One of Virginia Woolf’s best-known novels, Mrs. Dalloway features a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman of the post-World War I English society. While most of the novel is primarily centered on Clarissa Dalloway and her preparations for a party that evening as her “offering to the society”, Virginia Woolf also uses the novel to comment on the consequences of World War I on its veterans. Through Septimus Smith, a character who is an ill World War I veteran and suffers from posttraumatic stress, Woolf critically comments on the detrimental effects of World War I.
Virginia Woolf’s first depiction of Septimus Smith immediately indicates to the readers that Septimus is not mentally stable. “Septimus… aged about thirty, pale-faced…with hazel eyes [with a] look of apprehension [that] makes complete strangers apprehensive” (Woolf 16). After being dispatched from the war, Septimus suffered from severe trauma and was unable to differentiate between reality and his hallucinations. While he seems to appear composed and content externally, he was constantly ...
In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway undergoes an internal struggle between her love for society and life and a combined affinity for and fear of death. Her practical marriage to Richard serves its purpose of providing her with an involved social life of gatherings and parties that others may find frivolous but Clarissa sees as “an offering” to the life she loves so well. Throughout the novel she grapples with the prospect of growing old and approaching death, which after the joys of her life seems “unbelievable… that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant…” At the same time, she is drawn to the very idea of dying, a theme which is most obviously exposed through her reaction to the news of Septimus Smith’s suicide. However, this crucial scene r...
Ingram, Heather, ed. Women’s Fiction Between the Wars. "Virginia Woolf: Retrieving the Mother." St. Martin's Press. New York, 1998.
BIOGRAPHY: According to the entry « Eudora Welty » found on Wikipedia, Eudora Alice Welty was an American author and photographer, well-known for working on the South American theme. She began higher education at the University of Wisconsin, then went to New York, where she studied at Columbia University until 1931. Unable to find a job on the East Coast because of unemployment due to the Great Depression, she went back to her her native city Jackson, Mississippi. She started to publish short stories in magazines from 1936 and rapidly acquired notoriety as a short story writer, managing to carefully describe the culture and the racial issues of the South. Each publication of her short stories collections was considered as a literary event. In 1956, her novel The Pounder Heart, adapted by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, achieved great success on Broadway. In 1975, her enchanting novel The Robber Bridegroom became a musical. In 1973, Eudora Welty received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. Three years earlier, she published a collection of photographs that she had taken herself in the years 1930 and 1940, One Time, one Place: Mississippi in the Depression: a work intending to depict the harsh living conditions in Mississippi during the Great Depression. In 1984, at the request of Harvard University Press, she put on paper a lecture that she gave the year before to the students: the work became a bestseller. She died of pneumonia in 2001.
When attending a masquerade, a person is expected to wear a mask. In fact, it’s looked down upon if a mask isn’t worn. But, what if for some people that mask never came off? In A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, each character has constructed their own metaphorical mask that they set firmly in place every morning when exiting their bed. Each character: Nora, Torvald, Kristine and Krogstad all have masks that they put in place when speaking to each other. Throughout most of the play, it is clear that all of the aforementioned characters have multiple facades that they use when speaking to one another; often switching quickly as they begin speaking to someone else. Henrik Ibsen’s use of the masquerade serves as an extended metaphor to show the masks that the characters use in their everyday lives.
Mrs. Dalloway covers a day in the life of the upper-class society involving Clarissa Dalloway and her friends, living in London post World War I. This passage is set at Regent’s Park as Septimus Smith, a World War I veteran suffering from shell shock, and his wife, Rezia, are waiting to see the psychiatrist William Bradshaw. Septimus’ daily life struggles are seen as he tries to emerge from a hallucination and back into the harsh London daylight. Despite being mentally ill and dealing with guilt over the loss of his best friend Evans, Septimus has great moments of clarity, as he is able to recognize the beauty that surrounds him. The use of repetition demonstrates Septimus constant battles with time as he keeps revisiting the battlefield and the only way to get away from those horrors is to be in the moment-by appreciating that “beauty is everywhere”. A continual sense of movement throughout the passage is evoked through the use of kinetic verbs, demonstrates that time cannot be held back and Septimus must continue to move forward despite his past.
Identifying a lie can at times prove quite troublesome. Some individuals may occasionally claim to spot deception simply by noticing the behavior of someone accused. This gut feeling is by no standards definite, and could be in fact mistaken. On the on other hand, one possible way to expose a lie concerns the revealing of an idea that is most assuredly true, such as with an article that has been written down. Documents usually are quite accurate, for once an idea is put on paper it becomes quite hard to retract. In effect written words relate to the truth, and if understood by the viewer they may expose the lies of those around him. Taking this a step further involves putting truthful, paper into the hands of someone else, perhaps in the form of a letter or note via the post office. In his drama A Doll House Ibsen included three articles of mail to symbolize the truth, and thereby to reveal some of the lies perpetrated by Nora.
Henrik Ibsen was the first to introduce a new realistic mode in theater when he wrote the play A Doll’s House. The ending of the third act of this play was not accepted due to the controversy that it caused during the nineteenth century, because in this era women were not allowed to act the way Nora did, but through women’s movements society slowly started to accept it.
Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, features a severely mentally ill man named Septimus Smith. Throughout the novel the reader glimpses moments of Septimus’s dementia and how his poor frazzled wife, Rezia, deals with him. Septimus, who has returned from the war and met Rezia in Italy on his discharge, has a seriously skewed version of reality. He has been through traumatic events during the war, including the death of his commanding officer and friend, Evans. Upon his return to England he suffers from hallucinations, he hears voices (especially Evans’), and he believes that the trees have a special message to convey to him. Rezia attempts to get Septimus help by taking him to several doctors. Ultimately Septimus commits suicide rather than let the doctors get to him.
Weintraub, Stanley. ""Doll's House" Metaphor Foreshadowed in Victorian Fiction." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 13: 67-69. Web. 6 Jan. 2011.
Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh are defined by their memories. Virginia Woolf creates their characters through the memories they share, and indeed fabricates their very identities from these mutual experiences. Mrs. Dalloway creates a unique tapestry of time and memory, interweaving past and present, memory and dream. The past is the key to the future, and indeed for these two characters the past creates the future, shaping them into the people they are on the June day described by Woolf. Peter and Clarissa’s memories of the days spent at Bourton have a profound effect on them both and are still very much a part of them. These images of their younger selves are not broad, all-encompassing mental pictures, but rather the bits and pieces of life that create personality and identity. Peter remembers various idiosyncracies about Clarissa, and she does the same about him. They remember each other by “the colours, salts, tones of existence,” the very essence that makes human beings original and unique: the fabric of their true identities (30).
The extensive descriptions of Mrs. Dalloway’s inner thoughts and observations reveals Woolf’s “stream of consciousness” writing style, which emphasizes the complexity of Clarissa’s existential crisis. She also alludes to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, further revealing her preoccupation with death as she quotes lines from a funeral song. She reads these lines while shopping in the commotion and joy of the streets of London, which juxtaposes with her internal conflicts regarding death. Shakespeare, a motif in the book, represents hope and solace for Mrs. Dalloway, as his lines form Cymbeline talk about the comforts found in death. From the beginning of the book, Mrs. Dalloway has shown a fear for death and experiences multiple existential crises, so her connection with Shakespeare is her way of dealing with the horrors of death. The multiple layers to this passage, including the irony, juxtaposition, and allusion, reveal Woolf’s complex writing style, which demonstrates that death is constantly present in people’s minds, affecting their everyday
Henrik Ibsen created a world where marriages and rules of society are questioned, and where deceit is at every turn. In A Doll’s House, the reader meets Nora, a housewife and mother trapped in her way of life because the unspoken rules of society. Nora and the people around her decieve each other throughout the entire play, leading up to a shocking event that will change Nora and her family lives forever. Ibsen uses the theme deceit to tell a story filled with lies and betrayal.
Clarissa's relationships with other females in Mrs. Dalloway offer great insight into her personality. Additionally, Woolf's decision to focus at length on Sally Seton, Millicent Bruton, Ellie Henderson, and Doris Kilman allows the reader to see how women relate to one another in extremely different ways: sometimes drawing upon one another for things they cannot get from men; other times, turning on one another out of jealousy and insecurity. Although Mrs. Dalloway is far from the most healthy or positive literary portrayal of women, Woolf presents an excellent exploration of female relationships.
Mrs. Marian Forrester strikes readers as an appealing character with the way she shifts as a person from the start of the novel, A Lost Lady, to the end of it. She signifies just more than a women that is married to an old man who has worked in the train business. She innovated a new type of women that has transitioned from the old world to new world. She is sought out to be a caring, vibrant, graceful, and kind young lady but then shifts into a gold-digging, adulterous, deceitful lady from the way she is interpreted throughout the book through the eyes of Niel Herbert. The way that the reader is able to construe the Willa Cather on how Mr. and Mrs. Forrester fell in love is a concept that leads the reader to believe that it is merely psychological based. As Mrs. Forrester goes through her experiences such as the death of her husband, the affairs that she took part in with Frank Ellinger, and so on, the reader witnesses a shift in her mentally and internally. Mrs. Forrester becomes a much more complicated women to the extent in which she struggles to find who really is and that is a women that wants to find love and be fructuous in wealth. A women of a multitude of blemishes, as a leading character it can be argued that Mrs. Forrester signifies a lady that is ultimately lost in her path of personal transitioning. She becomes lost because she cannot withstand herself unless she is treated well by a wealthy male in which causes her to act unalike the person she truly is.
The Doll’s House is a modern short story because it uses subtle characterization rather than a face paced plot. In the story she described two sets of sisters and in detail how they act towards each other. For instance “The Kelvey’s never failed to understand each other.” Mansfield describes another set of sisters in the short story as well, the three Burnell sisters. The eldest sister in the Burnell family was bossy and rude. Over the entire story you draw the conclusion from reading in between the lines that Mansfield brings more attention to the two sets of sister relationships rather than the plot.