An Analysis on Mrs. Dalloway
...—and people succeed in communicating. More often, however, the threads do not cross, leaving the characters isolated and alone. Woolf believed that behind the “cotton wool” of life, as she terms it in her autobiographical collection of essays Moments of Being (1941), and under the downpour of impressions saturating a mind during each moment, a pattern exists. Characters in Mrs. Dalloway occasionally perceive life’s pattern through a sudden shock, or what Woolf called a “moment of being.” Suddenly the cotton wool parts, and a person sees reality, and his or her place in it, clearly. “In the vast catastrophe of the European war,” wrote Woolf, “our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.” These words appear in her essay collection, The Common Reader, which was published just one month before Mrs. Dalloway. Her novel attempts to uncover fragmented emotions, such as desperation or love, in order to find, through “moments of being,” a way to endure. While writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf reread the Greek classics along with two new modernist writers, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Woolf shared these writers' interest in time and psychology, and she incorporated these issues into her novel. She wanted to show characters in flux, rather than static, characters who think and emote as they move through space, who react to their surroundings in ways that mirrored actual human experience. Rapid political and social change marked the period between the two world wars: the British Empire, for which so many people had sacrificed their lives to protect and preserve, was in decline. Countries like India were beginning to question Britain’s colonial rule. At home, the Labour Party, with its plans for economic reform, was beginning to challenge the Conservative Party, with its emphasis on imperial business interests. Women, who had flooded the workforce to replace the men who had gone to war, were demanding equal rights. Men, who had seen unspeakable atrocities in the first modern war, were questioning the usefulness of class-based sociopolitical institutions. Woolf lent her support to the feminist movement in her nonfiction book A Room of One’s Own (1929), as well as in numerous essays, and she was briefly involved in the women’s suffrage movement. Although Mrs. Dalloway portrays the shifting political atmosphere through the characters Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway, and Hugh Whitbread, it focuses more deeply on the charged social mood through the characters Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf delves into the consciousness of Clarissa, a woman who exists largely in the domestic sphere, to ensure that readers take her character seriously, rather than simply dismiss her as a vain and uneducated upper-class wife. In spite of her heroic and imperfect effort in life, Clarissa, like every human being and even the old social order itself, must face death. Woolf’s struggles with mental illness gave her an opportunity to witness firsthand how insensitive medical professionals could be, and she critiques their tactlessness in Mrs. Dalloway. One of Woolf’s doctors suggested that plenty of rest and rich food would lead to a full recovery, a cure prescribed in the novel, and another removed several of her teeth. In the early twentieth century, mental health problems were too often considered imaginary, an embarrassment, or the product of moral weakness. During one bout of illness, Woolf heard birds sing like Greek choruses and King Edward use foul language among some azaleas. In 1941, as England entered a second world war, and at the onset of another breakdown she feared would be permanent, Woolf placed a large stone in her pocket to weigh herself down and drowned herself in the River Ouse. Mrs Dalloway was written between 1922 and 1924 and was published in May 1925. It is a classic of English modernist fiction, one of the most enduringly admired of Virginia Woolf's works. Its reception on publication was highly positive, both friends and reviewers treating it with great respect as a book that is innovative in technique, thought provoking in its treatment of serious issues and moving in its depiction of character. It was published just one month after Woolf's The Common Reader, a collection of her essays, and the two books together were both more commercially successful than anything she had done before and established her reputation as a major modernist writer. Before she wrote Mrs Dalloway, Woolf had written some short stories about Clarissa Dalloway. She wanted to write about this party hostess because she was interested in “party consciousness”. Late in 1924, after the novel was complete, she returned to these stories and wrote more. The sequence of seven stories was published posthumously as Mrs Dalloway's Party (1973). There are two main characters in Mrs Dalloway. The first is the fifty-two year old Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a conservative Member of Parliament. The second is Septimus Warren Smith, a young man suffering from “shell shock” as a result of his experiences in the war. The action all takes place on one day. In this the influence of Joyce's Ulysses has been detected. It is June 1923. In the course of the day Clarissa prepares for a party she is to hold that evening. She also meets up with a friend, Peter Walsh, who has been away in India for many years and who had been passionately in love with Clarissa when they were young. Smith and his wife go to Harley Street for a consultation with a famous doctor, Sir William Bradshaw. He immediately diagnoses Septimus's illness and declares that he must be taken away to a nursing home. Early in the evening, as another doctor comes to his home to take him away, Septimus kills himself by throwing himself violently from his window onto railings beneath. In the evening Clarissa hosts her party. She overhears a conversation about Septimus's case and withdraws to a room for private reflections on life and death. These two characters do not know each other and never meet. They have some things in common, however. They have both been ill (Clarissa is recovering from influenza, of which a huge and deadly epidemic swept across Europe in the years after 1918), and they both seem to experience but repress homoerotic desire (a feature of the novel that has excited much critical commentary). Their only connection is that their walks through London cross each other and that Clarissa overhears talk about Septimus at her party. The device of interweaving the two disconnected stories allows Woolf to achieve one of her main aims in writing the book. She wanted it, as she wrote in her diary, to be “a study of insanity & suicide; the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side.” She wanted to find a way of showing the different minds at work. Each character experiences London on the same day, but makes different things of it because of their different personal histories and states of mind. Placing the two ways of viewing the world side by side raises the possibility that the difference between the traumatised ex-soldier and the ageing hostess is one of degree and not of kind. Woolf's depiction of the mental activity of the insane draws heavily on her own experience and must count as one of the few really profound and serious treatments of mental derangement in English fiction. Woolf wrote in her diary about another of her ideas in writing the novel: “I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.” The novel depicts, through a host of secondary and minor characters, the ways in which each person is exposed to the...