Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway
A Day in the Life
About the Author
Virgina Woolf
Born Adeline Virginia Stephen
Born on January 25, 1882
Parents were both widowed
Father – Leslie Stephen
Historian, Author, Critic, Mountaineer
Mother – Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen
Served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters
Woolf suffered from mental illness
About the Author (Cont.)
Household contained children from three marriages
1895 – Mother Julia died
1897 – Half-sister Stella died
These two deaths led to one of many nervous breakdowns for Woolf
1904 – Father Leslie died
Woolf suffered another breakdown and was institutionalized
About the Author (Cont.)
1904 – Bloomsbury Group formed
Intellectual circle of writers and artists
Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon
Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf,
John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett, Roger Fry
1912 – Virginia married Leonard Woolf
1913 – Woolf suffered third serious breakdown
1913 – First novel finished (published in 1915) –
The Voyage Out
About the Author (Cont.)
Woolf died on March 28, 1941
Had been in a depressed state due to several factors: onset of World War II, destruction of home in the Blitz, poor reception to biography of friend Roger Fry
Put on her overcoat, filled pockets with stones, walked into River Ouse near her home, and drowned herself
Woolf’s Final Note
Dearest,
I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness.
You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
Novels by Woolf
1915 – The Voyage Out
1919 – Night and Day
1922 – Jacob’s Room
1925 – Mrs. Dalloway
1927 – To the Lighthouse
1928 – Orlando
1931 – The Waves
1937 – The Years
1941 – Between the Acts
Woolf’s Writing Style
Woolf rebelled against what she called the “ materialism ” novelists and sought a more delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human experience really lie. After two novels, The Voyage Out and Night
and Day, cast in traditional form, she developed her own style.
Woolf’s Writing Style (Cont.)
These technical experiments helped revolutionize fictional technique and perfected a form of
interior monologue in her novels. The publication of To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1929) established Woolf as a major novelist. She explores not only subtlety problems of personal identity and personal relationships but also a great deal of social criticism, such as the reflection on the position of women. Her strong support of women ’ s rights can be viewed in a series of lectures published as A Room of One ’ s Own (1929) and in a collection essays, Three Guineas (1938).
Stream of Consciousness
“…to describe the unbroken flow of thought and awareness in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction. Long passages of introspection, describing in some detail what passes through a character’s mind…”
“… the continuous flow of a character’s mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations”
What is Woolf’s goal?
Woolf's goal is to move steadily away from traditional forms of fiction, to come
"closer to life," to capture the moments of life, even though those times make life both terribly wonderful and completely unbearable.
About the Novel
Details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway
Dalloway is a high-society woman living in post-World War I England
Dalloway prepares to host a party
Novel follows stream of consciousness style
Woolf’s most famous novel
Story travels forward and back in time
Published on May 14, 1925
Other Characters
Septimus Warren Smith
World War I veteran suffering from shell shock
Sir William Bradshaw
Famous psychiatrist to whom Septimus is referred
Lucrezia “Rezia” Smith
Septimus’ Italian wife
Sally Seton
Friend of Dalloway
Other Characters (Cont.)
Richard Dalloway
Clarissa’s husband
Elizabeth Dalloway
Clarissa and Richard’s daughter
Peter Walsh
Old friend of Clarissa’s
Hugh Whitbread
Pompous friend of Clarissa’s
Miss Kilman
Elizabeth’s schoolmistress; dislikes Clarissa but loves Elizabeth
Themes in the Novel
The Sea as Symbolic of Life: The ebb and flow of life.
Doubling: Many critics describe Septimus as Clarissa's doppelganger, the alternate persona, the darker, more internal personality compared to Clarissa's very social and singular outlook. The doubling portrays the polarity of the self and exposes the positive-negative relationship inherent in humanity.
Themes in the Novel (Cont.)
The Intersection of Time and Timelessness:
Woolf creates a new novelistic structure in
Mrs. Dalloway wherein her prose has blurred the distinction between dream and reality, between the past and present.
Mental Health: a study of insanity and suicide; life and death
Themes in the Novel (Cont.)
Artificiality of Life: Woolf also strived to illustrate the vain artificiality of Clarissa's life and her involvement in it. She is a woman for whom a party is her greatest offering to society. The thread of the Prime Minister throughout, the near fulfilling of Peter's prophecy concerning Clarissa's role, and the characters of the doctors, Hugh Whitbread, and Lady Bruton as compared to the tragically mishandled plight of Septimus, throw a critical light upon the social circle examined by Woolf.
Themes in the Novel (Cont.)
Uncertainty of Life of Isolation: Life suddenly seems meaningless to both
Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway. They are alone; the people who love them are alone. They exist in a place apart, though really the same, as the rest of the people of London. They are outsiders.
Final thought
Analyze the following famous quote from
Virginia Woolf
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
