Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 to an intellectual family. She had several nervous breakdowns throughout her life and eventually committed suicide in 1941. Her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa Dalloway and shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith in a single day in June 1923 in post-WWI London. The story explores themes of mental illness, existentialism, and homosexuality through the characters' perceptions and memories. While Clarissa organizes a party, Septimus experiences hallucinations before committing suicide, which Clarissa interprets as an embrace of life. Woolf innovated the stream-of-consciousness technique to immerse readers in the characters' complex inner worlds.

1. Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

2. Virginia Woolf

She was born in London in 1882.

She grew up in a literary and intelectual atmosphere.

Her education consisted of private Greek lessons and
she read whatever she liked in her father's library.

She spent her summers at St Ives, Cornwall, and the sea
remained central to her art; infact for Virginia water
represented two things: on the one hand, it represented
what is femenine; on the other hand, it stood for the
possibility of the resolution of intolerable conflicts in
death.

Her mother's death in 1895, when Virginia was only
thirteen, affected her deeply and brought about her first
nervous breakdown.

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf.

In 1915 she entered a nursing home and attempted
suicide by taking drugs.

She died in Rodmeil in 1941.

3. ➲ With her father's death in 1904,
Woolf began her own life and
literary career.
➲ She decided to move to
Bloomsbury and, together her
sister Vanessa, she became a
member of Bloomsbury Group,
which included the avant-garde of
early 20th
century London.
➲ Bloomsbury members virtually
defined the social, political, and
creative concerns of the coming
mid-century: unconventional
sexual practices; anti-war
sentiments and socialism; and the
fragmented perspective aesthetics
of both Modernism and Post-
modernism.
The Bloomsbury GroupThe Bloomsbury Group

4. 
A novel wrote in 1925.

Presents a day in the life
of Clarissa Dalloway, an
upper­class English
woman.

The story takes place in
London on a day in June
1923.
Mrs Dalloway

5. At 10 a.m. on a Wednesday early in June 1923, Clarissa Dalloway
goes to Bond Street to buy some flowers for a party she's giving that
evening at her house. While she's in the flower shop, a car drives
noisily past and shifts the attention to the street, where Septimus and
Lucrezia Warren Smith are walking: he is an estate agent's clerk and
shell­shocked veteran of the war, she is an Italian girl. Septimus
Warren Smith, a veteran of World War I suffering from deferred
traumatic stress, spends his day in Regent's Park with his Italian­born
wife Lucrezia, where they are observed by Peter Walsh. Septimus is
visited by frequent and indecipherable hallucinations, mostly
concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war. Clarissa walks
back home and there she receives an unexpected visit from Peter
Walsh, the man she used to love in her youth. Later that day, after he
is prescribed involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he
commits suicide by jumping out of a window. All the characters who
have been in some way important during the day are present at
Clarissa's party. The Bradshaws arrive and Clarissa hears from them
of Septimus's death, with she feels a strong connection.

6. The protagonist of the novel, Clarissa, is a
London society lady of fifty-one, the wife of a
Conservative MP, Richard Dalloway, who has
extremely conventional views on politics and
women's rights. The influence of a possessive
father, the frustration of a genuine love, the need
to refuse Peter Walsh, a man ho would force her
to share everything – all this has weakned her
emotional self and split her in two. She's
characterized by opposing her feelings: her need
for freedom and indipendence and her class
consciousness. Her life appears to be an effort
towards order and peace, an attempt to overcome
her weakness and sense of failure. She needs to
make her home perfect, to become an ideal
human being but she imposes severe
rescrictions on her spontaneous feelings.

7. Septimus Warren Smith is a young poet
and lover of Shakespeare who, when
the war broke out, enlisted for patriotic
reasons. He's an extremely sensitive
man who can suddenly fall prey to panic
and fear, or feelings guilt. The cause of
these feelings lies in the death of his
best friend Evans during the war. So
he's a character specifically connected
with the war, he's a “shell-shock” case,
one of the victims of industrialized war,
who sought medical treatment in the
special centres set up by 1922. After the
war Septimus is haunted by the spectre
of Evans, he suffers from headaches
and insomnia, he cannot stand the idea
of having a child, he's sexually impotent.

8. The plot does not connect Clarissa and
Septimus. But they are similar in many
respects: their response to experience is
always given in physical terms, they depend
upon their partners for stability and
protection. There is a main difference,
however, which has aroused the theory that
Septimus is Clarissa's double. He's not always
able to distinguish between his personal
response and the nature of external reality.
His psychic paralysis leads him to suicide
whereas Clarissa never loses her aeareness
of the outside world as something external to
herself. In the end she recognizes her
deceptions, accepts old age and the idea of
death, and is prepared to go on.

9. Virginia Woolf was interested in giving voice to the complex inner world of
feeling and memory and conceived the human personality as a continuous
shift of impressions and emotions. In her novels
the omniscient narrator disappeared and the point of view
shifted inside the characters' minds through flashbacks,
associations of ideas, momentary impressions presented as
a continuous flux.
Mrs Dalloway takes place in a single ordinary day in June 1923, and it
follows the protagonist through a very small area of London, from the
morning to the night of the day on which she gives a large formal party.
Clarissa Dalloway's party is the climax of the novel and unifies the narrative
by gathering all the people Clarissa thinks about during the day. Clarissa
doesn't simply walk up Bond Street and back again, she also perceives, thinks,
remembers, so that her present experience and future plans are suffused with
the feelings and axperiences of the past.In Mrs Dalloway, all of the action,
except flashbacks, takes place on a day in June. It is an example of free
indirect discourse storytelling (not stream of consciousness because this story
moves between the consciousnesses of every character in a form of discourse):
every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character.
Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the
novel, alternating her narration with omniscient description, indirect interior
monologue, direct interior narration follows at least twenty characters in this
way but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus
Smith.

10. THEMES
Mental Illness
Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a
pointed criticism of the treatment of mental illness and
depression. Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse
through Septimus' decline and suicide; his doctors make
snap judgments about his condition, talk to him mainly
through his wife and dismiss his urgent confessions
before he can make them. Woolf weave her criticism of
the treatment of the mentally ill with her larger argument,
which is the criticism of society's class structure. Her
use of Septimus as the stereotypically traumatized man
from the war is her way of showing that there were still
reminders of the First World War in 1923 London.
Exsistential Issues
Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring
people together and create happy moments. She
interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing
life and her mood remains light even though she hears
about it in the midst of the party.
Homosexuality
Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted by Sally at
Bourton — 34 years later, she still considers the kiss they
shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels
about women "as men feel", but she does not recognize
these feelings as signs of homosexuality.

11. As for Joyce, also for Virginia Woolf subjective reality came
to be identified with the technique called “stream of
consciousness”.
However, differently from Joyce's chacacters who show their
thoughts directly through interior monologue, sometimes in
an incoherent and syntetically unorthodox way, Woolf never
lets her characters' thoughts flow without control, and
maintains logical and grammatical organisation.
Her technique is based on the fusion of streams of thought
into a third­person, past tense narrative. Thus she gives the
impression of simultaneous connections between the inner
and the outer world, the past and the present, speech and
silent.
Woolf's use of words was almost poetic, allusive and
emotional.
Fluidity is the quality of the language which flows
following the most intricate thoughts and stretches to
express the most intimate feelings. “Mrs Dalloway” takes
place in a single ordinary day and it follows the protagonist
through very small area of London, from the morning to the
night the day on which she gives a large formal party. Woolf
does not elevate her characters to the level of myth, but shows
their deep humanity behind their social mask.

12. “It is so very dangerous to
live for only one day!”
Edited by:
Fabiana Faiuolo
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