How Does Mrs Dalloway Use Direct Discourse

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The entirety of the novel Mrs. Dalloway is focused on juxtaposing exteriority against interiority, surface against depth. The characters project selves for the world they inhabit to see, but have entirely different selves with which only they are familiar. This lines up fairly reliably with the primary tenet of modernism: a focus on the projection of surfaces and how those surfaces relate, either by confirming or contradicting, to the true nature of an object or being. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses free indirect discourse to inhabit her characters’ minds, giving the reader not only a sense of the self a given character projects to others, but also an understanding of that character’s internal being. This is especially present in the following …show more content…

. . for, though she loved it and felt it tingle and sting, still these semblances, these triumphs (dear old Peter, for example, thinking her so brilliant), had a hollowness; at arm’s length they were, not in the heart; and it might be that she was growing old but they satisfied her no longer as they used” (174). This passage, which describes Clarissa’s relationship to her party attendees, and more broadly, the world in which she lives, is filled with information about projected surfaces. Clarissa spends the entire novel focused on her party–a great triumph! She visits her successes here, or rather, what she feels should be successes. Instead of feeling truly fulfilled by her party, as any Victorian-era housewife should be, Clarissa feels empty. The use of the word “semblance” in the first part of the passage is also an interesting choice. According to Merriam-Webster, “semblance” is “the state of being somewhat like something but not truly or fully the same thing.” The use of this word embraces the idea of Clarissa’s outward personality as a likeness or surface, opposed to the true wholeness of her person. It denotes an incongruence between her interior and her exterior, because a “semblance” of something is understood to never be as complete as the real

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