MRS DALLOWAY

The book is set five years after Armistice Day, when World War I ended, but England is still recovering –
hundreds of thousands of soldiers died and the country suffered severe financial losses. 
- Big Ben, the famous London clock tower, acts as a symbol of tradition and the past (it is part of the Palace
of Westminster) but also of the inevitable march of time. Big Ben’s tolling will be both a divider and uniter
in the novel, marking out each hour but also connecting people as being part of that same passage of time,
hearing its tolling all together.

- Flowers are often a traditional symbol of femininity and beauty, and for Clarissa they also represent the joy
she takes in life. She chooses to focus on beautiful things like flowers to banish the darker parts of her soul.
The car backfiring is a sudden reminder of war, as it sounds like a pistol. Death is always close at hand, with
pistol shots even among the flowers.

HUGH WHITBREAD

- Hugh Whitbread is the epitome of the “English gentleman” – he is always well-dressed, charming,
and wealthy, but he has no real substance to him, making him a symbol of traditional England.
Memories of Bourton add a layer of significance to the present.

SEPTIMUS

Septimus’s character is the book’s most tragic example of the loneliness of the soul. We see the world from
his perspective, and then see how drastically different this is from how the world perceives Septimus. Rezia
is a sympathetic character, but there is now a huge divide between her husband and herself

Clarissa looks out the window and watches an old woman in the house opposite hers climb upstairs and look
out the window. The old woman has no idea she is being watched, and Clarissa is comforted by this.
Somehow the old woman’s existence reassures her of the “privacy of the soul,” the thing that love, religion,
and the Doris Kilmans of the world try to destroy. Clarissa and the old woman have been neighbors for years
but have never spoken.
-Woolf’s most famous essay is called “A Room of One’s Own,” and throughout her work separate rooms act
as representations of individual souls. This scene condenses the heart of the novel, and the paradox between
aloneness and communication. The lack of communication between Clarissa and the old woman is tragic in
a way, but at the same time it comforts Clarissa about the privacy of the soul. Clarissa watching the old
woman also resonates with the singing woman’s words: “If some one should see, what matter they?”

.Clarissa feels that Septimus’s death is her “disgrace” because she lacked his bravery, instead settling for a
life of upper-class comfort and conformity with Richard. She thinks again of the window at Bourton, the
place of great joy and the premonition of death, a time of pure communication – just like the window
Septimus threw himself from. She then sees the old woman behind her closed windows, and sees how
difficult communication has grown as she has gotten older.

Privacy, Loneliness, and Communication

- Throughout Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf gives us glimpses into the minds of her characters while at the
same time showing their outward communication with other people. This framework leads to a complex
series of relations, and her characters deal with the privacy, loneliness, and communication of these
relationships in different ways. Peter Walsh is notably introverted, and gets swept up in his personal
fantasies. Even Clarissa, who loves parties, deeply experiences her own incommunicable thoughts and the
independence of her existence. She enjoys mingling with other people, but thinks that the true heart of life
lies in the fact that the old woman across the way has her own room, and Clarissa has hers.
The inherent privacy of the soul is not always positive, though, and it often appears as
loneliness. Septimus is the greatest example of this. No one understands his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD) and inner turmoil. Woolf shows the loneliness of the soul in nearly every interaction between
characters, as she contrasts people’s rich inner dialogues with their often mundane, failed attempts at
communication with each other. Richard tries to say “I love you” to Clarissa, but is unable to do so and
gives her flowersinstead. Clarissa even sees Septimus’s suicide as an act of communication, but by its very
nature Septimus can receive no response from the world. The important reunion pointed to by the entire
book – the meeting between Clarissa, Peter, and Sally – only takes place beyond the page, just after the
novel ends. With all this privacy, loneliness, and failed communication Woolf shows how difficult it is to
make meaningful connections in the modern world. Something as seemingly-frivolous as Clarissa’s party
then takes on a deeper, more important meaning, as it as an effort by Clarissa to try to draw people together.

Social Criticism

Though Mrs. Dalloway’s action concerns only one day and mostly follows a lady throwing a party, Woolf
manages to thread her novel with criticism of English society and post-War conservatism. In Woolf’s time
the British Empire was the strongest in the world, with colonies all across the globe (including Canada,
India, and Australia), but after World War I England’s power began to crumble. England was technically
victorious in the War, but hundreds of thousands of soldiers died and the country suffered huge financial
losses. Mrs. Dalloway then shows how the English upper class tried to cling to old, outmoded traditions and
pretend that nothing had changed. This is tragically exhibited through Septimus, as society ignores his
PTSD. Septimus fought for his country, but now the country is trying to pretend that the horrors of war left
no lasting traces on its soldiers.

The empty tradition and conservatism of the aristocracy is also shown in the characters of Lady
Bruton, Aunt Helena, and Hugh Whitbread, who have traditional values and manners but are hopelessly
removed from modern life. Richard works for the Conservative Party, which is portrayed as outdated, stuffy,
and soon to be replaced by the Labor Party. All the characters are still preoccupied with social class, as
when Clarissa snobbily avoids inviting her poor cousin Elsie to her party. Even the poor Doris Kilman is
endlessly bitter towards Clarissa for her wealth and charm. The futility of classism and outdated
conservatism then culminates in the figure of the Prime Minister. He is first mentioned as Peter’s critique of
Clarissa (that she will marry a prime minister and so become a useless appendage to a role rather than the
partner to a man) and then his “greatness” is discussed by people in the street, but when the Prime Minister
actually appears in person he is ordinary and almost laughable. The Prime Minister belongs to the old order
of Empire, repression, and classism, which Woolf shows must be discarded so that England can survive in
the modern era.

Time
Mrs. Dalloway takes place over the course of one day, and in its very framework Woolf emphasizes the
passage of time. There are no real chapter breaks, and the most notable divider of the narrative is the
chiming of Big Ben as the day progresses. All the novel’s action is so compressed (and usually composed of
thoughts and memories) that a few minutes can fill many pages. The chiming of Big Ben is a reminder of the
inevitable march of time, and fits with Clarissa’s fear of death and the danger of living even one day.
The circular presence of the past is also deeply intertwined with the forward ticking of the clock.
Clarissa, Peter, Richard, and Sally interact very little in the present, but Clarissa and Peter relive in great
depth their youth at Bourton, so their past relations add weight and complexity to their present
interactions. Septimus is even more ruthlessly pursued by the past, as he actually sees visions of Evans, his
dead soldier friend. One of Woolf’s original titles for the book was “The Hours,” so she clearly finds the
idea of time important, and by simultaneously emphasizing the chiming of the hours and the ubiquity of past
memories, she ends up showing the fluidity of time, which can be both linear and circular at once.
Death
Though much of the novel’s action consists of preparations for a seemingly frivolous party, death is a -

Relationship between Clarissa and Septimus:

The original title for Mrs Dalloway was “The Hours”, suggesting that time itself plays an important role in
the novel. Woolf experienced mental breakdowns during her lifetime, which involved treatments and
recommendations from different doctors. Just like Septimus, she ended her life by killing herself.

Phyllis Rose argues that “Mrs. Dalloway represents Woolf’s fullest self-portrait as an artist; it contemplates
the relationship between her own madness and her creativity” (126)

“Everyone is death-hunted, everyone is a poet, everyone is neurotic, everyone is a genius, everyone is

Virginia Woolf”, because every character seems to perceive the surroundings in a similar way, have a
“nostalgic relationship to their past”, and use metaphors to describe life (Nunez 172).

Clarissa Dalloway is a middle-class woman in her fifties, married to MP Richard Dalloway, about to host a
party in the evening. She comes across Peter Walsh, a man with whom she was in love when she was young,
who has just returned from a long stay in India. Their reunion stirs up emotions and creates images of what
life used to be, and what it could have been, had things happened differently. The thoughts of her youth
bring up memories of another love, Sally Seton, who later turns up at her party unannounced.

A character not directly connected to Clarissa, but crucial to Woolf’s study, is Septimus Warren Smith. He is
a shell-shocked veteran from the First World War, suffering from depression. After witnessing his friend
Evans die in the war without grief, he becomes unable to feel anything. Now he is married to Rezia, for
whom he can show no affection. In an attempt to escape the brutality of human nature, here portrayed by
judgemental doctors, he commits suicide. Even though he and Clarissa never meet, their characters reflect
each other, in terms of their similar visions or perceptions of life and society, built up from a mixture of
reality and imagination.

Woolf offers a deep insight into the human mind, showing that long-lasting medical analysis is not always
superior when it comes to representing the mental states of characters. The thoughts of Clarissa and
Septimus are well kept from other people in society and their outsides do not reflect them. Clarissa is
regarded as the perfect wife, mother and hostess, while Septimus is considered to be the brave, manly war
hero.

Written in the stream of consciousness technique with a constant change of narrator, the novel presents the
reader with an opportunity to enter the minds and share the thoughts and actions of its characters.

The relationship between the characters of Clarissa and Septimus is an explicit example. They can be seen as
each other’s opposites, at the same time as each other’s doubles. Clarissa is portrayed as the sane female and
Septimus as the insane male.

Clarissa Dalloway is seen as a woman well adjusted to society; she is the perfect hostess, wife and mother
belonging to the middle class. Even though this appearance is one she desires and tries to maintain, she is
fragmented inside. Yet she is ageing every second, she wonders what life could have been like, had she
made other decisions when she was young. She thinks of herself as invisible, that her body has become
nothing. She has even lost the connection between her body and her name; to other people she is no longer
Clarissa, but instead Mrs Richard Dalloway (8-9). Her two images affect her thoughts and experiences in the
outside world.
-she constantly sways between memory and perception, between past and present, as well as integrating the
different sensations, creating a web of consciousness, fantasy and reality. For one moment she is back in her
early twenties, in the countryside at Bourton, experiencing youth and love in the company of Sally Seton
and Peter Walsh. The next, she is back in London, cherishing life, yet feeling depressed.

On the outside, she displays a composed, cold surface, but on the inside her mind works in order to turn
away from the repressed passionate feelings of youth, and torments of life, that try to escape from her
unconsciousness. This leaves her fragmented, divided between happiness and sadness.

Septimus Warren Smith. He, like Clarissa, is fragmented and torn between his thoughts. From the outside,
Septimus is seen as the brave war hero, who fought for his country. He is considered to be an able man who
is happily married and content with life. Yet, on the inside, that is far from the truth. After the death of his
friend Evans, he suffers from shell shock and, by trying to return to a normal life, he discovers that he has
lost the ability to feel anything. He can see no happiness in life; where he sees beauty in nature, he sees
cruelty in human nature. By going back to everyday life after the war, trying to live as usual, he has become
depressed and confused, and is mentally unstable. His vision of life does not follow the norm, and his
condition cannot be understood by society, here portrayed by two doctors, Holmes and Bradshaw. They try
to treat him in different ways, to figure him out, which makes him turn away from life even more, convinced
that humans are brutal creatures.

Clarissa and Septimus have both experienced what it is like to be excluded. Clarissa was at Bourton part of a
female, worriless environment, with her mother, sister, her aunt, and Sally Seton. After her decision to marry
Richard, she leaves the countryside in favour of London, and she becomes excluded from the female
environment. By doing so, she enters another sphere, a patriarchal society where her role is set. Female
company is reduced to her daughter Elizabeth, to whom she is not very close. In contrast to Clarissa,
Septimus used to be included in the patriarchal society, but is now excluded from it. A young, healthy man
signing up as a volunteer in the war is someone useful to society, a shell-shocked war veteran is not. He has
experienced such horrors performed by man that he can no longer be part of society. He has lived through
something that nobody else can understand, realising the cruelty that exists in humans, and so he does not fit
in anymore. Since he has turned his back on society, he feels like a deserter, an outcast.

By hearing Big Ben, and other clocks, they are reminded of their existence in linear time. Yet they escape
into non-existence by fleeing to the past, to the future, or into pure fantasy untied by time and reality,
through their imagination. To some extent, it can be said that both are non-existent in the present as well as
existent, struggling in opposite directions. Septimus, on the other hand, strives to become non-existent, to
disappear from everyday life.

Big Ben is the dominant teller of time, always making people stop and reflect on it. It has the authority and
control and gives the impression of displaying time as something visible: “The leaden circles dissolved in
the air” (Woolf 2)

The reason behind Clarissa’s and Septimus’s fragmented selves lies in their past, and their inability to
wholly commit themselves to the present. Though their experiences are completely different, they share a
common sense of loss and exclusion, which they cannot escape from. They try to protect themselves by
forcing their feelings into repression, yet those feelings come back to haunt them. Apter claims that “The
capacity of the present to contain the past naturally makes the past appear as immediate. Memories become
entangled in present thoughts and perceptions” (55), explaining their situation.

By marrying Richard she gave up passion, but kept her independence. She hid her emotions and, because of
that, the pain inflicted by her choice still torments her today: “Clarissa is both perfectly conventional in her
role as a lady and hostess and, at the same time, a misfit: Mrs Dalloway is all about the fact that she is still
unresolved in a choice apparently completed a generation before” (Bowlby 79-80). Septimus also made
choices in the past that have left him in deep melancholy in the present. He left his mother to go to London
and become a poet.

This incapability to turn away from one’s past is shared by Clarissa and Septimus. Despite their different
backgrounds, they share some common events that can offer explanations to their similarities in present life.
They both left their family homes in their youth and replaced old habits with new lives in London. There are
gaps to be found in both stories, for instance the reason why Septimus left his mother, and why Sally and
Clarissa decided to part. None of these parts are included in their respective narrations. The fact that Clarissa
also suffered from the tragic loss of her mother and sister is hardly dwelt on at all. Perhaps in these hidden
parts of the characters, an explanation to their behaviour can be found. Both motherless, they found in Sally
and Isabel Pole female role models, mother figures as well as potential lovers.

Yet, while Clarissa tries to put her past behind her and struggles to fit into present society, Septimus’s only
option is to destroy the opposition of past and present through death.

Septimus’s choice of death becomes her choice of life. She looks at the old woman across the street, but
without fear this time. She has, in this moment, left her sorrows behind and become free, just like Septimus:
“She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it;
thrown it away while they went on living” (189). She experiences such strong emotions because she is now
assured that there is someone else out there who feels the way she does. Her choice between living and
dying is decided through his action. It can be argued that, from her perspective, he dies for her. His death
makes her realise that life is precious and that it is possible to be freed from past experiences, either by
dying or by living on to create new experiences every day.

Septimus also feels the pressure of fitting in a role. Just like Clarissa, he slips between masculinity and
femininity because of the change of circumstances in his life. Clarissa and Septimus are alike, despite their
different social, as well as geographical backgrounds. Although they never actually meet, they are connected
by the fact that they both end up in London; they are both walking around the city that summer’s day in
June. The notion of Clarissa and Septimus being mirror reflections applies to their gender insecurity as well,
suggesting that they are varying between different degrees of heterosexuality and homosexuality, femininity
and masculinity.