Analysis Of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Discussion

Discuss about the Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel that was written by famous British novelist Virginia Woolf. The novel was published back in 1925 at the time when Britain was dealing with the trauma of World War 1. The novel is depictive of the subjective experiences and the memories of the key characters over a duration of one day in post-World War 1 London. The novel is divided into parts instead of chapters, which highlights the excellently interlaced texture of the character’s thoughts. The novel was not just daring in its form, but even in its content. Woolf gave life to an ugly truth that was less talked about during that period – the war had already messed up the minds of people, weakening them psychologically. Critics have widely agreed that the writer found her voice with this novel. The novel did acquire a fair share of commercial and critical success. This book, commonly focusing on the most commonplace tasks like parties, shopping and eating dinner, presented that nothing is too small or too ordinary for any writer’s attention. Mrs. Dalloway was successful in transforming novel as an art form. The novel is widely deemed as being one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century.

Mrs. Dalloway has been created as a modern novel in its true sense by Virginia Woolf. The novel has been created from two short stories, Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street and the unfinished The Prime Minister. The novel is describing a day in the life of its main character, Clarissa Dalloway on a June day in post-World War I London, England. In the character of Clarissa Dalloway, personality is one of the underlying themes of both the character and Virginia Woolf’s fiction. The social image of the character screens the discordant features of the personality that could be diverted into different and opposing images. Each of the other characters can see just one of these features and then takes that as her actual personality. With the progress of the novel, the initial static image of the mirror paves the way for a series of moving and opposing views of Mrs. Dalloway, and her identity swells into encompassing all the different images while continuing un-encompassed by them. In recording the preparations by Clarissa of hosting a party, Woolf is recording all the views, impressions and remembrances of her own as well as of other characters. There exists no plots or sub-plots, no actual story, no action in its real sense and there is nothing actually happening in the novel, except the myriad of impressions that have been created by Woolf’s fresh style of writing in opposition to the conventional one (Freedman 2014; Herman 2013).

Characters

The novel is depicting a swiftly changing society and the narration is reflecting these changes. Mrs. Dalloway presents scathing impeachment of the then British class system and a tough assessment of the existing patriarchy. The social satire of the work extracts the majority of its force from ironic patterns of mythic reference that permits the mix of dramatic models from Greek tragedy and from the Christian liturgy. Woolf is envisioning an allegorical battle between good and evil – amongst Clarissa’s comic merriment of life and the disastrous death-dealing forces that are driving Septimus Smith towards suicide. The repetitive use of memory and flashbacks are the methods used by Woolf for creating interior time. The depiction of Big Ben at the start of a new chapter signifies the existence of external reality. The image of the city is neither lifeless nor static – it is full of buses, cars, and crowds of people who are simultaneously living their lives. Identity, which is a continual obsession of modernists is cast in a very different light. In the view of Woolf, the self is dependent on the other, still, it is separated from it. Intangible, ephemeral and elusive, true identity is difficult to capture (Edmondson 2012; Latham 2015).

One more technique that helped Woolf unite interior and exterior time is repetition and the characters are joined by the consistent use if memory. The characters are placed in such a way as if searching for their own identities and they are feeling, thinking and experiencing instead of just acting. It is evident that the writer is not narrating her story like the way her predecessors did and the technique she has used is very commonly used by many modernist writers and that is what is shown as the stream of consciousness technique. As narrations are mostly mirrored in the mind of one character or another, it is most of the time fragmented and dreamlike, just like Mrs. Dalloway (Park 2012).

Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which is written in the form of a stream of consciousness, is vivid, authentic and representative of the different traumatic experiences of the characters that have been caused by World War 1. Two main characters, Clarissa and Smith, show signs of traumatic suffering that has been incurred by World War 1. Both their spiritual discomfort and psychic problems are relevant to their experiences with war. The overall tone of the novel is of depression and melancholy, consistent with the thematic problem of the War incorporated imperceptibly in the narrative of the character’s spirituality. Clarissa’s self rejects her husband’s deference at all time, which goes in a perpetually conflated manner with her actual rebellious spirit, signifying an unequal competition among free individuality and the male-dominated society that she was dwelling in. what Clarissa is representative of is free individuality that is repressed by compulsive control of males. Clarissa is entertaining a doubtful hatred for Richard that defies the supreme male society he is standing for and is perceived by her as being a man’s brutal claim over political interests and individual liberty. Clarissa sees Richard’s plausible demand as amounting to a form of hypocrisy hiding his male-chauvinism, which is actually coinciding with the military power and the forceful influence it had in the war that just was over and has rendered Clarissa a sense of being old and shriveled. Her despising resistance of the enclosed attic is bound up with her delicate feelings for the white sheets, which is metaphorically interconnected with her being in the hospital where there were wounded soldiers covered in white sheets. Therefore, when Clarissa gets shut up with the white sheet in the attic, she gets enforced with her memories and thoughts of the wounded and dead in the Great War, which was no less punishing than getting subdued by military brutality. Alignment, thus, arises between dictation by a male and the cruelty of the war.  Many critics have diagnosed Septimus Smith as being a case of schizophrenia and even applied a conventional psychoanalytic interpretation of his character. However, they have actually failed to identify that he suffers not from any psychological pathology, but instead from a psychological injury, that has been imposed by his culture by means of war and has been made septic by the very same culture’s postwar treatment of veterans (Czarnecki 2015; Hogan 2013).

Themes

There existed a dominant belief for long that women suffered from pathological grief more than men, which was explored by Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. She has explored the harmful effects of medicalizing and feminizing grief, with Septimus being left with no avenue of expressing his sorrow and suffering from melancholia. He hallucinates one for his dead comrades, showing the severity of war and the death toll that he has experienced with his own eyes. He ultimately took his own life to free himself from human nature, hypocrisy, and insincerity. In Clarissa’s eyes rest is imagined as a preparation for death, with bed becoming the grave. Where Septimus has no other outlet other than death, Clarissa made efforts in maintaining her connectedness with the people she cared about the most, even validating herself and her relationships. Even though throughout the novel her sense of emptiness was repetitively exhibited, she made efforts in keeping herself connected with the past good memories (Wang and Xie 2017).

It is an extremely amazing thing that within a span of a single day, a lot of things took place with the characters inside Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and the past and the present life of Clarissa, particularly her love story got revealed. In the first of the novel itself, Clarissa Dalloway is seen with ally Seton, Peter Walsh, and Richard Dalloway. She had feelings and love for each one of them. Clarissa’s love for Sally is shown vividly by the narrator. Clarissa was attracted by the beauty of Sally, after which very quickly they became intimate. Sally was the first person to tell her about sex and different social problems. They had discussions about literature, life and so on, and danced with each other the whole life. She was happy with Sally, and Woolf describes her happiness as something with integrity and purity, with no self-interest. Even if they were always together, marriage was an impossible option for them. Back then, female homosexuality was not criminalized, but female love affairs were unacceptable. Their love affair was an illusion and disappeared fast. After thirty years of meeting at Clarissa’s party, they both felt no affection for each other (Blair 2012).

Thirty years ago, Peter had feelings for Clarissa and he even loved her a lot and wanted to marry her. They were at parties and dances together. They seemed like an ordinary couple in the eyes of others. However, when Peter interrupted the kiss between Sally and Clarissa, Clarissa felt for the first time his jealousy and hostility and then ended up quarreling with him. Even though their romance period was not short, they lacked harmony. Among all three of Clarissa’s friends, Peter was her first lover. He understood the immeasurable effect of Clarissa on him. However, Clarissa did not choose him, but Sally. She thought he was like a little boy, which became more intense after meeting with Richard Dalloway. She could no longer tolerate the jealousy and narrow-mindedness of Peter. Even after leaving him, Clarissa could not, however, forget her time spent with him, which confused Peter about her actual feelings. She was living her life peacefully with Richard after their marriage, but still, her sudden remembrances about her past lovers and experiences confused Peter (Russell 2015).

Literary Techniques

There was a time when Clarissa loved all three of them equally – Sally, Peter, and Richard. She cannot ever give an affirmative answer. She is always living in her part, thinking about her love stories and looking for answers to her decision of marrying Richard and justifying her reasons for not marrying Peter. She feels no desire for either Peter or Richard and is unaware of by whom she is loved and whom she loves. For her, there is no one true love as she cannot love any one of them calmly, strongly and with ease. Instead, she might be loving a combination of them. Imagination and remembrance have led to her spiritual problem. Even though she is speculating, she might never find the answer till her last breath. In this context, Woolf is seemingly telling everyone that if a woman is thinking over her own experiences then she would find that there is nothing more confusing than love. Woolf is attempting at defining a woman’s goals in life and seeking for the answer of what a woman is and what they are hoping to be and do. Mrs. Dalloway is a different take on the age-old concept of a love triangle (Gelfant 2012).

Conclusion

The First World War was a major catastrophic event that struck people with countless wounds and deaths. Even after it ceased, the grief and agony did not get dispelled, continuing in the form of traumatic memories. Mrs. Dalloway is a good example of the inescapable effects of traumatic experiences, also serving as a reflective on the traumatic narratives of different protagonists. The novel displays pathetic diffusions of traumatic suffering. The novel has also helped draw attention to the external threats of War, something dreadful and inhuman. Even inside her very modernistic approach of narrative, Woolf has managed to stuff in a love triangle, at the time of war.

References

Blair, E., 2012. Virginia Woolf and the nineteenth-century domestic novel. SUNY Press.

Bowlby, R. ed., 2016. Virginia Woolf. Routledge.

Czarnecki, K., 2015. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) Smith. Virginia Woolf: Writing the World, p.190.

Edmondson, A., 2012. Narrativizing Characters in Mrs. Dalloway. Journal of modern literature, 36(1), pp.17-36.

Freedman, A., 2014. Death, Men, and Modernism: Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf. Routledge.

Gelfant, B.H., 2012. Love and Conversion in” Mrs. Dalloway”. Criticism, 8(3), p.2.

Herman, D., 2013. Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf’s Flush. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 59(3), pp.547-568.

Hogan, P., 2013. Literary aesthetics: Beauty, the brain, and Mrs. Dalloway. Literature, neurology, and neuroscience: History and modern perspectives, pp.319-337.

Latham, M., 2015. A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway. Springer.

Park, S.S., 2012, June. The Feeling of Knowing in Mrs. Dalloway: Neuroscience and Woolf. In Contradictory Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-First Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (pp. 108-114). Oxford University Press.

Richter, H., 2015. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage. Princeton University Press.

Russell, R.R., 2015. Radical Empathy in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Genre, 48(3), pp.341-381.

Ryan, D., 2013. Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life: Sex, Animal, Life. Edinburgh University Press.

Scott, B.K., 2012. In the hollow of the wave: Virginia Woolf and modernist uses of nature. University of Virginia Press.

Sim, L., 2016. Virginia Woolf: the patterns of ordinary experience. Routledge.

Wang, J. and Xie, X., 2017. Traumatic Narrative in Virginia Woolf’s Novel Mrs. Dalloway. English Language and Literature Studies, 7(1), p.18.