Mrs.+Dalloway

= =  =**Mrs. Dalloway **=

 This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life, a day that is also the last day of a war veteran's life. Direct and vivid in her account of the details of Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party she is to give that evening, Woolf ultimately manages to reveal much more; for it is the feeling behind these daily events and their juxtaposition with the journey to suicide of Septimus Smith that gives //Mrs. Dalloway// its texture and richness and makes it so memorable. (back cover of Mrs. Dalloway)

 Forum Assignment //Mrs. Dalloway// Wiki Page Intro, l-lxviii Novel, 1-219

__WRITE (300-500 words)__ PART A: After reading through the novel //Mrs. Dalloway// and the wiki page presented to you, relate the real life experiences of Virginia Woolf to the reasoning behind the overall plot of //Mrs. Dalloway.// (Use one passage from the wiki space or other resources presented to you and two quotes from the novel to formulate your response).

PART B: In //Mrs. Dalloway//, the complexity of English society is something that each of characters must struggle with to find acceptance. Woolf uses the structure of the Post WWI societal and political values to create the problems and interactions the characters face, and make the knowledge of that society key to understanding the motives and responses of those characters. Formulate your response in which you discuss how the contemporary society in //Mrs. Dalloway// affects the actions and judgment of the characters in the novel. Include two relevant passages from the text.

 Biographical Info

Virginia Woolf, the English novelist, critic, and essayist, was born on January 25, 1882 , to Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, and Julia Duckworth Stephen. Woolf grew up in an upper-middle-class, socially active, literary family in Victorian London. She had three full siblings, two half-brothers, and two half-sisters. She was educated at home, becoming a voracious reader of the books in her father's extensive library. Tragedy first afflicted the family when Woolf's mother died in 1895, then hit again two years later, when her half-sister, Stella, the caregiver in the Stephen family, died. Woolf experienced her first bout of mental illness after her mother's death, and she suffered from mania and severe depression for the rest of her life. Patriarchal, repressive Victorian society did not encourage women to attend universities or to participate in intellectual debate. Nonetheless, Woolf began publishing her first essays and reviews after 1904, the year her father died and she and her siblings moved to the Bloomsbury area of London. Young students and artists, drawn to the vitality and intellectual curiosity of the Stephen clan, congregated on Thursday evenings to share their views about the world. The Bloomsbury group, as Woolf and her friends came to be called, disregarded the constricting taboos of the Victorian era, and such topics as religion, sex, and art fueled the talk at their weekly salons. They even discussed homosexuality, a subject that shocked many of the group's contemporaries. For Woolf, the group served as the undergraduate education that society had denied her. 

//The Voyage Out//, Woolf's first novel, was published in 1915 , three years after her marriage to Leonard Woolf, a member of the Bloomsbury group. Their partnership furthered the group's intellectual ideals. With Leonard, Woolf founded Hogarth Press, which published Sigmund Freud, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and other notable authors. She determinedly pursued her own writing as well: During the next few years, Woolf kept a diary and wrote several novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous essays. She struggled, as she wrote, to both deal with her bouts of bipolarity and to find her true voice as a writer. Before World War I, Woolf viewed the realistic Victorian novel, with its neat and linear plots, as an inadequate form of expression. Her opinion intensified after the war, and in the 1920 s she began searching for the form that would reflect the violent contrasts and disjointed impressions of the world around her.

In //Mrs. Dalloway //, published in 1925, Woolf discovered a new literary form capable of expressing the new realities of postwar England. The novel depicts the subjective experiences and memories of its central characters over a single day in post–World War I London. Divided into parts, rather than chapters, the novel's structure highlights the finely interwoven texture of the characters' thoughts. Critics tend to agree that Woolf found her writer's voice with this novel. At forty-three, she knew her experimental style was unlikely to be a popular success but no longer felt compelled to seek critical praise. The novel did, however, gain a measure of commercial and critical success. This book, which focuses on commonplace tasks, such as shopping, throwing a party, and eating dinner, showed that no act was too small or too ordinary for a writer's attention. Ultimately, //Mrs. Dalloway // transformed the novel as an art form.

Woolf develops the book's protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, and myriad other characters by chronicling their interior thoughts with little pause or explanation, a style referred to as stream of consciousness. Several central characters and more than one hundred minor characters appear in the text, and their thoughts spin out like spider webs. Sometimes the threads of thought cross—and people succeed in communicating. More often, however, the threads do not cross, leaving the characters isolated and alone. Woolf believed that behind the “cotton wool” of life, as she terms it in her autobiographical collection of essays //Moments of Being// ( 1941 ), and under the downpour of impressions saturating a mind during each moment, a pattern exists.

Characters in //Mrs. Dalloway// occasionally perceive life's pattern through a sudden shock, or what Woolf called a “moment of being.” Suddenly the cotton wool parts, and a person sees reality, and his or her place in it, clearly. “In the vast catastrophe of the European war,” wrote Woolf, “our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.” These words appear in her essay collection, //<span class="chapt_body_italic">The Common Reader //, which was published just one month before //<span class="chapt_body_italic">Mrs. Dalloway //. Her novel attempts to uncover fragmented emotions, such as desperation or love, in order to find, through “moments of being,” a way to endure.

While writing //<span class="chapt_body_italic">Mrs. Dalloway //, Woolf reread the Greek classics along with two new modernist writers, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Woolf shared these writers' interest in time and psychology, and she incorporated these issues into her novel. She wanted to show characters in flux, rather than static, characters who think and emote as they move through space, who react to their surroundings in ways that mirrored actual human experience. Rapid political and social change marked the period between the two world wars: the British Empire, for which so many people had sacrificed their lives to protect and preserve, was in decline. Countries like India were beginning to question Britain's colonial rule. At home, the Labour Party, with its plans for economic reform, was beginning to challenge the Conservative Party, with its emphasis on imperial business interests. Women, who had flooded the workforce to replace the men who had gone to war, were demanding equal rights. Men, who had seen unspeakable atrocities in the first modern war, were questioning the usefulness of class-based sociopolitical institutions. Woolf lent her support to the feminist movement in her nonfiction book <span class="chapt_body_italic">//A Room of One's Own// ( 1929 ), as well as in numerous essays, and she was briefly involved in the women's suffrage movement. Although <span class="chapt_body_italic">//Mrs. Dalloway// portrays the shifting political atmosphere through the characters Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway, and Hugh Whitbread, it focuses more deeply on the charged social mood through the characters Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf delves into the consciousness of Clarissa, a woman who exists largely in the domestic sphere, to ensure that readers take her character seriously, rather than simply dismiss her as a vain and uneducated upper-class wife. In spite of her heroic and imperfect effort in life, Clarissa, like every human being and even the old social order itself, must face death.

Woolf's struggles with mental illness gave her an opportunity to witness firsthand how insensitive medical professionals could be, and she critiques their tactlessness in //<span class="chapt_body_italic">Mrs. Dalloway //. One of Woolf's doctors suggested that plenty of rest and rich food would lead to a full recovery, a cure prescribed in the novel, and another removed several of her teeth. In the early twentieth century, mental health problems were too often considered imaginary, an embarrassment, or the product of moral weakness. During one bout of illness, Woolf heard birds sing like Greek choruses and King Edward use foul language among some azaleas. In 1941, as England entered a second world war, and at the onset of another breakdown she feared would be permanent, Woolf placed a large stone in her pocket to weigh herself down and drowned herself in the River Ouse. [|Source]

For another biographical article on Virginia Woolf, visit [|The Literature Network]. Due to copyright laws this article can not be republished without permission. <span style="font-size: 190%; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">

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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> = = <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 190%; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Historical & Political Context

The nineteenth century ushered in developments that profoundly changed European society. Mercantilism and industrialism created a powerful new class. The cultural, political and economic might of this new class, the bourgeoisie or middle-class, soon overtook that of the aristocratic classes that had controlled nations and empires before. The spread of democracy and workers' rights movements also characterized the nineteenth century. It was not until after World War I (1914 – 1918), however, that a deep sense of how extremely and permanently European society had changed prevailed.

//Mrs. Dalloway// registers this sense of the end of an era. Clarissa's Aunt Parry, the aged relic who makes an appearance at Clarissa's party, represents this decline and this ending of an old way of life. The old woman likes to remember her days in Burma, a time and place suggestive of the height of British imperialism and colonialism. But, as Lady Bruton's distressed comment about the situation in India makes clear, the old days of paternalistic European colonialism are over. India and other colonies that used to be comfortable homes for colonials like Clarissa's aunt are now uncomfortable places where the beginnings of serious battles for independence are occurring.

Lady Bruton also mentions the Labour Party's ascendancy. (This new party gained a parliamentary majority in England in 1924, the year before //Mrs. Dalloway// was published.) This detail indicates how the England of this time had become radically modern in its move to a fuller social democracy, the political system that still characterizes most modern nations today, including the United States. The Labour Party's name indicates its representation of rule by the people, for the people, as opposed to rule by an aristocracy or an oligarchic class.

Elizabeth Dalloway, a young woman considering a career, is also an indicator of change, as entering the working world was a social possibility not available to women before this time.

__**WWI**__ WWI bears comparison with the Vietnam War. Like this more recent war, it is remembered as a war that many thought should have been avoided and that traumatized its soldiers. It was an imperial war in two senses. First, it was an attempt to limit the European encroachments of Prussian imperial rule and power. Second, it was partially provoked by border skirmishes among European nations on the African continent (European nations had begun colonizing African territories in the late nineteenth century). It was a power struggle pertaining to traditional European ruling classes and had very little to do with the everyday concerns and struggles of most European citizens.

What was shocking about the war was how long it dragged on and how many casualties it produced. (It lasted four years and millions of young men died or were terribly wounded.) The style of fighting developed in this war was trench warfare. In trench warfare, soldiers dig deep ditches from which they shoot at the enemy. When given the order to charge, they climb out of these trenches and meet the enemy head-on. These cramped, claustrophobic trenches were breeding grounds for disease, as they were muddy and wet from frequent rainfall. Soldiers felt that the trenches were as much ready-made earthly graves as they were protection from enemy fire. Also, poison gas (mustard gas) was used during WWI, and soldiers caught by the fumes without gas masks died or suffered horribly.

Enemy soldiers often formed friendships during cease-fire periods in the space of no man's land between opposing trench lines. Soldiers on both sides felt strongly that their real enemies were not each other, but the officers, politicians and generals who were running the war. The carnage, mutilation, and terror of this badly managed war resulted in a host of traumatized war veterans. This trauma was given the name "shell shock" in the years following the war. Septimus Warren Smith, who was a brave soldier, but who ends up a suicidal, ruined man, indicates Woolf's condemnation of this unfortunate war.

__**Compare & Contrast**__ > **Today:** International communications and connections have progressed to such an extent, due to computer technology and the Internet, that the term "globalization" is in common use. The modern world foreseen in the 1920s has definitively arrived. > **Today:** Art at the close of the twentieth century is defined by postmodernism. The name of this new set of movements suggests how its forms are both tied to modernism (post//modernism//), and in some ways defined against modernism (//post//modernism). Postmodernists examine and question globalization and transnationalism. > **Today:** Colonies no longer exist; rather, a group of independent nations cover the globe. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> [|Source]
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**1920s:** In Britain, the Labour Party rises to power, women get the right to vote, and the first major wave of communication and travel tech nologies are incipient or, in some cases, widely established (radio, telephone, telegraph commu nications; automobile and airplane travel).
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**1920s:** Modernism, the set of artistic movements that try to express, through form and style, the cultural and social changes of a brand new century, is flourishing. The modernists profess internationalism.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">**1920s:** While the American colonies of Europe (i.e., the United States and the nations of South and Central America) have long since established themselves as independent nations, the twentieth century is characterized by nationalist and independence movements in Europe's remaining colonies (in Asia and Africa). These movements are not brought to a close until the 1960s.

__**Additional Information**__

<span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 128);">[] This link to the PBS website has a lot of great information, pictures and video's regarding "The Great War" (WWI) which is the war being referred to in the novel //Mrs. Dalloway.//

[] This website gives lots of information about the politics of WWI and the how's and why's. It has lots of pictures and lots of helpful information.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-size: 190%; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Literary Criticism

[| Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: "a well of tears"]<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 100%;"> George A. Panchias This essay describes the connection between the Great War of 1914-1918 and how it is displayed in //Mrs. Dalloway//.

[| 'Mrs' Dalloway': portrait of the artist as a middle-aged woman - novel by Virginia Woolf]<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 100%;"> Jacob Littleton A critical essay on the book and the character Clarissa.

[|Virginia Woolf and the Insanity of Criticism in Mrs. Dalloway]<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 100%;"> Unknown Describes criticism Clarissa faces in the novel.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-size: 190%; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 190%;">Film & Media

In 1997, director Marleen Gorris created the film __Mrs. Dalloway__ starring Vanessa Redgrave and Natascha McElhone as old and young Clarissa Dalloway, respectively. The film was very successful with critics: Eileen Atkins won the Evening Standard British Film Award in 1999 for Best Screenplay, Rita Savagnone won the Silver Ribbon award at the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists in 1998 for Best Dubbing Female, and Marleen Gorris was nominated for the Golden Seashell at the 1997 San Sebastian International Film Festival.<span class="wiki_link_ext"> = =

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> __**Film & Media Review**__ A recent review of the film __Mrs. Dalloway__ was filled with support and intrigue. There were many skeptics that were concerned with how the director would directly correlate the constant change in thoughts between characters. However, after the movie was released the critics were answered. Marleen Gorris was able to interpret the novels main objective, which allowed her to add dialogue to the film that gave the viewer a deeper understanding of what they were watching. However the critics do say that the simplicity of the dialogue does take away from the connection between the viewer and the main characters. They do add that watching the film will give the viewer an easier understanding of the novel. This is mainly due to the fact that the novel starts off with a very fast pace of simple scenarios that are made complex by Woolf's use of symbolic passages.

This is a direct review by Damian Cannon that shows the relation between the pro's and cons of the film in relation to the novel. []

This review describes the scenes that were placed in the film with relation to the novel. [] <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 190%; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 190%;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 190%; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Images

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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-size: 190%; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Other Web Links

This link is for the Royal Parks website that gives great information about Regent's Park and the surrounding area that is described in the beginning pages of //Mrs. Dalloway//. []

Below is a link to the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain. As quoted from the site, "The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain is a non-profit organisation which aims to raise the profile of Virginia Woolf and promote the reading and discussion of her works." This website provides information on the society itself, such as the Society's Constitution and membership, and resources on Virginia Woolf. The //Mrs. Dalloway// first edition photo featured in 'Biographical Info' was provided on this site as well. []

The complete text of Mrs Dalloway. []

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