Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

wikipedia entry:

14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway continues to be one of Woolf's best-known novels.

Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time, and in and out of the characters' minds, to construct a complete image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.

Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[1]

Plot summary

Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth at Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband -- she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic Peter Walsh. Peter himself complicates her thoughts by paying a visit, having returned from India that day.

Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War I, spends his day in the park with his wife Lucrezia. He suffers from constant and indecipherable hallucinations. He commits suicide by jumping out of a window.

Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party, and gradually comes to admire the act -- which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his own happiness.

Style

In Mrs Dalloway all of the action, excepting flashbacks, takes place on a single day in June. It is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling; every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, alternating her narration with omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, direct interior monologue, and soliloquy.[2] The narration follows at least twenty characters in this way, but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.

Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is often hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf herself derided Joyce's novel (the Hogarth Press, run by her and her husband Leonard, turned down the chance to publish the novel in England).

Themes
Feminism

As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies both sexual and economic repression. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a politician, but she is still able to express herself in the parties she throws[3].

Sally Seton, whom Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent woman[3]: she smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag, and made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When Clarissa meets her in the present day, she turns out to be a perfect housewife, having married a rich man and had five sons.

Lesbianism

Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted to Sally at Bourton -- 20 years later, she still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about women "as men feel" (from "Mrs Dalloway", Penguin Popular Classics 1996, page 36 OR Harcourt, Inc. (2005), Page 35), but she does not recognize these feelings as signs of homosexuality.

She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (Woolf, 36)

Mental illness

Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the treatment of mental illness and depression[3]. Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse through Septimus' decline and ultimate suicide: his doctors make snap judgments about his condition, talk to him mainly through his wife, and dismiss his urgent confessions before he can make them.

There are similarities in Septimus' condition to Woolf's own struggles with bipolar disorder (they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek, and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of a window as Septimus finally does)[3]. Woolf eventually committed suicide by drowning.

Existential issues

When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life." By focusing on character's thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of private thoughts, rather than concrete events, in a person's life. Most of the plot points in Mrs. Dalloway are realizations that the characters make in their own heads[3].

Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized as a woman who appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and create happy moments. Her charm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of joie de vivre, always summarized by the sentence, "There she was." She interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life, and her mood remains light even when she figures out her marriage is a lie.

Film adaptation

A film version of Mrs Dalloway was made in 1997 by Dutch feminist film director Marleen Gorris. It was adapted from Woolf's novel by British actress Eileen Atkins and starred Vanessa Redgrave in the title role. The cast included Natascha McElhone, Lena Headey, Rupert Graves, Michael Kitchen, Alan Cox, Sarah Badel and Katie Carr.

Mrs Dalloway was a key element of the plot of both the Michael Cunningham novel The Hours and its subsequent screen adaptation. Cunningham's title was derived from Woolf's original title for Mrs Dalloway.