Mrs Dalloway is a
novel about time and the inter-connectedness of human existence. The novel’s eponymous heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, is hosting a dinner party. She is a middle-aged woman whose youthful passions have all been spent and, as she prepares herself for the party and concentrates on the details of her activity, she begins to reminisce and recall the defining
moments of her
life and how things could have been different. Elsewhere in London, where the novel is conspicuously set, Septimus Smith sees horrific visions as he struggles to live with the effects of shell-shock. The lives of the two characters interweave as the novel progresses until they collide in a dramatic manner at the end of the novel.
As one of Woolf’s most celebrated modernist novels, Mrs Dalloway masters the literary technique of stream of consciousness to great effect. Throughout the novel, the reader is invited into the depths of the characters’ consciousness as their thoughts flit from one thing to another and run on from one another. It is the verbal
expression of our innermost psychological processes. Therefore, while there is very little
action as such in the novel and the action that does occur takes place all in one day, there is a multitude of impressions and emotions that combine to make the novel an organic whole. The past,
present and future exist simultaneously not only in the minds of the characters but also on the page thereby reminding the reader that we are always living in the present moment but our present moment is influenced by what has already happened and what we consider might
happen or want to happen.
Mrs Dalloway is Virginia Woolf’s expression of the “moments of being” she held so dear. There are moments in a person’s life when everything comes together in a pinnacle of perfect happiness, as in the kiss between Clarissa and Sally. These moments, however brief they are, affect the emotional fabric of a person’s life and therefore live on in the influence they exert.
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