Mrs. Dalloway

For Clarissa Dalloway, flowers primarily represent the joy and beauty of life. They also have a more conventional meaning, as they are associated with love and femininity. In relation to the...

Clarissa's throwing parties is more concerned with her innate love of life than with trying to please other people. Having said that, Clarissa does want those who attend her parties to enjoy...

Rezia's reaction to her husband's death is seemingly one of acceptance. She is not described as having much of a reaction at all, which makes sense considering all the times she has witnessed...

In a novel that takes places fewer than five years after the First World War ended, the impact of the war itself and of the returning soldiers’ difficulties is omnipresent in London. The narrator...

In the novel, Clarissa Dalloway represses her talents and desires to conform to her socially prescribed role as a woman. She becomes the perfect society hostess and the active, vigilant supporter...

There are a good number of instances where Woolf changes the focalizing character although it is not precisely correct to say she changes the point of view. The point of view all throughout is...

Peter Walsh reappears in London from India after an absence of about six years. He is a youthful suitor of Clarissa Dalloway from many years ago and is still in love with her after all these years....

Septimus Smith is a sensitive young man who fought in World War I. As a result of that experience, he has PTSD, or, as it was then called, shell shock. He experiences delusional and suicidal...

Sally Seton has a huge influence on Clarissa Dalloway's character when the two are young women and part of the same circle of friends. In the present day of the novel, both women are married and...

Mrs. Dalloway is a character very much concerned with outward appearances. The passage can be thought of as evidence of the public–private divide in that her thoughts about her own mortality are...

Woolf tells us in the introduction to the 1928 eidtion of her book that Septimus is intended to be the double of Mrs. Dalloway.  Indeed, she first thought that he might live while...

This pathbreaking novel is told entirely through stream of consciousness. In other words, there is no outside narrator setting up and describing the scene or telling us, as readers, what to think....

Miss Kilman is presented as a character who harbours feelings for Elizabeth that are so strong she feels overpowered by them. She is well aware that she loves Elizabeth with a love that is...

In Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, the importance of motherhood to Mrs. Dalloway is that, in some ways, motherhood gives her life a sense of purpose. She says, Sometimes lately it had seemed to...

Clarissa Dalloway spends much of the novel reminiscing about one eventful summer at Bourton—her childhood country home—when she was a teenager. It was here that the most significant characters in...

Mrs Dalloway utlizes a third person narrator who is “omniscient” in the sense that the narrator has access, to some degree, to the thoughts of all the characters. The novel also employs what is...

Virginia Woolf uses Big Ben to represent, quite literally, the passing of time. The clock strikes the hours throughout the story to remind the reader, and the characters, that the day is continuing...

There are several ways in which one can see Mrs. Dalloway as a Modernist novel. The mose dominant is that the novel's premise marks a "shift" in both content and narrative style. When Woolf...

The movie version of The Hours by Daldry is different from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf in many ways. First, the movie is framed by Virginia Woolf's suicide by filling her pockets with stones...

The main stylistic feature of Woolf's writing in this novel, and generally in her other texts, is the way that she uses a particular style of narration to express the thoughts and feelings of her...

Woolf spends much time inside Clarissa Dalloway's head, recording her thoughts as she thinks them in stream-of-consciousness. Through her thoughts, Clarissa becomes compelling to us, first, because...

The main function of Peter Walsh, if we look at the text, is the way that he represents a profound ambivalence towards life. He acts as a foil to the stable Richard, whom he finds extremely boring...

Characters in Mrs. Dalloway are primarily linked through Clarissa Dalloway herself. Most of the characters in the novel have some connection with this title character. Her husband, Richard, and...

Mrs. Dalloway is an excellent novel and just so happens portrays a sexual attraction between two women. It was banned for that simple reason. In literature it is considered a masterpiece and was...

Modernism is a philosophical and artistic movement that began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement was fueled by a desire to break from tradition in order to more...

Time (and the passage of time) is one of the most important themes in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. More specifically, the novel is largely about middle-aged people thinking about their youth and...

Virginia Woolf does an excellent job at subverting the stylistic devices used in her novel Mrs. Dalloway. The way she does this is by using pure realism to explain (quite respectfully) topics that...

Michael Cunningham superimposes certain characters from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway into The Hours. For example, Cunningham's Clarissa Vaughn is essentially Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway....

I would argue that it might be best to keep Woolf's phrasing in its most simple terms as possible. Part of her gift is that she is able to develop ideas and notions that really challenge one's...

I think that if you are assessing the role of memory in the Woolf work, you would have to engage into how the past filters into present and future. The vision of consciousness that Woolf offers is...

Prufrock and Peter Walsh are alike in that they are both middle-aged men who are dogged by a sense of having failed to achieve the dream that propelled them when they were young. Walsh's dream was...

This excerpt, which appears at the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, explains Clarissa's outlook in life. She does not feel worried about her eventual death or about mortality as a whole, because she...

Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith are connected early in the novel by the invisible thread of the motor car that captures everyone's attention as it pulls up to the sidewalk in front of Mrs....

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf explores the internal lives of her characters, which is why this novel is such a significant work of modernist literature. By presenting the inner workings of each major...

Virginia Woolf is trying to capture the subjectivity of knowledge and experience in Mrs. Dalloway. She reacted quite strongly against Edwardian novelists like Arnold Bennett, who created realism...

Confinement is permeates the plot as one of the central themes of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. It is a theme that applies not only to the eponymous main character and to the character of...

On a very fundamental level, London is home to Clarissa Dalloway because she lives there (and has lived there for quite some time when the book begins). However, London is home to Clarissa for more...

Part of modernism, as a general movement, can be described as "a response to rapid change." Mrs. Dalloway explores many characters that go through internal changes as a result of age, changing...

Virginia Woolf’s classic example of modernist fiction, Mrs. Dalloway, is a unique literary experiment for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the fact that this novel only covers one day in...

In the Regent's Park episode we are privy to Peter Walsh's stream of consciousness thoughts, and Peter, Rezia, and Septimus briefly see each other, though they don't know each other. In Mrs....

Specifically, I think you could approach a Marxist reading of Mrs. Dalloway by analyzing Clarissa Dalloway's relationship to Miss Kilman. A working single woman who scrapes by financially through...

Virginia Woolf belongs to a historical group of writers called "modernists" who wrote in a style called "modernism." Literary modernism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also...

In 1984 John Barth published an article titled "The Literature of Replenishment" in Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (John Hopkins Press)where modern novel is defined, among other things,...

I tend to think that Mrs. Dalloway can be best seen as a Modernist work and this becomes the best lens with which to analyze and interpret it. When Woolf writes about Modernism, she seems to be...

Mrs. Dalloway is primarily not a comic novel, dealing as it does with suicide, loss, compromise, failure, aging, the inability of the medical system to treat mental illness, and the repercussions...

The film The Hours was first released in 2002. The film is directly linked to the novel Mrs. Dalloway, which was written by Virginia Woolf and first published in 1925. Virginia Woolf herself is one...