginia Woolf’s 1915 novel The Voyage Out. Rachel Vinrace is traveling far away from her home in London. Her fellow passengers are a fascinating and motley assortment of members of Edwardian society whose lives and relationships reveal much about the world from which they come. Through witty comedy and stark tragedy, Woolf examines such themes as family, culture, and the individual in this remarkable portrait of modern life. Its unique and lyrical style, which has garnered the novel praise since its first publication, adds an artistic dimension to this surprisingly current novel. Indeed,The Voyage Out is a beautiful and telling work about self and society that rings as true today as in 1915. 1919, Night and Day [pic] [pic] Originally published in 1919, Night and Day contrasts the daily lives of four major characters while examining the relationships between love, marriage, happiness, and success. Like Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out, Night and Day is a more traditional narrative than her later novels. Unlike her first novel, however, Night and Day relies much more on its characters' internal struggles to push the its plot forward. What results is a character study of a very quiet group of people who are actually in the throes of deep anxiety and indecision. 1922, Jacob’s Room [pic] Who is Jacob Flanders? In Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel, Jacob’s...
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