Review and reinterpretation of Mrs. Dalloway
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published 01/09/2008
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SummaryThrough Space and Time: Reality and Experience in the Modern Age
“This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears” (Woolfe 9).
Modernism marked the collapse of structures that had defined the individual and the relationship of that individual to the world. Rapid changes in religion, science, and politics revealed the gaps in society’s ideologies. The institutions that had once provided the foundation of English society were no longer absolute. The individual, whose very existence was constructed upon these frameworks, was suddenly empty; clinging to relics of a lost ideal and left with little more than questions. Without structures to order the fleeting experiences of the individual, how can one assert one’s own existence? Woolf explores this question of self through the prose of Mrs. Dalloway. She leads the reader through the shifting scenery of London; from the certainty of Big Ben to the abstract, scattered emotions and memories of Woolf’s characters, searching for that which remains outside of these structures, for that which is real.
“This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears” (Woolfe 9).
Modernism marked the collapse of structures that had defined the individual and the relationship of that individual to the world. Rapid changes in religion, science, and politics revealed the gaps in society’s ideologies. The institutions that had once provided the foundation of English society were no longer absolute. The individual, whose very existence was constructed upon these frameworks, was suddenly empty; clinging to relics of a lost ideal and left with little more than questions. Without structures to order the fleeting experiences of the individual, how can one assert one’s own existence? Woolf explores this question of self through the prose of Mrs. Dalloway. She leads the reader through the shifting scenery of London; from the certainty of Big Ben to the abstract, scattered emotions and memories of Woolf’s characters, searching for that which remains outside of these structures, for that which is real.
Table of Contents
- Introduction.
- The characters of Mrs. Dalloway.
- Big Ben.
- The character of Woolf?.
- Clarissa and Peter.
- The question of reality and the inability of traditional structures to explain or contain the vastness of life.
- Society's attempts to force Septimus back within its ordered structures.
- The monuments presented in Mrs. Dalloway.
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