- Illness
‘Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book; & I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side’ – Diary Vol. 2, p.207 – Mrs Dalloway Introduction
‘Mrs Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party’ – VW’s Introduction, p. vi
Wang: distance, transfer and objectify Woolf’s own memories of madness, during 1912 and 1913, and give them artistic expression
Medical discourse on diagnosis: schizophrenic, manic depressive, PTSD – deliberately ambiguous? ‘shellshock’: an attack on the medical community ill-equipped to handle him.
Septimus is treated like a child – or a girl – his trauma is feminised by the medical community, he is left with no ‘masculine’ means of expressing grief
Holmes and Bradshaw
‘Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess… not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatic, forbade childbirth…’
REST CURE: also affected Woolf
‘But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged… Conversion is her name’
- Time
Influenced by Joyce’s experimentation with stream-of-consciousness narration
‘I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect & each comes to daylight at the present moment…’ – Diary VOL. 2. P. 263 – Mrs Dalloway Introduction
Set in 1923 – ‘by December 1910, human character changed’
Big Ben’s strokes – ‘leaden circles dissolving into air’
‘For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.’
‘perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where – such was her darkness.’
‘but she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced […].’
To Clarissa, Lady Bruton represents the British past, customs, and tradition. Her face wears time in a frightening way though, as her aging reminds Clarissa of her own inevitable death.
Opening
Blurs the boundaries of space and time – seems like her early life on the coast whilst actually depicting London – an interior narrative of beach and exterior experience of urbam
Septimus has a psyche out of touch with reality
‘‘‘It is time,’’ said Rezia. / The word "time" split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time.’
- Consciousness / Society
Avrom Fleishman: ‘dialectic of communion and individuation’
Criticism of the social system while she examines the nature of individual consciousness
Ellen Rosenman: ‘brings together disparate strands of life and fashions them into the harmonious whole of the party’
Septimus
An important vehicle for her critique o the social system whilst simultaneously allowing Woolf to explore the interiority of madness
Wang: psychic subterranean in the form of madness
Septimus must see through human nature – this ability might have been the cause for his suicide
- Women
Clarissa introduced in ‘The Voyage Out’ – ‘broadening Mr Dalloway’s mind’, having been voted out of Parliament ‘by one of the accidents of political life’
They are sharply satirised: Richard ‘may I be in my grave before a woman has the right to vote in England!’
‘Being on this ship seems to make it so much more vivid – what it means to be English… it makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear NOT to be English!’
Clarissa develops from TVO – becoming less shallow and asserting powerful literary thoughts in the stream of her thoughts: ‘And now can never mourn’ and echoes of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’
‘Sacrificing male for female development (Introduction) – Septimus’ death in place of Clarissa’s as her shadow/double