Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf

1. Action

The novel examines one June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class London woman married
to a member of Parliament, Richard Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway is essentially plotless; what action there is
takes place mainly in the characters’ minds. The novel addresses the nature of time in personal
experience through multiple interwoven stories, particularly that of Clarissa as she prepares for and hosts
a party and that of the mentally damaged war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. Other characters include
into whose mind we get insight are Peter Welsh, Richard Dalloway, Lucrezia Warren Smith, Miss Kilman,
Elizabeth Dalloway (Clarissa and Richard’s daughter) and Lady Bruton.

2. Madness vs idiosyncrasy

Septimus Warren Smith is a World War I veteran suffering from shell shock (what today would likely be
identified as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD). Septimus has been suffering greatly since returning
from the war and seeing its atrocities, and his suffering is something the other characters are unable to
grasp. He has recurrent visions in which he sees his dead friend, Evans. Septimus is sometimes overcome
with the beauty in the world, but he also fears that people have no capacity for honesty or kindness. For
Septimus the world is threatening, and the way he sees it offers little hope. Hi behaviour is perceived as
madness and his doctor, Sir William Bradshaw who recommends his isolation from society and is and
advocates the “sense of proportion”, one must live according to certain social patterns, to social
conventions, otherwise they will be considered a “lunatic”. In the case of Septimus it meant that he
should submit to Bradshaw’s will, live in confinement.

The perception of Septimus by society is contrasted with the perception of Peter Welsh. He is a deviant
whose attitude towards women may be considered strange at least. At one occasions he follows a woman
in the street and at the same time he is playing with a pocket-knife. He is also extremely jealous of his
fiancée Daisy, whom he actually does not love. He is possessive and much more dangerous for society yet
that society sees anything particularly wrong in his behaviour and treats it as a idiosyncrasy, a peculiarity.

One of the reasons for this striking difference in the perception of the two characters can be their social
class. Septimus comes from a rather poor family, he could not afford a proper education, wasn’t sent to
university and decided to improve his knowledge on his own by attending some courses. Peter Welsh,
however, comes from an upper middle class and was rich enough to go to Oxford.

Health we must have; and health is proportion; so that when a man comes into your room and says he is
Christ (a common delusion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do, to kill
himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends,
without books, without messages; six months' rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes
out weighing twelve.

Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William's goddess, was acquired by Sir William walking hospitals,
catching salmon, begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who caught salmon herself and took
photographs scarcely to be distinguished from the work of professionals. Worshipping proportion, Sir
William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade
childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until
they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw's if they were women
(she embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son), so that not only did his
 colleagues respect him, his subordinates fear him, but the friends and relations of his patients felt for him
the keenest gratitude for insisting that these prophetic Christs and Christesses, who prophesied the end of
the world, or the advent of God, should drink milk in bed, as Sir William ordered; Sir William with his thirty
years' experience of these kinds of cases, and his infallible instinct, this is madness, this sense; in fact, his
sense of proportion.

3. Social criticism

 The novel is a criticism of English society and post-War conservatism. In Woolf’s time the British Empire
was the strongest in the world, with colonies all across the globe (including Canada, India, and Australia),
but after World War I England’s power began to crumble. England was technically victorious in the War,
but hundreds of thousands of soldiers died and the country suffered huge financial losses. Mrs. Dalloway
then shows how the English upper class tried to cling to old traditions and pretend that nothing had
changed. This is tragically exhibited through Septimus, as society ignores his war trauma. Septimus
fought for his country, but now the country is trying to pretend that the horrors of war left no lasting
traces on its soldiers.

 Madness and social position (point 2)

 The novel is a critique of petty life, the culture of tea parties and luncheons, a society concerned only with
the surface of things, like Clarissa who tries to ignore the uncomfortable realities of her surroundings (for
instance, she is angry at Lady Bradshaw for mentioning the death of Septimus at her party as it could spoil
the atmosphere) —the residual horrors of World War I - and instead engages at the superficial level of
social conventions and expectations.

 Fostering old empty traditions and conservatism of the aristocracy is also shown in the characters like
Lady Bruton or Hugh Whitbread who are detached from modern life. Hugh Whitbread is an impeccable
Englishman and upholder of English tradition, according to Sally he had “the most sublime respect for the
British aristocracy” of any anybody she had ever known:

Hugh she detested for some reason. He thought of nothing but his own appearance, she said. He ought to
have been a Duke. He would be certain to marry one of the Royal Princesses. And of course Hugh had the
most extraordinary, the most natural, the most sublime respect for the British aristocracy of
any human being he had ever come across.

 Lady Bruton is a member of high society, very proud of her family of military men administrators for
whom the most important mission is promoting emigration to Canada for “the best of English youth”
(eugenics) and not dealing with the urging matters like dealing with the traumatised British soldiers.

 Germanophobia: During and after WWI many British people with German roots experienced
discrimination in Britain. An example in the novel is the situation of Miss Kilman who for those reasons
had to change her name, and despite having a history degree, she was fired from a teaching job during
the war because of society’s anti-German prejudice.

4. Colonialism, British Empire, India

 The narrator criticises the British Imperialism for imposing its own values and views on its colonies. The
narrator says that under the name of help or brotherly love is hidden a desire for power, which in India,
 for instance, was achieved by forcing Indians submit to the Empire, by conversion, imposition of Western
customs:

“But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged—in the heat and
sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate
or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own—is even now engaged in
dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern
countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to
impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a
tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love
through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the
dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her
eyes the light of their own.”

 Aunt Helena does not recollect Indian people but its beautiful landscapes. She only remembers coolies (a
derogatory term for a low-wage labourer, typically of South Asian or East Asian descent) who carried her
on their backs:

„For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She was past eighty. She ascended staircases
slowly with a stick. She was placed in a chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had known Burma in the
'seventies were always led up to her. Where had Peter got to? They used to be such friends. For at the
mention of India, or even Ceylon, her eyes (only one was glass) slowly deepened, became blue, beheld, not
human beings—she had no tender memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies—it was
orchids she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the 'sixties over
solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms, never beheld before) which she painted
in water-colour; an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if disturbed by the War, say, which dropped a bomb
at her very door, from her deep meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying in the 'sixties in India
—but here was Peter.”

5. Modernist narrative techniques

 Focalisation -