By Virginia Woolf She was born in London

By Virginia Woolf

� She was born in London, on 25 Jan 1882. � She belonged to an upper middle-class socially active Victorian family. � Her life was plagued with tragedies: mother died when she was 13, & sister 2 years later. � She suffered from depression and mania (metal illness) which led her to take her own life. � Drowned herself at the age of 59, in 1941.

� Studied at King’s College in London. � Was a member of the Bloomsbury group which was made up of influential writers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals. � She wrote The Voyage Out (1 st Novel), To The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, and many more. � Wrote MRs. Dalloway when she was 43.

Follows a turbulent time in Britain’s historysuch as the death of Queen Victoria, the industrial revolution and 1 st world war. Society speeding headlong into modernity. Novel sets on 13 the June 1923 five years after the WWI (but written in 1925). It takes place in a single day in post war london- you see glimpses of variety of lives & dasses as the third person narrator takes the point of view of several characters. Post war Britain Although throughout the novel, the reader is given flashbacks of both Aevents (such as Clarissa’s Conservative party leading the country again after 17 years of liberal leadership.

� Type of book: Novel � Genre: modernist, formalist & feminist. � Setting time: a day in mid-june, 1923 � Setting place : London � Narrator: anonymous. The omniscient narrator is a commenting voice who knows everything about the characters.

� Clarissa Dalloway : protagonist of the novel, struggles constantly to balance her internal life with the external world. Her world consists of fashion, parties & high society. � Clarrisa has a tendency toward introspection that gives her a profound capacity for emotion, which many other characters lack. � Constantly overlaying the past and present Clarissa struggles to reconcile herself to life memories. For most of the novel she considers aging & death with trepidation such as buying flowers. � Through content, Clarissa never lets go of the doubt she feels about decisions that have shaped her life, particularly her decision to marry Richard instead of Peter.

� Septimus Warren Smith: A World War I veteran suffering shell shock, married to an Italian woman named Lucrezia. � Lucrezia make Septimus notice things outside himself, but he has removed himself from the physical world. Instead, he lives in an internal world, wherein he sees and hears things that aren’t really there and he talks to his dead friend Evans. � Though he is insane, Septimus views English society in much the same way as Clarissa does, and he struggles, as she does, to both maintain his privacy and fulfill his need to communicate with other.

� Septimus and Clarissa both have beak-noses, love Shakespeare, and fear oppression. � Before the war he was young, idealistic poet. After the war he regards human nature as evil and believes he is guilty of not being able to feel. He chooses to escape his problems by killing himself. � Peter Walsh - A close friend of Clarissa’s, once desperately in love with her. Clarissa rejected Peter's marriage proposal when she was eighteen, and he moved to India. He has not been to London for five years. He is highly critical of others. Often overcome with emotion, he cries easily. He frequently has romantic problems with women and is currently in love with Daisy, a married woman in India.

Sally Seton - A close friend of Clarissa and Peter in their youth. Sally was a wild, handsome who smoked cigars and would say anything. She and Clarissa were sexually attracted to one another as teenagers. Now Sally lives in Manchester and is married with five boys. Richard Dalloway - Clarissa’s husband. A member of Parliament in the Conservative government, Richard plans to write a history of the great English military family, the Brutons, when the Labour Party comes to power. He is a sportsman and likes being in the country. He is a loving father and husband. While devoted to social reform, he appreciates English tradition. He has failed to make it into the Cabinet, or main governing body.

Lucrezia Smith - Septimus’s wife, a twenty-fouryear-old hat-maker from Milan. She loves Septimus but is forced to bear the burden of his mental illness alone. Normally a lively and playful young woman, she has grown thin with worry. She feels isolated and continually wishes to share her unhappiness with somebody. She trims hats for the friends of her neighbor, Mrs. Filmer. Elizabeth Dalloway - Clarissa and Richard’s only child. Gentle, considerate, and somewhat passive, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth does not have Clarissa’s energy. She has a dark beauty that is beginning to attract attention. Not a fan of parties or clothes, she likes being in the country with her father and dogs. She spends a great deal of time praying with her history teacher, the religious Miss Kilman.

THEMES Communication vs. Privacy Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa, Septimus, Peter, and others struggle to find outlets for communication as well as adequate privacy, and the balance between the two is difficult for all to attain. Clarissa in particular struggles to open the pathway for communication and throws parties in an attempt to draw people together. At the same time, she thinks the ultimate human mystery is how she can exist in one room while the old woman in the house across from hers exists in another. Even as Clarissa celebrates the old woman’s independence, she knows it comes with an inevitable loneliness.

Disillusionment with the British Empire In 1923, when Mrs. Dalloway takes place, the old establishment and its oppressive values are nearing their end. English citizens, including Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, feel the failure of the empire as strongly as they feel their own personal failures. The Threat of Oppression is a constant threat for Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, and Septimus dies in order to escape what he perceives to be an oppressive social pressure to conform. Miss Kilman and Sir William Bradshaw are two of the major oppressors in the novel: Miss Kilman dreams of felling Clarissa in the name of religion, and Sir William would like to subdue all those who challenge his conception of the world.

Mrs. Dalloway covers one day from morning to night in one woman’s life. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class housewife, walks through her London neighbourhood to prepare for the party she will host that evening. � When she returns from flower shopping, an old suitor & friend, Peter Walsh, drops by her house unexpectedly. � Years earlier, Clarissa refused Peter’s marriage proposal, and Peter has never quite gotten over it. Peter asks Clarissa if she is happy with her husband, Richard, but before she can answer, her daughter, Elizabeth, enters the room. � Peter leaves and goes to Regent’s Park. He thinks about Clarissa’s refusal, which still obsesses him. The point of view then shifts to Septimus, a veteran of who was injured in trench warfare and now suffers from shell shock. �

� In the park Septimus and his wife are waiting for Septimus’s appointment with Sir, William Bradshaw, a celebrated psychiatrist. � Before the war, Septimus was budding young poet and lover of Shakespeare; when the war broke out, he enlisted immediately for romantic patriotic reasons. He became numb to the horrors of war and its aftermath: when his friend Evans died, he felt like sadness. � Now Septimus sees nothing of worth in the England he fought for, and he has lost the desire to preserve either his society or himself. Suicidal, he believes his lack of feeling is a crime. � Clearly Septimus’s experiences in the war have permenently scarred him and he has serious mental problems. However, Sir, William does not listen to what Septimus says and diagnoses a lack of proportion.

� Richard Dalloway eats lunch with Hug Whitbread & Lady Bruton, members of high society. After lunch, Richard returns home to Clarissa with a large bunch of roses. He intends to tell her that he loves her but finds that he cannot, because it has been so long since he last said it. � Meanwhile, Septimus and Lucrezia are in their apartment enjoying a moment of happiness together before the men come to take Septimus to the mental hospital. Dr. Holmes arrivesand Septimus fears the doctor will distroy his soul and he jumps from a window to his death. � Peter hears the ambulance go by to pick up Septimus’s body & marvels ironically at the level of London’s civilization. He goes to Clarissa’s party. Sir William Bradshaw arrives late, and his wife explains that one of his patients, the young veteran (Septimus), has committed suicide. Clarissa retreats to the privacy of a small room to consider Septimus’s death. She understands that he was overwhelmed by life and that men like Sir William make life intolerable. She identifies with Septimus, admiring him for having taken the plunge and for not compromising his soul. She feels, with her comfortable position as a society hostess, responsible for his death. The party nears its close as guests begin to leave. Clarissa enters the room, and her presence fills Peter with a great excitement.

CONCLUSION Mrs. Dalloway is a novel of inner consciousness, more so picturing one day in the life of a woman, suggesting all that she could have experienced years before and contemplating all that should have happened, had she been true to herself, after becoming a mother (meaning old). Mrs. Dalloway’s World is world of memories and thoughts, the party she organizes in the novel is the mindset and almost every character speaks out what he or she thinks, Mrs. Dalloway feels everywhere which ironically means she belongs to no where- neither to the past nor to the present.

She finds everything to be hidden, masked and pities those who live a life of hypocrisy which has become the way of the world – but she too is ultimately a victim of that – She marries Richard Dalloway giving importance to his status and rejects Paul Walsh, her lover. But in the party (years after her marriage) Paul Walsh returns to haunt her. In contrast to this character is Septimus Warren who becomes insane and commits suicide, after having undergone traumatic experiences in the war – this news reaches Mrs. Dalloway in the party enough to make her think about her own life and only in the end does she meet Peter Walsh.

The one common thing is that all the characters are uncomfortable. Virginia Woolf, I think is trying to portray the unconscious guilt which drives men insane and eventually to suicide. And the technique she has adopted to bring this out is all the more bizarre, which is “Stream of Consciousness”- To be very simple “this is all thinking (of the past), events narrated from the memory” – quite a modern literary technique.