Mrs. Dalloway When Discussing Virginia Woolf\'s Fictitious

Mrs. Dalloway

When discussing Virginia Woolf's fictitious character's in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, one can ultimately decide that these characters are filled with diversity and dimensional character. As the reader, I wholeheartedly disagree that the characters "are not perfect illustrations either of virtue or of vice." They are quite the contrary! These characters are perfect illustrations of virtue and high merit. Their lives are filled with commonalities that all humans can relate to. This gives Woolf's characters the pizzazz that keeps readers coming back for more generation after generation.

Clarissa Dalloway, the central character, is a complex woman. Her relations with other women reveal as much about her personality as do her own rumination. By focusing at length on several characters, all of whom are in some way connected to Clarissa, Woolf expertly portrays the ways females interact: sometimes drawing upon one another for things which they cannot get from men; other times, turning on each other out of jealousy and insecurity.

According to author Jacob Littleton, "the most fundamental fact of Clarissa's psyche is the pleasure she takes in physical, sensual existence." (Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 41. Issue: 1. p.36).Although the entire novel tells of only one day, Woolf covers a lifetime in her enlightening prose and consistently explains the mystery of the human personality. The narrative of Mrs. Dalloway may be viewed by some as random congealing of various character experiences but, it appears to be a fragmented assortment of images and thought, there is a psychological coherence to the deeply layered novel. Part of this coherence can be found in Mrs. Dalloway's psychological tone which is tragic and human in nature.

According to literary critic and author Harold Bloom, Mrs. Dalloway is made up of remnants through precise imagery.

Mrs. Dalloway is made up of "fragments." has a story and some characters -- by conventional standards, a fragmentary dramatic design -- but the fragments of which the novel is composed would not seem related or particularly significant without another sort of connection. The dramatic sequences are connected through a single metaphorical nucleus, and the key metaphors are projected and sustained by a continuous web of subtly related minor metaphors and harmonizing imagery. "

Bloom p. 67)

This imagery is what sustains Woolf's characters and ultimately brings them to life in a personal way. Perception is Reality in Mrs. Dalloway. The delicate Clarissa Dalloway, a disciplined English lady, provides the perfect contrast to Septimus Warren Smith, our resident insane ex-soldier living in chaos through imagery conjured up by Woolf.

But not only imagery is what fulfills the reader with a personal relationship to the characters in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf uses stream- of- consciousness to demonstrate the pressures and effects of society on different characters in the 1920's. Using Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, Woolf reveals how two different realms of society can exist simultaneously yet in two completely different realms of that reality. She carefully intertwines these two narrative lines involving two separate characters. Within each narrative there is a particular time and place in the past that the main characters keep returning to in their minds. For Clarissa, the "continuous present" of her charmed youth at Bourton keeps intruding into her thoughts on this day in London. Clarissa's parents had a summer home at Bourton. Clarissa's memories of this place associate its pastoral setting with her childhood innocence and with the sense of open possibilities in relationships and in identity, before she becomes a wife and mother and before Richard assumes his role in public life in London. For Septimus, the "continuous present" of his time as a soldier during the Great War keeps intruding, especially in the form of Evans, his comrade. These reminiscent thoughts are humanistic in value and believable to readers. It truly does make t he characters three-dimensional rather than flat.

In her essay entitled "Modern Fiction," Woolf comments on the conventions of her time that exist in the world of fiction writing. In one of her most famous quotes, she wrote: