Write your abstract
here.
Mrs. Dalloway- Virginia Woolf
“ For there she was….”
Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway, in the party,
celebrating
life, bringing together people to an ‘Ardenic’ party,
having conquered her apprehensions, disillusions and
disenchantment with abysmal life. The last sentence of
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a masterpiece of assertion in
the
face of failure, existence against the feeling of
absurdity
of life. But it is not an uncomplicated celebration. It
is
a celebration which reverberates with death; a
celebration
with an acute understanding of pathos.
Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the party the whole day,
buys
flowers herself, but is all the time aware of the
complications of the life she is going to celebrate in
her
party. Her image of the ‘perfect hostess’, seen as a
pretence by Peter Walsh is not as stable as she would
like
to think it to be.
Walking through a park in London, she is a common woman
caught in her past, remembering her Bourton days with
Peter
& Sally, observing an air-plane skywriting, hearing the
Big
Ben’s ‘ominous’ chimes. At home, she is troubled by
her ‘narrow bed’, lack of ‘ability’ to have more
children
beyond her only daughter, anxious about her drying
female
sexual energies, worried about her daughter and her
relationship with a middle-class teacher- Miss Kilman
and
troubled by the incomplete nature of her life with her
long
time partner/ soul mate paying her a visit reminding
her of
the ‘lack’ she tries to run from.
All these and perhaps many other reasons make her look
outside the window, feel like throwing herself out, but
the
old woman visible from the window, across the road,
turning
the light off, going to bed- ‘continuing to exist’,
stops
her from taking the final ‘plunge’.
Septimus Warren Smith had ‘killed’ himself. She heard
about
this ‘anonymous man’ in her party amid her
celebrations.
She thought about him, did not pity him though. He had
thrown it away, he had chosen to.
She had walked the terrace at Bourton, thought it was
all
meaningless, difficult when ‘your parents give it into
your
hands, this life to be lived..’ But she had resisted.
She
had chosen to.
An analysis of Clarissa Dalloway in the party is
intimately
linked to all the events of the day and the ‘unrelated
relatedness’ of Septimus’ experiences and death. It is
a
magnificent feta achieved by Woolf. She portrays the
tension of life , of being, beautifully and with
complete
understanding of the ‘inner mind’, aware of all the
complexities and difficulties, she is capable of
celebrating it in Clarissa’s party.
Woolf herself found walking over the ‘pavement over an
abyss’ difficult, but she makes Clarissa do it and
cross
over.
Thus in the end we have- “For there she was.”- Woolf’s
Mrs.
Dalloway, inspite of and with, everything difficult and
destabilizing moving on with her life!!