Preview

Mrs. Dalloway Book Review

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
681 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Mrs. Dalloway Book Review
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is an inspring and colorful novel based on a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. With focus and pristine clarity, Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a sunny day in June 1923. Woolf is notable for her manner to completely indulge into the consciousness of her subjects, making her writing powerful and genuine. Mrs. Dalloway is a modernist novel, meaning that it overturns the traditional styles of writing at its time. Similar to other Modernist novels, its plot is simple. Woolf’s artistic style of writing is evident in Mrs. Dalloway, as she enters the consciousness of Clarissa and the other characters she comes across. This style enables readers to learn more about how each character perceives themselves and how they perceive each other. Clarissa Dalloway is an inquisitive character and questions her purpose and meaning in life. Although she is a woman of the upper class, her fine fashion and fancy parties leave her discontent. She ponders on the idea of happiness and if it is truly attainable. She is rather vain and self-centered, nevertheless, she is still likable. Clarissa lives in the moment and has a tendency to act on impulse without regards to the consequences. As Clarissa moves forward with her day she encounters other characters. In making preparations for a party she was hosting that night, she runs into Peter Walsh, a man who was once in love with Clarissa, proposed to her, and was rejected. He then moved to India and had recently returned to London after five years. He is very emotional and feels as if he accomplished nothing in his life. Similar to Peter is Sally Seton, a target for missed opportunities. Sally only comes into the novel as a figure of Clarissa’s memory, where she reminisces on Sally’s rebellious nature and their secret attraction to one another. Richard Dalloway, Clarissa’s husband, is seen through the eyes of Peter, and is characterized as shallow and superficial. Their daughter, Elizabeth Dalloway, is

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The article illustrates how the novel Mrs. Dalloway depicts the effects of World War One. One of the major topic is the war has “created a parallel between time and deaths in one’s intense consciousness”. Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway has experienced the dangers of war, after witnessing the death of his best friend in trenches, he realizes how vulnerable life is, and death can happen at any time. He is sensitive to time passage that every time the Big Ben strikes, he would think of the horrifying war, and he would recognize death and aging is inevitable, so he chooses to end his life to be freed from this fear. “Clarissa is the only character who comes to terms with death and the fleetingness of time”, she is pleased to the hear the news that Septimus…

    • 210 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Diagnosing Septimus Smith

    • 1397 Words
    • 6 Pages

    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.…

    • 1397 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Madness is a prevalent theme in ‘Mrs Dallway’ and is expressed primarily, and perhaps most obviously through the characters Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway – however the theme is also explored more subtly in more minor characters such as Lucrezia and Mrs Kilman. Virgina Woolf’s own issues inspired her greatly, as she herself suffered her first mental breakdown at the tender age of thirteen and was prescribed ‘rest cure’ – just as Septimus is; Woolf is often described as a ‘mad genius’ as she was declared mentally ill at an early stage in her life -- this intense and troubling lifestyle of erratic nervous breakdowns coupled with her substantial involvement in the Bloomsbury group in ‘the early manifestations of the Freudian psychiatry’ led to a close scrutiny and new way of looking at the issue of madness. The novel, in Virginias own words, attempts to present ‘the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side’ through the characters of the ‘sane’ protagonist Mrs Clarissa Dalloway and the ‘insane’ World War veteran Septimus Warren Smith, she intended for Clarissa to speak the sane truth and Septimus the insane truth, and indeed Septimus’s detachment enables him to judge other people more harshly than Clarissa is capable of. The world outside of Septimus is threatening, and the way Septimus sees that world offers little hope.…

    • 1437 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    It is absolutely just to say that this is so. Clarissa is very shallow; she fits the typical, one-dimensional image of women created at that time perfectly. She says on page eleven, “she would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes”. She thinks this, as she considers how she would have liked her life to be, and she reels off things she would have preferred to what she has currently. This in itself is a menial thing to think about, and, when thinking about it realistically, wouldn’t better her life in any way; therefore, it is also a useless thing to wish for as well. We see her do this again when Woolf writes, “it was an extraordinary beauty of the kind she most admired, dark, large-eyed, with that quality which, since she hadn’t got it herself, she always envied” this is similar to the previous quotation, and yet different in that, this time it refers to both her looks and her personality as well. She talks of the beauty “she most admired”, but also talks of the ‘quality’ that Sally had. The extroverted quality Sally had, that she later loses when we encounter her again at Clarissa’s party.…

    • 890 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Critical Analysis

    • 1005 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Karen DeMeester. ‘Trauma and recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway’, MFS, Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 44, number 3, Fall, 1998, 649-673.…

    • 1005 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Being around others can be a goddamn nightmare. Yet there is still a constant need in many people for other human beings for social interaction and support. Not everyone works with that the same way since there are some people who need more, some who needs less, and some who don’t really want any at all. When they got to extremes they are often seen deviant and non-conformity can cause some real waves. Depression and Autism are both neurodivergences that impact the way people operate socially and as in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, there is a clear contrast on how these impact people and people around them. The amount of interaction a person enjoys with others doesn’t…

    • 1431 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    the lively mood of modern London, while the gloomy tones of Clarissa reveals a severe…

    • 1015 Words
    • 1 Page
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In the novel, oppression has become a way of life for Clarissa. After the War, she has intentionally chosen to live her life as a wife of a member of the government, and gracious hostess to her friends and elite English society. Her choice of lifestyle is also a sign of her choice to marry Richard Dalloway instead of her former boyfriend Peter Walsh. Clarissa's choice demonstrates how deeply-rooted her awareness is to her English society: "…what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at…

    • 1509 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Mrs. Dalloway is a complex and compelling modernist novel by Virginia Woolf. In the novel, published in 1925, Woolf comes up with a new literary form using which she reveals her views of political, economical and social issues artistically in her work. Virginia Woolf 's short stories, essays, letters, diaries and novels are full of criticism of the social structure. For example, in her first novel, Night and Day (1919), she criticizes the patriarchal dividend in the family that enslaves women. In her novels ranging from the first one to the last, she works towards exploring the relation between the household and public effect of the patriarchal society and between male predominance and female subservience. In her diary entry of 19 June 1923, Woolf writes: 'In this book, I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity. I want to criticise the social system, and show it at work, at its most intense. 'Critics have continually overlooked her intentions in writing Mrs. Dalloway. According to them, she has been concerned with private consciousness, which incorporates the personal and individual world of her characters in the novel. They are somewhat correct in their explanation, as it cannot be ignored that the characters are engaged in their own private consciousness, for they desire to make their own space in the stark reality of the external world.…

    • 1151 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The universality of the themes of death and love entice readers to discover the changing attitudes towards them as context changes. Likewise, readers are persuaded by the exploration of the symbolic flowers in the appropriated to text, to desire an understanding of its original significance in Mrs Dalloway. Finally, the simpler style of Michael Cunningham’s novel makes it more approachable to a wide audience, and once readers have developed a level of understanding of The Hours, they are encouraged to explore the complexities of Mrs…

    • 1381 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The novel, Mrs. Dalloway, purpose was to expose how shell shock and other mental illness was misdiagnosed by medical professions, who was supposed to acknowledge anything wrong with a patient. The novel had many good reviews about the message behind the novel, but many critics believed Virginia Woolf wrote the novel to deal with her own mental illness. In a way, the novel was a snippet of the author’s life because Woolf’s doctors did not understand her horror story with depression. The critic David Dowling saw the novel as a masterpiece because of the message of post-traumatic stress disorder, and the struggles of veterans back from the war zone. Dowling explained Woolf used the characters, Septimus Smith and Peter Walsh, to represent loneliness…

    • 733 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Hirsch did not use rememory as a tool for uncovering Woolf’s work; and her mention of the novelist is brief, as are most mentions of Woolf when thinking about “Beloved” or rememory. Instead, Hirsch argues that “male intervention” disrupts the mother-daughter relationship of the concept (Hirsch, 98). While this argument holds well for “Beloved,” the applicability of rememory extends beyond this and should be applied to Woolf’s work of Mrs. “Dalloway.” With rememory as a critical tool for analyzing “Mrs. Dalloway,” new facets of the novel begin to be…

    • 2144 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Alex Zwerdling, well known for being a literary critic gives his readers a positive view on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway in his article Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System. Zwerdling introduces the idea that Woolf’s novel was frowned upon due to the unconventional ways the book was written in and the “provocative” topics she presents in her work. He supports his claim by giving us an in depth look at the characters within the story particularly that of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. As the reader already knows Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus are dealing with problems pertaining to their past, however, their approach to these problems deviate from the traditional views that existed during that time. In Septimus’s case he believes…

    • 224 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Virginia Woolf Influences

    • 963 Words
    • 4 Pages

    A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Voyage Out are probably familiar titles to anyone who has studied classic literature. These were all written by Virginia Woolf, an innovative woman who left her mark on the literature of her time. Virginia revolutionized the essay and introduced many new concepts of writing. Although she struggled greatly with mental illness, she led an interesting and successful life. Virginia Woolf contributed many noteworthy literary works to society, although she was deeply troubled throughout her life.…

    • 963 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Symbolism in Mrs Dalloway

    • 1113 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The Prime Minister.The prime minister in Mrs. Dalloway embodies England's old values and hierarchical social system, which are in decline. When Peter Walsh wants to insult Clarissa and suggest she will sell out and become a society hostess, he says she will marry a prime minister. When Lady Bruton, a champion of English tradition, wants to compliment Hugh, she calls him “My Prime Minister.” The prime minister is a figure from the old establishment, which Clarissa and Septimus are struggling against. Mrs. Dalloway takes place after World War I, a time when the English looked desperately for meaning in the old symbols but found the symbols hollow. When the conservative prime minister finally arrives at Clarissa's party, his appearance is unimpressive. The old pyramidal social system that benefited the very rich before the war is now decaying, and the symbols of its greatness have become pathetic.…

    • 1113 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics