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Literatura Inglesa IIi: Pensamiento y Creación Literaria en la

1.ª Mitad del Siglo XX
3º Grado en Estudios Ingleses: Lengua, Literatura y Cultura
Facultad de Filología
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
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Unit 5
Tales of The City
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST GEOGRAPHIES OF

THE MIND
1.- PRESENTATION: WOMEN AND MODERNISM

The period between 1910 and 1940 is one in which the attitude towards art in general
and literature in particular changes radically. The argument over what deserves to be
represented and the right way to represent it was at the centre of the literally innovations

of the period. After the War, this argument was won by a group of male, middle-class
writers who advocated an art that would avoid the personal, the emotional, and the
mundane. The success of these writers meant that a particular kind of modernism
became accepted as the most important and significant art of its time. The poet T.S. Eliot
was a key figure in this process of becoming through his theories on impersonality and
of the objective correlative which were extremely influential during the 1920s and 1930s,
the period when modernism became institutionalised and codified. The Eliotean model
was just but one of the many approaches regarding the writing produced in this period.
Women writers experimented with form and content as did male writers, yet their way of
experimentation, the means by which they experimented and the goals they expected to
achieve through this experimentation were different from those of male writers.
Male writers approached literary modernism in the belief that art should convey a
‘transcendent’ reality that lay outside particular social and ideological systems. This view
on modernism produced an exclusive and discriminatory form of writing that accentuated
the dichotomy high art/low art. Forms of writing outside modernist aesthetics were
considered as low art; consequently, the so-called popular fiction which re considered
as low art; consequently, the so-called popular fiction which, not surprisingly, was being
produced by a considerable number of women writers, was undervalued and catalogued
as a product to be consumed by the masses. In this respect some feminist critics, such
as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest that a major motive for what was
understood as modernism, was a reaction against the rise of literary women. However,
if women writers approached modernism differently from the way men did, they did not
escape the elitism attributed to their male counterparts. Virginia Woolf’s novels, H.D.’s
(Hilda Doolittle) sequence Pilgrimage participate of the modernist aesthetics (self-
reflexiveness, ambiguity, fragmentation of form, among other) and produced difficult
literary works that could hardly be seen as popular pieces of writing.
Some tensions produced the woman writer by this dilemma were explored in an early
story by Katherine Mansfield, 'The Tiredness of Rosabel'. This story concerns the
daydreams and romantic fantasies of an overworked shop assistant, and its particularly
interesting as an example of how Katherine Mansfield in particular; and women writers
of the period at large, aligns herself both with high art and with mass culture.
At the beginning of the story we are placed at a critical distance from popular romance.
Coming home on the bus, the central character Rosabel watches with distaste another
girl reading a popular novel. She criticises the way in which the girls is <<mouthing the
words in a way that RosabeI detested, licking her first finger and thumb each time that
she turned the page>>. Popular romance is connected with vulgarity and the body and
is apparently condemned.
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As the story continues, pointed contrasts are made impoverished realities of her life.
Romance is shown as dangerous because it covers over the real (economic and sexual)
causes of Rosabel’s dream, we find that it powerfully affirms the value of the life of the
female body, and indeed celebrates it. Rosabel’s dream world offers her light, warmth,
colour, and sexual pleasure:
Mansfield’s text discloses the way in which popular romance, speaks powerfully to other
female needs, pleasures, and desires. The text points in two directions and dramatizes
the dilemma in which Mansfield finds herself as a woman writer of the period. On the
other hand she is pulled towards a ‘masculine’ writing position that foregrounds such
qualities as authority and autonomy, and the opportunities offered by it. The solution to
this dilemma, is to push modernism to the limit and attempt to deconstruct this opposition.
Women modernists tried to incorporate into their writing what they felt constituted their
femininity. In this sense, women writers of the period challenged the claim of
impersonality defended by the male writers, turned to personal experience, and in their
writings, they made a journey in search of a self that was perceived as multiple and
fragmented.
Central to the rise of modernism and its questioning of reality as portrayed in Victorian
and Edwardian fiction is the development of science in the late nineteenth century. Of

particular importance was the appearance of a new medical branch called sexology. The
works of the German Krafft Ebing, and the British Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis
exposed, the existence of female sexuality and female sexual desire. This meant that
the younger generation of women, the women that would start writing after the end of
the First World War, stressed not just the need for constitutional reform, but also that for
a much greater personal and sexual emancipation for women.
The great turning point was marked by Freud’s theories on the unconscious. Freud’s
work first became available in translation in 1909 and his theory of the unconscious
constituted a break from current ideas of an essential, immutable, unified self.
What are the issues raised by the modernist woman writer? There are five main
characteristics to be found in the writings produced by women in this period. The first
refers to subjectivity and gender identity. Women tended towards the split, fragmented,
dispersed, and alienated subject because they felt split within an external, male-
dominated world; there was, on one hand, an external public vision of herself, and on
the other, an internal private self-different from cultural prescription. That is they
perceived a self that stood against the liberal humanist view of a subject as fixed,
autonomous, conscious, rational, unified, and unifying.
The second characteristic has to do with history and myth and the dissolution of time: in
their fiction past, present and future intermingle; there is no chronology to be followed,
just the path of involuntary memory as a sound, a smell, may transport us elsewhere.
The third places great emphasis on the city: modernist women write about urban places,
about their experience within the city because the city is perceived as offering new
possibilities and as an unreal fragmentation. Other authors explore the new visions on
sexuality.
The final characteristic is their alliance to stream of consciousness: May Sinclair, when
reviewing the early volumes of Pilgrimage in 1918, noted that the novel centred on the
mental process, on the thoughts, responses and interior emotional experiences of a
single central character; that it sometimes shifted point of view among several key
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figures, and that there were interior monologues that contrasted heavily with the silence
outside of the character. Some modernist women are Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein,
H.D., Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys. Of these
authors, we shall concentrate in the following sections on the work of Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf is a major figure in the Modernist movement. She made significant
contributions in the development of the novel and in the writing of essays. Given the
amount of material, her diaries and letters collected in several volumes, the biographies
she has inspired and thousands of critical works that have focused on her persona and
work, it requires effort to establish a complete and fixed picture of this woman of letters.
The fact that seems clear is that Virginia Woolf was a complex and paradoxical woman
whose unconventional personality is difficult to pin down. Adeline Virginia Stephen was
born on 25 January 1882 in London. Her beautiful mother, Julia Prinsep Duckworth
Stephen, had three children from a previous marriage to the barrister. Virginia Woolf
inherited her mother’s looks and Julia would be the inspiration for Mrs Ramsay in To the
Lighthouse. Leslie Stephen, her father, was also a widower. From this marriage he had
a daughter, Laura, who was mentally handicapped. In addition to Virginia, Julia and
Leslie Stephen had three other children: Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian. All eight children
lived with her parents and a number of servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, in
London.
The Stephen family belonged to the upper-middle class that produced most of the

influential thinkers and artists of the day. The greatest writers and politicians of the time
were frequent visitors to Hyde Park Gate. On her mother’s side, the famous Victorian
photographer, J. Margaret Cameron, was Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt.
Julia Stephen was mostly a devoted wife and self-sacrificing mother who also worked
very hard for the less privileged members of society. Her premature death in 1895
prompted Virginia’s first nervous breakdown. Leslie Stephen was a distinguished critic,
biographer and philosopher. Although he was never the genius he wanted to be, he was
one of the most influential figures in the literary world in late Victorian England. He was
the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, an author of the History of English
Thought in the Eighteenth Century. As a young man Leslie Stephen abandoned a
promising career as a Cambridge don because he declared that he had never believed
in the literal truth of the Bible. He was a liberal thinker and a passionate advocate of his
views, some of which were highly controversial in those days. He had an extensive library
open freely to his children. Virginia Woolf, working her way through this library, became
acquainted with a large number of English and classical works.
Despite his alluring public life, Leslie Stephen was an emotional bully and a domestic
tyrant, as Virginia Woolf recalls in her memoirs, ‘a Sketch of the Past’. After the death of
her mother, Virginia Woolf’s half-sister, Stella, took over the running of the household as
well as Julia’s role as the provider for Leslie’s demands for sympathy and emotional
support. Stella married in 1897 and died of peritonitis on her return from her honeymoon.
The household duties and the burden of coping with her father fell on the painter-to-be,
Vanessa, the eldest Stephen sibling.
Leslie Stephen died in 1904 and Virginia had a second nervous breakdown. During this
second breakdown Vanessa decided to move and took the Stephen family to 46 Gordon
Square, Bloomsbury. The neighbourhood chosen was not one of the most respectable;
many old friend of the family criticised the way of life of the Stephen children. As it turned
out, the idea was an excellent one, for their new home allowed the four siblings to
overcome the gloomy atmosphere that surrounded them after the death of Woolf’s
mother.

For all Virginia Woolf had free access to her father’s library at a time when many girls of
her class were discouraged from reading, she never had a proper education, and she
was never allowed out of the house to study. She always felt this as a void in her
development and it became a gendered trope highlighting the educational privileges
afforded to her brothers and her other male peers, who had been given the opportunity
to read at Cambridge. Yet, in October 1897, Virginia Woolf, attended classes in Greek
and history at King’s College, London. She received tuition from Dr George Warr in 1898.
Later that year, Walter Pater’s sister, Clara Pater, taught her Latin. In 1902 she resumed
her Greek studies and started private classes with Janet Case.
Her elder brother, Thoby, left public school in 1899 and went up to Trinity College,
Cambridge. Greek was also important because it was a subject, she could share with
Thoby, who also brought to Hyde Park Gate the atmosphere of undergraduate life in
Cambridge. It was there that Thoby made friends with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Saxon
Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Maynard Keynes. They comprised the embryo of
what came to be called the ‘Bloomsbury Group’.
At the end of 1904 Virginia Woolf started writing reviews for the Manchester Guardian
and in 1905 she started reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1906, after a
trip to Greece, Thoby died of typhoid fever. He had started the ‘Thursday evenings’
meetings for his Cambridge friends. The arrangement was continued by Vanessa and
then, after Vanessa’s marriage, by Virginia and Adrian when they moved to 29 Fitzroy
Square. Woolf was to move again in 1911, a year before she married Leonard Woolf.
From then onwards the Woolfs rented a small house near Lewes in Sussex. Her sister

Vanessa rented nearby Charleston Farmhouse in 1916; in 1919, the Woolfs bought
Monks House in Rodmell. This was a small, weather-boarded house which they used
mainly during the summer holidays until they were bombed out of their flat in
Mecklenburg Square in 1940. Monks House then became their home until Virginia
Woolf’s death. She drowned herself in the nearby River Ouse.
In 1908 Virginia Woolf started writing her first novel, The Voyage Out. Originally to be
called Melymbrosia, the novel was finished in 1913, but was not published until 1915, as
she suffered a third bout of deep depression and debilitating headaches after her
marriage. The Voyage Out is rather conventional in form and was well received by critics.
Her second novel was Night and Day.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf had bought a small printing press in order to take up printings
as a hobby and as therapy for Virginia. By now they were living in Richmond, and the
‘Hogarth Press’ was named after their house. The first publication in the Woolf’s Hogarth
Press was Two Stories, with a story by each of them: ‘The Mark on the Wall’ by Virginia
and ‘Three Jews’ by Leonard.
From 1921 onwards, Woolf always published with the Hogarth Press. This same year
she published her first collection of short stories, most of them experimental in nature. In
1922 she published Jacob’s Room an ironic tribute to her brother, Thoby, and her first
experimental novel. In 1924, the couple moved to 52 Tavistocl Square, in London and in
the following year, 1925, Mrs Dalloway was published, followed in 1927 by To the
Lighthouse, and The Waves in 1931. These three novels are generally considered to be
her greatest contribution to Modernism.
Her involvement with the aristocratic novelist and poet, Vita Sackville-West, led to
Orlando: A Biography, a subversive fictional account inspired by Vita’s life and ancestry
at Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent. The story spans four centuries of the history of
England. The central character is a sixteen-year-old aristocratic poet, Orlando, who
becomes the favourite of Elizabeth I. During the reign of Charless II Orlando changes
sex and Lady Orlando continues down the centuries, finally able to finish the poem she
started when a young man. Two talks given at women’s colleges at Cambridge in 1928
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led to A Room of One’s Own, a discussion of women’s writing and its historical, economic
and social underpinning.
The 1930s was an unhappy time for the Woolfs as the deaths of friends and the prospect
of war increasingly overshadowed the decade. Virginia wrote a fictional biography of
Elizabeth Barret Browning’s dog entitled Flush in 1933. In 1937 she published The Years,
perhaps her most overtly political fictional work. A best-seller in America, the novel was
a long and painful exercise in writing. It is often read alongside Three Guineas, a
successor to A Room of One’s Own although it is more revolutionary in its view. The
essay deals extensively with the relationship between war, masculinity, and women’s
education and employment. In 1940 she wrote a biography of her friend Roger Fry. On
28 March 1941 she killed herself while she was in the last revision of her final novel
Between the Acts posthumously published by Leonard Woolf.
When the Stephen children moved to 46 Gordon Square in 1904, Thoby started to

organise meetings on Thursdays at their house. The people who used to attend included
many of his friends at Cambridge such as the novelist E.M. Forster, the literary journalist
Desmond MacCarthy and his wife, the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the biographer
and essayist Lytton Strachey, the painter Duncan Grant, the political writer and
publishers Leonard Woolf, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and Saxon Sidney-
Turner, among other. The Stephen sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, and their brother
Adrian also attended the meetings.
These meetings were continued by Adrian, Vanessa and Virginia after Thoby’s death. If
there is anything that would join the group together it was their refusal to compromise
with their Victorian upbringing. The group was liberal in its attitudes and allowed a free
range to blasphemy and bawdiness; a variety of sexualities prevailed.
At first Virginia Woolf was unimpressed and sceptical towards what she saw as a
pretentious bunch of male students. Later on, their discussion topics attracted her
attention and, even though she didn’t dare to participate, she enjoyed the mode of
discussion and the earnestness of these young men in pursuit of topics such as ‘beauty’,
‘good’ and ‘reality’.
In the long run Woolf would gain a group of friends who were, at the same time, the fellow
students she had been denied. From the meeting she also learned a method of analysis
that would very much influence her writing and her thought. Some of the male attendees
to these ‘Thursday evenings belonged to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, or
Apostles. The society was a very exclusive and elitist group. There were never more
than six or seven members at one time, although those who had belonged to the Society
always remained linked to it. The Society started as an undergraduate discussion club
in 1820 and slowly developed into a semi-secret group mainly preoccupied with the
development of the intellect. Plato and Kant were haunting presences in the Society G.E.
Moore a classicist became the most influential thinker among the members. In particular,
his work Principia Ethica influenced the views of the members of the society. Andrew
McNeillie in the chapter dedicated to ‘Bloomsbury’ in the Cambridge Companion to
Virginia Woolf has very accurately summarised the main points of Moore’s argument in
his Principia in the following way:
In different forms, these strands of Moore's argument can be traced in Woolf’s writing.
For instance, in The Voyage Out Richard Dalloway reads: «Good, then, is indefinable»
from the «black volume of philosophy» that Helena Ambrose is reading.
Moore's method of analysis is behind Woolf’s description of their meetings as «piling
stone upon stone» the arguments and her final ironic comments of not being sure which
one is the conclusion of the discussion.
The interesting aspect here is to be aware that what is important is not so much to arrive
at a definite conclusion, but the method employed. The journey is important, not the
arrival.
Moore’s radical philosophy appealed to Bloomsbury for its rationalism, and its elevation
of aesthetic life, claiming that «the most valuable states of mind are those we associate
with the contemplation of beauty, love and truth». In a sense, Moore’s rationalism, his
optimistic view of human nature and his willingness to question received notions, as well
as his idea of emotions appropriate to specific objects, were so strongly associated with
Bloomsbury’s own set of ideals that the connection between the philosopher and the
Group seems natural.
It’s through Moore, that the Bloomsbury Group became interested in psychoanalysis and
Freud’s work. In Rieff’s view, Moore opens the path into Freud in his last chapter of
Principia Ethica. Frankness and as introspection in matters of sexuality were hallmarks
of the Bloomsbury Group. In this sense, the group’s interest on ‘the new psychology’,
comes as no surprise. Yet, the view of this set towards the unconscious, sexuality, and

neurosis was ‘intellectually pre-Freudian’. Even if an ambivalent one, the interest in
Freud’s theories led several peripheral members of Bloomsbury to play an important role
in the foundation of the British Psychological Society. Among them was Adrian Stephen,
who abandoned his studies in medieval law to become one of the first analysts of the
Society.
James Strachey and his wife Alix became the translators of Freud’s work into English. In
1924 James became chief editor of the Standard Edition and together with Ernest Jones
he approached the Woolfs to have the Edition published by the Hogarth Press. The
Woolfs eagerly undertook the project.
However, the admiration of Freud and his work seemed to be at an intellectual and
theoretical level only. It is true that it never occurred to Leonard or to Virginia herself to
seek the help of this new method as regards Virginia’s nervous breakdowns. On the
contrary: Virginia continued with the ‘rest cures’ prescribed by conventional psychiatrists.
Woolf’s own attitude towards Freud’s psychoanalysis seems to be an ambivalent one. If
she could see the potential of Freud’s theories for her own illness, she still distrusted the
search of psychoanalysis for some kind of repressed inner conflict. Although she allowed
her artistic mind to play with the idea of unknown territories in her mind, she seemed
unable to allow herself to think of her own mind as unknowable. The conflicts she
identifies in her own life are conscious ones between, for instance, critical and creative
thought. In any case, Woolf was far from being completely indifferent to psychology and
the new science of psychoanalysis.
In order to understand Woolf’s oeuvre in all her multiple aspects, one has to consider
other authors and thinkers who were of great interest to the writer. Among them were
people such as the anthropologist Jane Ellen Harrison and Walter Pater.
Harrison’s pioneering work impressed Woolf greatly and was the inspirational force
behind Woolf’s constant search of the past (for its implication in the present and the
future) and her sceptical view on History.
2.- TEXT ANALYSIS

The study of Virginia Woolf’s essays has often been neglected in favour of her fictional
writings. At best they have been used as complementary information to enhance the
view of a particular point in her novels. Many of her literary reviews for The Times Literary
Supplement were published anonymously. The apparently capricious nature of the
essays, on many topics and in many different styles, has led to a number of
heterogeneous collections starting in 1925 which the first collection, The Common
Reader, was published.
Leonard Woolf’s four-volume Collected Essays provided the first glimpse of the
magnitude and importance of Woolf’s material. After Leonard Woolf’s death in 1969
several selections of non-fiction volumes were edited, including Books and Portraits, and
Michèle Barret's Women and Writing. Andrew McNeille in 1986 started his edition of
WooIf’s essays, The Essays of Virginia Woolf. The first three volumes of the six volumes
that were to constitute his edition were published between 1986 and 1988. The fourth
and, as yet last volume was published in 1994. The two final volumes are yet to come.
McNeille's masterly editions provide a fully annotated chronological order allowing the
study of the essays as a whole, enabling critics to discern their significance to the full
and also their relationship to her better-known works. In relatively recent years
publications such as Rachel Bowlby's A Woman’s Essays and The Crowed Dance of
Modem Life provide an approach to a selection of Woolf’s essays that still constitutes a
good reference to discerning the significance of Virginia Woolf’s essay writing.

The difficulties encountered in producing a final and satisfactory compilation of Woolf’s
essays, is not in accord with the immense importance that Woolf’s critical writing had
during her lifetime. Woolf was a regular contributor to, among other journals, The Times
Literary Supplement and T.S. Eliot regarded her as 'the centre of the Iiterarv life of
London.' The reasons behind Woolf’s apparent disdain for her essay writing might be
found in the fact that most of her essays were commissioned and written for money. In
this sense, according to Bloomsbury aesthetics, they could hardly be seen as artistic
endeavours.
Critical studies on Woolf’s oeuvre are starting to reconsider the importance of Woolf’s
essays in relation to the engrossing quality of their subject matter and to the experimental
form in which they were written. This being so, it is impossible to establish a clear line
between the aesthetic pleasure provided by her novels and that provided by many of her
essays. Woolf herself was hesitant about the aesthetic value of essay writing and in
essays such as 'The Modem Essay' she writes:
As can be seen in this quotation, Woolf discusses the nature of the essay in terms of
aesthetics which are precisely «the features expected to go with literature». In this sense,
Woolf wrote most of her essays with this pleasure principle in sight.
The length of the essays also varies, ranging from the short literally reviews she wrote
for journals, o book-length pieces such as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.
Many of the longer essays dealt with authors, from the past who became subjects of
essays from different sources. In these essays she could feel more at ease because she
had more room and a greater perspective. Her writings about literary history show that
she preferred certain periods, such as classical Greece, the Elizabethan period,
eighteenth century literature, the Romantics, or nineteenth-century Russian fiction.
Authors she favoured were Daniel Defoe, James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, Jane

Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, George Gissing, Henry James, Thomas
Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. They are often mentioned in her non-fictional writings.
However, the scope of the essays was not limited to the literary world and many of them
were inspired by seemingly unimportant events, such as an evening drive or by more
important concerns, such as illness, laughter or reading itself. Woolf meditates about a
wide range of topics: architecture, houses, street life, opera, travel, shops, flying, cinema,
and radio, to name but a few. Some of these topics, woman-like, banal and unimportant
as they may seem, conform to her endeavour to find a mode of expression that would
encapsulate what she saw as the task of the artist: the recording of reality.
Essays such as 'Modem Fiction' or 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' argue against traditional
forms of fiction writing defended by her contemporary generation of writers such as H.G.
Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy whom she calls «materialists». These writers
were too closely concerned with realism and themes chosen for their novels, were too
closely concerned with realism and, as a consequence, left the conventional form of
fiction-writing unchanged. By a static approach to the traditional structure of fiction, these
writers are unable to portray reality because they bypass 'life' which is «a luminous halo,
a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the
end». According to Woolf fiction must reflect reality by obstructing flan ordinary mind on
an ordinary day». If the writer dares to do so, he or she will be confronted with the fact
that «the mind receives a myriad of impressions, trivial, fantastic, evanescent or
engraved with the sharpness of steel». By breaking the traditional structure of the novel,

that is, by freeing the writer from the obligation of providing a coherent plot structured in
corre1ative chapters,
Woolf hopes that the narrative will show «the essential thing» comprising «the proper
stuff of fiction». This is precisely what, in Woolf’s view, younger writers re doing.
Commenting on James Joyce's The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and referring
to the episodes of his Ulysses that were being published in the Little Review, she
propounds that the modem novel should be: «concerned at all costs to reveal the
flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain». In short,
the modem writer is interested not so much in the outside world of appearances, but in
the «dark places of psychology», in those emotions and feelings which, although difficult
to express, form as much part of reality as the straightforward world of appearances
portrayed in the realist novel.
For Woolf it is the duty of the writer to present in the novel those moments when reality
cannot be straightforwardly explained and that have been silenced by the traditional
novel. As a consequence, the form of the novel and the use of language must also
change so as to be able to provide the reader with that moment of intense emotion that
comes when he or she perceives a flash of significance seeming to go beyond words.
In ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, she takes this argument further. Arnold Bennett's
assertion that there was no good novelist at the time because they were «unable to
create characters that are real, true and convincing» prompted one of Woolf’s most
famous and intriguing statements: «in or about December 1910, human character
changed». The puzzling question here is what happened in the year 1910 that was so
significant as to change 'human character'.
The most immediate historical relevance of this date is the death of King Edward VII. His
death marked the end of the Edwardian era and the beginning of the Georgian. In literary
terms, the Edwardian era and the beginning of the Georgian. In literary terms, and
according to Woolf’s essay, this implied the end of the Edwardian narrative and the
possibility of a new form of narrative, started by Henry James and Joseph Conrad in the
late nineteenth century, and taken up by the younger generation, the latter termed in

Woolf’s essay as the Georgian writers. They included writers such as D.H, Lawrence,
James Joyce, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and T. S. Eliot.
Some critics have argued that this year, 1910, saw the opening of Roger Fry's strongly
criticised exhibition of Post-Impressionist paintings, a term coined by Fry himself. The
show entitled 'Manet and The Post-Impressionists’, introduced Cézanne, Gauguin,
Signac and Van Gogh to the public in London: it also included works by such
contemporary artists as Picasso, Matisse, and Derain. The most widely criticised feature
of the exhibition was the shocking impact of the spectacular colours used in the paintings,
viewed by the outraged critics as a primitivistic and unnatural use of colour.
February of the same year is also significant in the personal life of Virginia Woolf because
of what has come to be known as the ‘Dreadnought hoax’. For this ‘massive practical
joke’ Woolf blackened her face, dressed in a caftan and a turban, and wore a beard and
a moustache to impersonate the Emperor of Abyssinia. Her colleagues impersonated
the Emperor’s entourage and a delegation of British diplomats. The group went as far as
to mock-inspect H.M.S. Dreadnought, the most important warship in the British Royal

Navy of that time. They were received with honours by the Captain and crew of the ship
who showed the party the secret areas of the ship. Cole could not let it stop there: he
alerted the press. The Daily Mirror printed the story, with a picture of the group. Rose
has argued that the event is significant beyond the amusing anecdote because it
supposed the acting out of Virginia Woolf’s ‘own rebellion against paternal authority’.
Following the argument of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ it has to be said that Woolf was
referring to all these events at the same time, making apparent with the multiple referents
combined in one single sentence the variety of ‘realities’ that are true, convincing and
significant, depending on the eye of the beholder. She now puts the stress on the
different angles from which a real character can be rendered. Introducing the character
of Mrs Brown, whom she has met on a train, she demonstrated that «Mrs Brown can be
treated in an infinite variety of ways, according to the age, country and temperament of
the writer».
Broadly speaking, the essays by Virginia Woolf mentioned could be divided into those
strictly dealing with literature and those dealing with what today could be termed feminist
issues. Again, it is difficult to establish a clear dividing line between these two major
themes, which were major preoccupations for the writer. If it is true that ‘Modern Fiction’
and ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ should be seen as Modernist statements by a Modernist
writer, it is no less significant to infer that in these texts the writer shows a great interest
in the relation between women’s own perception of reality and literature. On the other
hand, what are already today classic feminist textbooks such as A Room of One’s Own
or Three Guineas cannot be considered without acknowledging Woolf’s Modernist
aesthetics.
The language and the structure of A Room of One’s Own participate in those exploratory
forms ascribed by Woolf to modern fiction. In a most unconventional manner the essay
begins with a «But» placing an interrogation mark on the subject of «women and fiction»,
the main theme discussed in the text, while it asserts the need for making problematic
those traditional views on the subject that are held as universal truths.
By simultaneously implying doubt and assertiveness, the starting ‘but’ puts the reader
right from the first page in the questioning frame of mind needed when exploring the
subject of the essay. The aim of this ‘but’ is to introduce the unsettling aspect of the
uncertainties of language and knowledge, and to confront the reader with the
discomfiting uneasiness that comes when s/he is asked to re-evaluate preconceived
ideas.
A few lines down Woolf pushes this uneasiness further and ponders about the possible
meanings that ‘women and fiction’ might have. In doing so she trespasses on another
line of the traditional conventions. She confesses that she will never be able to «fulfil
what is… the first duty of a lecturer» because she will display a most unconventional
discursive practice based on her opinion that «a woman must have money and a room
of her own is she is to write fiction».
Already, the irony and witticism present in the text can be observed. The reassuring
action of jotting down some notes of ‘pure truth’ from a lecture, in the way we all do when
attending such an event, is mocked by the very fact that those notes will remain for ever
‘on the mantelpiece’. Once more, the ambiguity in Woolf’s words may not pass
unnoticed. If at first sight these words appear to mean that this ‘pure truth’ will indeed be
preserved, it might also be the case that the notes are placed on the mantelpiece and
are never looked at again; in this latter circumstance, she is showing the pointlessness
of ever writing them. Woolf’s method is redolent of the discussions she witnessed on
“Thursday evening’ in Bloomsbury. By an expository argument of how she arrived at the
conclusion about money and a room in connection with writing and women, it is expected
that the reader will actively engage in the argument, participating intellectually, rather
than simply being a mere and passive recipient of some preconceived and opinionated
assumptions. The most interesting aspect of the essay is its suggestive quality, calling
for as many different responses as it has readers.
In order to be on a level with her audience and to allow the intellectual rhapsody to take
place, Woolf puts into practice a device that constituted another breaking of the

conventions on essay writing. In ‘The Modern Essay’ she argued that: «Almost all essays
begin with a capital I». The authoritative quality given to this ‘I’ of the ‘expert’ impedes
any communication: instead, it precipitates a drowsy hedonism where the reader is a
mesmerised sleeper for the duration of the text. In A Room of One’s Own this ‘I’ is totally
abandoned and its identity demystified. In the text Woolf refuses to use the traditional
phallocentric discourse by criticising the narcissistic ‘I’ in men’s writing:
The phallic shadow prevents the text from providing pleasure to the ‘I’ that is bored and
that is «only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being». On a deeper level
the ‘I’ who has no real existence is not portrayed as a celebratory ‘I’ as some critics have
claimed to see in it the determination on formation of a women’s society. The ‘I’ who has
no real existence is an inquiring ‘I’ trying to solve the enigma of the «true nature of woman
and the true nature of fiction». The inclusion of a different ‘I’ in the discourse challenges
the notion of the unified homogeneous identity held by patriarchal discourse. Precisely
by confronting the ‘I’ (who bores me) with an ‘I’ that (as yet) has no real existence the
very notion of identity is displaced.
It’s important to highlight the fact that Woolf starts challenging a monolithic notion of
identity precisely by posing arts challenging a monolithic notion of identity precisely by
posing, right from the beginning of her essay, the question of the possibility of an
‘unknown’ ‘I’. The statement of the existence of this ‘unknown’ ‘I’ is given within a textual
context in which ‘I’ seems obsessively present. In the opening lines of A Room of One’s
Own, ‘I’ is scattered in sentences and intermingled with other pronouns such as ‘you’
and ‘they’. Suddenly, when the meaning of the title ‘women and fiction’ is being
pondered, the rhythm is changed, by the appearance of a series of sentences containing
solely the first-person singular pronoun:

This use of the pronoun reaches its peak in a single sentence where it appears three
times: «I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the
room and the money». The reader is surprised when, once caught up in a web formed
by the pronoun 'I', the narrative states that this 'I' 'has no real existence'.
This technique works in two ways. First, it prepares the reader to be able to sense the
claustrophobic presence of the ‘I’ whose shadow impedes growth. Second, it marks the
textual tension emerging when the traditional texture of essay writing is about to be torn
apart, by Woolf’s introducing a fictional account into the text. When this new emergent 'I'
burst forth in the text Woolf’s voice disappears and the new subjectivity drifts into a
fictitious world.
By diminishing the importance of the name of the narrator 'I', Woolf is minimising the
importance of an authoritarian voice in the text. Yet, she insists upon a name, 'Mary
Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael' resolved by the end of the essay into «Mary
Beton». Precisely at this point of naming, the reader understands that the textual voice
is that of a woman, a vital piece of information in the subsequent development of Woolf’s
argument.
Moreover, Woolf is attempting to assemble an identity other than the one allocated to
women by patriarchal society. In this context, it is not by chance that the name of that ‘I’
is ‘Mary’. In Western Christian culture the name ‘Mary’ is immediately associated with
the Virgin. This name, repeated three times, marks the point of departure for Woolf’s
examination of female identity and the production of writing. As is already known, the

appearance of the Virgin in the literature of the Middle Ages, meant the idealisation of
women in a process where women's voices were silent, and their attributes reduced to
those of selfless nurturers and inspirers of men. Apparently insignificant, the allusion to
the figure of the Virgin through the motif of the narrator's name is of great importance. It
is a fundamental point entirely devoted to unsettling the Establishment, represented in
the text by the male audience hiding behind the curtains.
A Room of One’s Own was the final version of two lecturers delivered by the writer at the
female Oxford colleges of Newnham and Girton in October 1928. In the course of six
sections and using a novelistic approach, she covered the topics she understands: the
subject of women and fiction. Once her hypothesis about the money and the room in
each of the sections has been stated, Woolf analyses topics such as the contrast
between male and female writing, university colleges and the banning of women from
public spaces in section one; the effect of poverty on the writing of fiction, or anger in
men and its effect on artistic production in section two; the obvious but previously
unstudied women’s exclusion from history in contrast with the obsessive presence of
women in fiction written by men, is analysed in section three.
Here, she introduces a fictional character who serves as an example to speculate about
never acknowledged women writers. The story of Judith Shakespeare also allows the
writer to ponder about the relationship between gender and genius, prompting the main
line of thought for the following section. Genius needs material conditions and social
recognition; most importantly genius needs a tradition from which to learn the craft and
to master it. Woolf traces in section four, a woman’s literary tradition and is confronted
with the fact that it is not an easy task. Again anger comes to the foreground when she
analyses its detrimental effect in her criticism of Charlotte Brontë who «had more genius
than Jane Austen» but whose rage made her writing «deformed and twisted». Because
Jane Austen was able to sustain an artistic integrity by freeing herself from this anger,
Woolf compares her genius as an artist to that of Shakespeare.
It strikes the reader in this section that most of the women writers from the sixteenth to
the nineteenth century mentioned by Woolf were in one way or another eccentrics, in the
literal sense of the world. This section also suggests that the genres are gendered and

that the novel is young enough as to allow the voices of women to be inscribed in it. The
arrival of the professional woman writer, the woman who self-consciously thought of
herself as a writer and who wittingly, entered the public domain of cultural production
through publication for payment marked a turning point in women’s literary history.
In the next chapter Woolf’s quest is to find a position in language suitable for women,
one that allows them to express what Woolf sees as their different artistic creativity:
In order to write this experience Mary Carmichael will have to find a language that has
never been used before. The quotation above seems to imply that the position in
language for which Woolf is searching is a ‘lesbian’ one, an inference reinforced by her
reference to Sir Chartres Biron, presiding over Radclyffe Hall’s trial for her lesbian novel
The Well of Loneliness. The interesting point here is that Mary Carmichael will be
breaking the silence of history. Woolf points out that the structure of language, as
transpires in some books, has served men «out of their own needs for their own uses».
However, language cannot just be invented. Time and experimentation are needed. It is
also important to refer to a network of writers who might have experienced the same
needs and noticed the same flaws in language. In this respect, tradition is a prerequisite,
so that any current generation of writers may learn from their predecessors and also
become a source of knowledge for further generations. As Woolf stated in a letter to the
editor of the New Statesman, the presence of a tradition was fundamental for

Shakespeare’s writing:
These conditions coincided for women writers in Sappho's Lesbos and then never again.
Since women writers' encounter with language is difficult, and language is perceived as
deficient when trying to express an experience felt as different, «it is useless to go to the
great men writers for help>>.
Woolf believes that women's writing is essentially different from men's writing. Having
said this, to state what is specific to women's writing and how women achieve this type
of writing poses a problem for her. As she herself argues:
In the context of these words her apparently contradictory warning, «It is fatal for anyone
who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple»,
becomes significant. Seemingly, Woolf is hesitant about her conviction relating to the
differences between women's and men’s writing. She is aware of the dangers of such a
postulate, which can tacitly imply a sense of biological determinism. She perceives that
patriarchy has used biologically determined theories to defend and to justify the
ideological superiority of men over women. For this reason she places great emphasis
on rejecting determinism. By questioning the meaning of ‘feminine’ she is hinting at the
possibly at the possibly that femininity might be a matter of representation.
Woolf encourages women to write because it’s only by writing that a new economy of
representation other than that made through the repression of the feminine can be
developed. Women’s representation, if achieved ‘unconsciously’, will escape the
economy of sameness that forms the foundations of patriarchal writing.

One of the most outstanding and shocking ideas Woolf presents in A Room of One’s
Own is found in the last chapter when she says that the ideal state of mind in which to
produce art is an androgynous one:
Woolf’s account of the androgynous mind repudiates the idea of rejecting the feminine,
since it is important to the relationship between women and fiction that androgyny be
proposed as the ideal state of mind in which to produce art. She explicitly expresses her
fear that androgyny can be equated to man, as is the case with Freud’s theory of
bisexuality. In this sense she states, «It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like
men, or lived like men, or looked like men».
If the artist’s aim is to portray, she cannot afford to ignore the various perspectives from
which this reality can be observed. The artist should, through a state of mind that is

androgynous, enhance her knowledge.
The androgynous mind has as its central and most revolutionary declaration the avowal
of a form of writing that will be unconsciously feminine. Such a form of writing will create
a text characterised by a ‘suggestive quality’. The number of critical readings inspired by
A Room of One’s Own accounts for its unique quality. Both the structure of Woolf’s essay
and the distinctive uses of language it displays suppose a breakthrough. As Showalter
argues, the text is executed through «repetition, exaggeration, parody, whimsy, and
multiple viewpoint». Woolf’s use of language far from being a fault, as Showalter claims,
precisely enhances the subversive quality of the essay. Through her experimentation
with language Woolf is searching for a form of writing capable of encompassing the ‘real’
world when it is perceived from different angles.
Mr Dalloway was published in 1925 and received much critical acclaim; it has now
become a ‘classic’. As a novel it broke with the pattern of the novel established at that
time. It is a different novel in themes, style and method of writing, an exploration in new
techniques, shifting continuously from one character to another, from past to present,
from one subject matter to a different one.
However, the plot of Mrs Dalloway is quite simple: one day in June in London, Clarissa
Dalloway is planning a party for the evening; Peter Walsh, her old suitor, returns to
England after five years in India; at the end of the day, Sally Seton, another old friend,
shows up unexpectedly at the party; the ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith kills himself.
When a character starts thinking about one issue, he or she does not finish with it
completely, but it is forgotten and continued in the thoughts of another character. This
happens frequently, for example, with the remembrances of the summer that seems to
be the most important moment in the lives of Mrs Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and Sally.
Virginia Woolf designed universal characters as can be seen when she locates them in
the streets and parks of London. They are neither plain characters nor heroes nor
heroines; they are types: the housewife, the madman, the politician, the doctor, etc. One
of the main features in their presentation is that all through the book they «Are frequently
split between at least two times or two places and always questioning their ability to know
one another or themselves».
They’re also the alibi to present 'reality' through different individual consciousnesses.
One of the linking characters in this 'web' is Sir William Bradshaw, a friend of the
Dalloways and also Septimus's doctor. This metaphorical 'web' is made up of invisible
threads that connect all of those characters, otherwise unconnected into a common circle
of experience, regardless of their class. There are several examples of how the invisible
threads join but the clearest example occurs at the end. Here, Clarissa Dalloway hears
at the party about Septimus's madness and death, and she notices that she feels 'like
him'. This suggests an alignment between these two characters through a moment of
epiphany. At this moment Clarissa stands side-by-side with Septimus; this is just what
Woolf wanted to communicate when she started the novel. As she wrote in her diary:
Woolf wrote «Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book» because she had written before
about Mr and Mrs Dalloway, and about Clarissa in particular in some short stories and in
the novel, The Voyage Out, where Clarissa appears as a minor character. In previous
writings Woolf had presented the couple in a harsher light than she did in Mrs Dalloway.
Similarly Richard Dalloway had appeared as a domineering and pompous personality
and Clarissa as dependent and superficial. But while these character's characteristics
remain in Mrs Dalloway, the two generally appear much more reasonable and likeable.
When one first takes the book and reads the title Mrs Dalloway, one may assume that
the story will be about the life of Clarissa Dalloway, as happens for example in Jane
Eyre, where the title corresponds exactly to the plot of the novel. But in this case, our
expectations are unfulfilled.

It might be an irony; a device Virginia Woolf uses to break the traditional pattern. It might
also be that the writer provides a clue for the understanding of the novel, because
Clarissa is the character who links all the ideas she wanted to convey and is the one who
closes the narrative circle.
Irony is also used when criticising the social system, as she uses irony as a way to keep
her anger out of the narration. It’s noticeable how Virginia Woolf prevents herself from
getting angry. Instead it is the character of Sally who «suddenly lost her temper, flared
up and told Hugh that he represented all that was most detestable in British in middle-
class life. She told him she considered him responsible for the state of 'those poor girls
in Piccadilly'. This technique allows her to criticise society without interrupting the
narration, in contrast to Jane Eyre, where the narration is suddenly interrupted by a long
feminist discourse.
The framework of the novel could be placed in what Julia Kristeva has called 'linear
(historical) time': one day in the life of London, in the life of several people, the day
Clarissa Dalloway is going to give a party. The hours pass one after the other. Big Ben
strikes one hour after the other. The words come in a sequence. But coexisting with this
linear time, other times can be identified, what Kristeva calls 'woman's time', made up of
cyclical time and eternal time. During that day in June 1923, another day of the past is
constantly being re-lived by some of the characters. Cyclical time occurs when the past
is repeated continuously, made 'present' all along the day.
Another example of the 'invisible thread' also connecting the use of time and
consciousness remains in the importance attached to event like the appearance of a car,
an aeroplane writing in the sky, or the sound of an ambulance: all these and other
elements are presented repeatedly, cyclically, through different individual
consciousnesses.
On the other hand, the death of Septimus is not an end in itself; in a way he is present
in the party, so he has not died. He has not finished, but he seems to be eternalised by
the very fact that his situation is told at the party and Mrs Dalloway internalises his death.
He has entered into monumental time.

Woolf in Mrs Dalloway shows interest in what is one of the features of Modernism: the
experimentation with temporality.
The setting is a warm day in June 1923, and this technique echoes Joyce's Blooms day.
However, Woolf goes beyond Ulysses in that she records the thoughts and
remembrances of a number of consciousness: those of Septimus, Lucrezia, Clarissa,
Miss Kilman, Elizabeth, Peter and Sally, among others.
Hillis Miller in 'Mrs Dalloway: Repetition as the Raising of the Dead' shows the new and
complex means, and methods used by Woolf in her narrative. Repetition and the function
of the omniscient narrator are the significant aspects of this type of narrative. The
omniscient narrator can move from mind to mind and relate to the reader the thoughts
and feelings of any character. Time is used in a unique manner: the narrator relating the
story after the event has happened using the present tense. This repetition is achieved
by relating first the mind of one character and then the mind of another. In addition, one
character can relate what heIshe thinks to what another character is thinking.
According to Millet, there comes at this point a «general mind», unity as evidenced in
common images throughout the narrative. As a mode of transportation from one mind to
another, Woolf uses external objects for example, the aeroplane writing a brand name,
Kreemo, in the sky as «a man of transition». By repetition events from the past that are
brought up in many minds, as was for example, the summer when Clarissa met Richard
Dalloway, Woolf permits her narrator to remove the «usual boundaries between mind
and world».

There are several reasons why Woolf wanted the reader to enter people’s
consciousnesses. It was firstly because she wanted to demonstrate that a myriad of
events, some apparently meaningless, can actually affect people’s lives tremendously.
Secondly it was because she wanted to portray as closely as possible the workings of
the mind thorough a minute description of how the characters think about their world and
not through an edited, thematic and coherent version or reality.
Finally, Woolf wanted the reader to enter people's consciousnesses so that the reader
might get a sense of what madness feels like: the unrelated thoughts are very much like
the unrelated thoughts 'normal' people think all the time, so remarking the fact that the
dividing line between madness and normality is quite fine. For all these reasons Woolf
wrote Mrs Dalloway as an experimental exercise of what was the task of the writer, to
narrate reality as the mind perceived it, and not as the conventions of fiction required.
These are the reasons for such writing. But how is it achieved? It is not an easy task for
the writer, as the recording of the workings of the mind may produce a very slow, even
boring, text. The technique receives many names and there are different variations, such
as stream of consciousness and interior monologue. According to David Lodge there are
two staple techniques for representing consciousness in prose fiction:
Woolf chooses the latter, and what Lodge calls 'authorial participation in the discourse'
refers to the traditional omniscient narrator mentioned by Miller. Lodge is saying that in
the case of the interior monologue, what happens is that the reader feels as if there were
some kind of headphone plugged into the character's mind: what we hear is thus the
first-person narrator. In the case of Woolf (free indirect style), what happens is that there

is a narrator conveying these thoughts for the reader but acting almost as if the narrator
were not there.
Woolf called her technique the 'tunnelling process' by which she created 'caves' behind
her characters, not only caves of events, but caves that also contained the character's
fears, memories, dreams, and fantasies. She proceeded to dig connections between the
different characters' respective caves in order to show how we relate to each other as
human beings.
The theme of insanity was close to Woolf’s past and present. She was plagued by manic-
depressive illness and she suffered nervous breakdowns throughout her life. Suicide had
often occupied her mind. In 1944 she committed suicide, leaving a note explaining that
she no longer wanted to live. Woolf originally planned lo have Clarissa die or commit
suicide at the end of the novel, yet finally decided that she did not want this ending for
Clarissa. By the end of the novel, however, Clarissa is so close to Septimus that in a way
she dies with him, for these two characters have been connected throughout the novel.
The world of madness is clearly represented by Septimus, the distinguished soldier,
slowly being killed by the lingering effects of the war: he is suffering from shell-shock
syndrome, an illness that affected many First World War veterans. Shell-shock syndrome
produced in its sufferers insistent, almost real-life, memories of the warm and a total loss
of feeling. Septimus feels he is living in an ongoing war and feels guilt for having sun
hoed it when so many have died. He worries that the war «taught him not to care» when
his superior officer was killed. He wants to die too. As with many other First World War

veterans, Septimus, a 'winner' and 'survivor' of the war, enjoys none of its benefits. His
Italian wife is miserable with his madness and the doctors, are unhelpful.
Paralleling the life of Septimus is that of Clarissa, a rich housewife and the web of people
that surrounds her: her friends Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, Clarissa's daughter
Elizabeth, Miss Kilman, who is Elizabeth's teacher, and acquaintances such as Lady
Bruton and Sir William Bradshaw. Clarissa tries to keep thoughts of death at bay by
focusing on her party. She spends all day thinking about the past, about her old suitor
Peter and her best friend Sally. After many years all three meet at the party and they
have the time to go over the choices they have made in life.
The greatest fear is the atrophy of the heart, such as that shown by Sir William Bradshaw,
who makes it his job to make sure «these unsocial impulses... are held in control»… In
order to achieve this he secluded the lunatics and forbade them from having children.
Sir William lightly brings the news of Septimus’ suicide to Clarissa's party, bridging these
two and connecting them through death. This is what Woolf wanted to convey with her
novel: the world of the 'sane' and the 'insane' side by side, in order to show that the
dividing line between the two worlds is very fine.
«I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity». This is achieved through the
alignment of Clarissa with Septimus. This phrase is immediately followed by the words
«I want to criticize the social system and to show it at work at its most intense», a
reference to the post-war trauma of English people who, five years after the war, were
still discouraged and plagued by doubt and the memory of the destruction of an entire
generation. As Peter Walsh reflects: «Those five years, 1918 to 1923 had been, he
suspected, somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed
different and morals and manners had changed». Even the language is beginning to die:
Clarissa says young people «could not talk... The enormous resources of the English
language, the power it bestows, after all, of communicating feelings… was not for them.
They would solidify young. »
This criticism of the social system also denounces the existence of new legislation that
wants to do away with all those that do not comply with the 'norm'. Political issues are

embedded within the narrative: emigration, imperialism, government party struggles.
Septimus is destroyed by the realities of the war, while society in general is in denial of
the repercussions. Lady Brutton's proposal of forcing surplus women to emigrate and to
populate the colonies, are presented as cruel and satirised. The political proposal of Sir
William Bradshaw, who turns Septimus into a ‘case’ to be transformed into a provision in
a Bill, is presented merely as dangerous.
One would think that in order to ‘criticize the social system’ Woolf would have wanted
serenity and distance, yet next question is «Am I writing The Hours [Mrs Dalloway] from
deep emotion? » This is because Woolf believed that, in order to convey ‘reality’, she
needed to write from her body and from her mind, to write against the heart. This is why
there is so much pain in the following sentence of the quotation: «Of course the mad part
tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the
next weeks at it. » The pain of recollection was too strong, Woolf suffered a serious
breakdown after writing the novel because emotionally she had invested too much in it:
indeed Leonard Woolf, her husband, and close friends compared her periods of insanity
to a manic depression quite similar to the episodes experienced by Septimus.

Many critics describe Septimus as Clarissa’s Doppelganger, the alternate persona, a
darker, more internal personality compared to Clarissa's very social and singular outlook.
Woolf’s use of the Doppelganger, Septimus, portrays a side to Clarissa’s personality that
becomes absorbed by fear and broken down by society as well as a side of society that
has failed to survive the War.
The critic Deborah Guth believes that Clarissa achieves a final vision through «three
prominent frameworks: the romantic, the pagan, and the Christian». Through these
frameworks Clarissa’s character is able to evolve through her imaginative devices. She
can substitute herself for Septimus’ death without actually being a victim. Clarissa’s use
of «imaginative self-evasion» keeps her from having to confront the reality of Septimus’
madness because she doesn’t allow him to enter her life on a personal level. Similarly,
the critic Suzette Henke compares Clarissa's party to a communion similar to the Catholic
Mass, culminating in a celebration of life. Septimus' suicide is likened to a sacrifice that
is offered, bringing a renewed sense of life’s value. Henke notes the use of contrast
within the text: the satirical and the tragic; political power and artistic creativeness; death
and life; evil and good; public demands and individual preservation; patriarchal
dominance and maternal love; homosexuality and androgyny; possessiveness and
privacy.
The novel's closing scene draws together its main arguments, as Clarissa withdraws
from the party to think about the death of a former soldier she has never met, but with
whom she feels an affinity: «A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about
with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies,
chatter: This he had preserved».
3.- KEY TERMS
• Ambiguity • High art
• Class • Interior monologue
• Doppelganger • Low art
• Experimentalism • Modernism
• Fragmentation • Race
• Gender • Self-renexivenes
• Genre
FULL ANALYSIS
A Room of One’s Own
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf
1928
October 1929
Modernism, Feminism
Feminism, Essay
The lectures were conceived by Woolf around the time that the law finally changed in

Britain to allow women the vote. This monumental event came after years of struggle
and gradual progress that Virginia was significantly influenced by as a woman and as a
writer.
The narrator depicts a particular day in fictional university of Oxbridge, inspired by the
quadrangles and impassable lawns of Oxford and Cambridge.
Apart from her trip out of town to visit Oxbridge University and Fernham College, Mary
spends her time in London. But one major reason that London matters as a setting is
that it's teeming people and symbols. Even if Mary is just starting out the window at
leaves falling and people getting into taxicabs, she's soaking in the city and all that it
means.
Woolf speaks to the audience as herself but also sometimes assumes a first-person
narrator to describe the events of the days leading up to the lecture.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Woolf is not a character in her lecture. But by creating a narrator to carry the bulk of her
lecture, she makes explicit her own role as author and creates a separation between
herself and the ideas of the narrator, and the importance of fiction in communicating inner
experience (since she relies on the narrator to communicate these ideas rather than
doing so herself). Woolf essentially introduces the narrator at the beginning of the lecture
and then takes over from the narrator at the end of the novel to provide closing remarks.
THE NARRATOR
To tell her story and make her argument, Woolf invents a narrator who she says could
be any woman, "call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you
please—it is not a matter of any importance," she says. This narrator guides the audience

(and reader) visually and intellectually through a series of experiences in which she
learns how women have been poor and why. The anonymity of the narrator and her
ability to sympathize not just with women but with men gives her a sense of authority and
a sense of being a person rather than being a woman, a point of view she advises her
audience to assume if they are to become good writers.
JUDITH SHAKESPEARE
She’s he imagined sister of William Shakespeare. Woolf creates her to show how a
woman with talent equal to Shakespeare would not, because of the structure of society,
be able to achieve the same success. Judith's life is fraught with tragedy – first pressured
by her family into an early marriage, she must escape to London to free herself to pursue
art but is turned away with scorn from every theatre she approaches. She becomes
pregnant, which makes a life of writing impossible, and she eventually kills herself. But
later in the essay, Woolf brings back the ghost of Judith Shakespeare and tells the young
women in the audience that they have the power to be the voice that Judith never had.
MARY BETON
She’s the narrator's aunt, whose death has afforded the narrator a generous allowance
of 500 pounds a year. The narrator lives very comfortably on this sum and financial
security has taught her a lot about the importance of money and why women have
suffered intellectual and creative poverty as well as material poverty.
MARY CARMICHAEL

She is the imagined author of a book called "Life's Adventure" which the narrator reads
and criticizes for its broken sentences that fail to emulate the master of sentences, Jane
Austen. Despite her obvious lack of genius though, Carmichael does provide the narrator
with the first confession of lesbianism that she has seen in fiction and shows how far
women and fiction have come.
To push back against male writers who claimed that women were born intellectually
inferior to men and to encourage women to make their living through writing.
FINANCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM

The title of Woolf's essay is a key part of her thesis: that a woman needs money and a
room of her own if she is to be able to write. Woolf argues that a woman needs financial
freedom so as to be able to control her own space and life in order to gain intellectual
freedom and therefore be able to write. She argues that such financial and intellectual
freedom has historically been kept from women, with the result that nearly all women,
even those with literary talent and ambition, are unable to achieve their goals or potential
because of a lack of opportunity to engage in sustained work and thought.
As the narrator, Wolf examines her own life and the financial inheritance she received
from her aunt. So she was able to look forward to life of financial security and could
actually focus on writing. She imagines the fate of women without such a secure,
personal income, imagines how impossible the task of writing would seem even if one
had the ambition to do it. The rare examples she is able to cite of middle-class or lower-
class women who decided to write, were not even seen as admirable women by society,
and were instead belittled and thought almost unnatural.
It's clear throughout the lectures that Woolf is not just making this argument to express
her own views or to tell a story. Woolf makes sure that she directs her argument to these

young women in the hope that they will decide to change the fate of the next generation
of women by providing them with a literary legacy and good fortune.
WOMEN AND SOCIETY

In addition to establishing the necessity for women to have financial and intellectual
independence if they’re to be able to truly contribute to the literary canon, Woolf
addresses the societal factors that deny women those opportunities. As such, A Room
of One's Own is a feminist text. She describes a society formed by the instincts of the
different sexes that together define society and together influence individual's behaviours
and opportunities.
Woolf explores society how it is tilted, in two ways. First, she shows how she herself has
been shut out of the fictional college "Oxbridge", an amalgamation of the two elite English
universities Oxford and Cambridge. She creates an imaginary woman named Judith
Shakespeare, sister of William Shakespeare and his equal in talent. She then shows
how Judith is prevented by the structure of society from become an “incandescent” poet
and ends up committing suicide.
A Room of One's Own also examines the realm of female homosexuality, speaking
honestly about the possibility of a woman's affection for women. By putting this usually
silenced topic before her audience, she creates an atmosphere where feelings and
taboos are able to surface and be expressed and are able to become commonplace and
understood as a normal part of womanhood.

It should be kept in mind that A Room of One's Own was crafted out of a series of lectures
that Woolf delivered to women at the first women's colleges at Cambridge. With herself
and those before her, Woolf creates a sense of a new community of women emerging,
the educated, even professorial woman to match the naturally professorial man. This is
a message of hope but also a warning and an incitement, that in order to change at all
the fragile position of women in literature, this generation must forcibly change it.
CREATING A LEGACY OF WOMEN WRITERS

A Room of One's Own was fashioned out of a series of lectures that Woolf delivered
to groups of students at Cambridge women's' colleges. She addresses these women
explicitly and draws on certain assumptions and common knowledge, so we immediately
have to consider the particularity of the occasion when reading the text. As a successful
woman, Woolf stands before these women scholars as their elder and somewhat
superior but also as their compatriot. They are allies in the same cause, to become
educated women and contribute to their society and the canon of scholarship and
literature that inspires them.
Woolf is aware throughout that she, and these lectures, are part of the legacy and history
of women writers. From that starting point, Woolf as the narrator invokes the women
writers of the past and present to help her make her argument. Woolf presents a network
of women who've missed out on their potential because of their status as women and
the conditions of poverty and lack of education that that status implies. By creating an
imaginary sister for Shakespeare, Woolf emphasizes the anonymity and invisibility of
women; she makes us imagine many more forgotten women that history has left behind
and whose minds will never be expressed.
Woolf claims that as well as all the social conditions that have inhibited women, it is also
this lack of history and legacy that continues to inhibit them, This is why she appeals to
the young women before her: to use their education to be a different kind of generation
and to create a history for their daughters like young men have always had to admire
and emulate.
TRUTH

Beneath Woolf's argument about what it takes for a woman to create fiction is another
more universal argument about the nature of truth, which inevitably casts a shadow over
the points she makes. Woolf seems to realize two main points about the nature of truth
that she passes on to her audience.
The first point has to do with is subjectivity. As a lecturer, she says she hopes that her
listeners find some truth in what she is saying. She claims that all truth is a kind of
experience and is subjective. She hopes to impart something truthful by showing her
experience and perspective and, in doing so, perhaps the listener can deduce something
true. She goes about the essay in this vein, describing with an "I" voice the sensory and
mental processes of her day.
The second point is that the quest for truth connects her with both the women and men
in her story. As the narrator finds herself shut out of college buildings and women writers
absent on the library shelves, she observes the extent of the intellectual life around her
and in front of her in the form of the women of Newnham and Girton whom she is
addressing. Her pursuit of knowledge and her taste for debate and intellectual expression

connects her with those around her, including the male ‘professor' types who have been
so supported by society.
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

The image of a room that the woman writer can own and use to write in, away from the
demands of traditional womanhood, is a powerful and vivid symbol of the life of
intellectual freedom Woolf is championing for the women attending her lectures. Woolf
describes the forgotten women, the women unable to live up to their artistic potential, as
inhabiting busy family spaces and always living dependent upon men rather than owning
their own property. She therefore sees a room of one's own as representing the
quintessential needs of future women writers if they are to create their own literary
legacy.
LIGHT
Light symbolizes the genius needed to illuminate truth. Woolf refers to "that hard little
electric light which we call brilliance" and notes that the "lamp in the spine does not light
on beef and prunes." Therefore, light is genius, or artistic brilliance. Light also symbolizes
the ability to see truth, or to judge between truth and illusion. She refers to the "white
light of truth" and calls the reader to hold "every phrase, every scene to the light" because
Nature has given the reader "an inner light by which to judge of the novelist's integrity or
disintegrity."
TEN-SHILLING NOTE
As she pays for her lunch with a ten-shilling note—part of an income from an inheritance
left to her by an aunt—Mary Beton wonders at the power of that note and its siblings,
which seem to magically appear in her purse. They have the power to free her form the
"rust and corrosion ... fear and bitterness" she had built up when she was without money.
Thus, the ten-shilling note comes to symbolize financial independence and the way
money has the power to lift the burdens women endure because of their poverty.
PRUNES AND CUSTARD
After a sumptuous luncheon at Oxbridge Mary Beton endures a meager dinner of beef,
prunes, and custard at the women's college where she is staying. The dinner is not
inspiring, and she notes, "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not
dined well." This dinner symbolizes the poverty of women compared to men and helps
to make the case a woman needs money in order to use her gifts to create works of
genius.
DISTRACTIONS AND INTERRUMPTIONS
A man interrupts Mary Beton's path across the grass. A bell interrupts her thoughts. A
restaurant check brings her contemplations back to the present. The essay's fictional
narrative is littered with distractions and interruptions. These constant interruptions
mimic the distractions and interruptions Woolf imagines must have been the reality for
writers such as Jane Austen as they sat in their sitting rooms and were called upon to
make conversation, rather than write uninterrupted in a room of their own. Woolf includes
these interruptions to symbolize the struggle of women writers, and the need for a private
space in which to write.
OXBRIDGE
Oxbridge University is the imaginary university that provides a setting for the Chapter 1
of the essay. Its magnificent buildings become a symbol of the legacy men have built
over many years. The wealth of generations of men built the chapel, placed in it lovely
stained-glass windows, and made sure it was filled with singers and scholars. Similarly,
the literature written by men was built up over time, from the earliest male writers through
English poet John Milton, Italian poet Dante Alighieri, and English playwright William
Shakespeare through the present. Male author built upon male author to bring about
great literature, as stone is set upon stone to build a chapel. Both kinds of "buildings"
require money. In contrast, women do not have a legacy of literature to draw upon
because they never had any money. Their colleges are plain and small compared to
Oxbridge, as is their literature. However, Woolf makes it clear the building blocks of
women's literature are finally being set in place. She ends on a hopeful note, encouraging
women to keep building.

In 1928 established English author Virginia Woolf was invited to lecture on the topic of
Women and Fiction at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges of
England's well-known Cambridge University. The lectures she delivered on this topic
were collected, refined, and published in 1929 as the six-part essay A Room of One's
Own. Using a combination of literary techniques—ranging from direct address of the
audience to following a fictional alter ego through the British Library—Woolf builds a
feminist argument. She begins with the claim that to write, a woman must have money
and rooms to write in. That is, a woman must have financial independence and a private
space to call her own. Only then can she throw off the anger at the social, political, and
economic limitations women experience as part of a society designed by men and for
men.
Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
1922-24
1925

Modernism
Modernist Fiction
Mrs Dalloway takes place in June of 1923. World War I ended in 1918, and though the
United Kingdom was technically victorious in the war, hundreds of thousands of soldiers
died fighting and the country suffered huge financial losses. In 1922 much of Ireland
seceded from the United Kingdom, and many of Britain’s colonies would reach
independence in the decades following, including India, where Peter Walsh returns
from. Mrs Dalloway critiques the conservatism and traditionalism of the upper classes at
the time, while also portraying the tragedy of the “lost generation” following World War I,
like Septimus as a victim of PTSD.
Strictly defined, the point of view in Mrs Dalloway is third person omniscient; that means
there’s an overarching narrator who knows everything and who has access to everyone’s
thoughts.
The POV changes many times during the course of the novel, as we weave in and out
of the minds of Clarissa, Septimus, Lucrezia, Peter, Richard, Elizabeth, and Miss Kilman.
We have access to their thoughts and memories, which among the literary set is called
"free indirect discourse."

The omniscient narrator remains anonymous. At times, the omniscient narrator can be
quite prominent and critical, but other times will simply relate the thoughts of the
characters themselves.
This narrative technique is perfect for Mrs Dalloway. It allows us to focus on the little
things that people think about, things that might seem silly for a narrator to comment on.
At the same time, it can get a little confusing. Sometimes the shift between characters –
and between the present and the past – are so subtle that we don’t even notice.
Setting is one of the most innovative aspects of Mrs Dalloway. The events of the story
take place on a Wednesday in June 1923 (most importantly, in post-World War I
London), all in one day. This choice to talk about just one day is very modernist and very
novel – pun intended. But because the characters are so haunted by the past, the reader
is taken away from London several times, and travels back in time to Bourton, to the
country home owned by Clarissa’s family.
Perhaps the most important setting in the novel is its historical setting. Taking place just
after World War I, we see that the effects of the war are still around, whether or not men
like Richard Dalloway acknowledge the scars left behind. Septimus went off to war
believing it would make him a hero; instead, he ends up a shadow of a man, traumatized
to the point of committing suicide. Even Clarissa as always abided by the strict patriarchal
social standards of British culture and thus misses out on the freedom she craves.
Throughout Mrs Dalloway, we see a self-destructive faith in the greatness of nation and
tradition at the expense of the individual.
CLARISSA DALLOWAY
The novel’s eponymous protagonist, a middle-aged, upper-class lady throwing a party.
Clarissa is married to the conservative politician Richard Dalloway but is deeply affected
by her past love for Sally Seton and her rejection of Peter Walsh, and she often dwells
on the past. Clarissa is sociable and loves life, especially the small moments and

sensations of the everyday. At the same time she is constantly aware of death and feels
that there is a great danger in living even one day. Clarissa considers the privacy of the
soul the heart of life, but she also loves communicating with others and throwing parties,
bringing people together, which she considers to be her great gift. Though she is
intelligent and was once radical, she has grown conventional in middle age, and others
sometimes think her frivolous.
SEPTIMUS WARREN SMITH

A World War I veteran in his thirties, Septimus suffers from shell shock, or PTSD. He
was once an aspiring poet, but after enlisting in the war for idealistic reasons and the
death of his close friend and officer Evans, Septimus became unable to feel emotion. He
married Lucrezia while stationed in Milan. Septimus feels condemned by human nature
and is often suicidal and thinks that he has been condemned by the world to die for his
failure to feel. In his more intense hallucinations he imagines himself surrounded by
flames, or as a prophet with a divine message. Though the two characters never meet,
Clarissa and Septimus act as doubles in the novel.
PETER WALSH
Clarissa’s closest friend who was once passionately in love with her. They are
intellectually very similar, but always critical of each other. Clarissa rejected Peter’s
proposal of marriage, which has haunted him all his life. He lived in India for years and
often has romantic problems with women. Peter is critical of everyone, indulges in long
fantasies and musings, and constantly plays with his pocketknife.

PRIVACY, LONELINESS, AND COMMUNICATION
Throughout Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf gives us glimpses into the minds of her
characters while at the same time showing their outward communication with other
people. This framework leads to a complex series of relations, and her characters deal
with the privacy, loneliness, and communication of these relationships in different ways.
Peter Walsh is notably introverted and gets swept up in his personal fantasies. Even
Clarissa, deeply experiences her own incommunicable thoughts and the independence
of her existence. She enjoys mingling with other people but thinks that the true heart of
life lies in the fact that the old woman across the way has her own room, and Clarissa
has hers.
The inherent privacy of the soul isn’t always positive and often appears as
loneliness. Septimus is the example of this. No one understands his PTSD and inner
turmoil. Woolf shows the loneliness of the soul in nearly every interaction between
characters, as she contrasts people’s rich inner dialogues with their often mundane,
failed attempts at communication with each other. The important reunion pointed to by
the entire book only takes place beyond the page, just after the novel ends. With all this
privacy, loneliness, and failed communication Woolf shows how difficult it is to make
meaningful connections in the modern world. Something as seemingly frivolous as
Clarissa’s party then takes on a deeper, more important meaning, as it as an effort by
Clarissa to try to draw people together.
SOCIAL CRITICISM
Though Mrs. Dalloway’s action concerns only one day and mostly follows a lady throwing
a party, Woolf manages to thread her novel with 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 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, outmoded traditions and pretend that nothing

had changed. This is tragically exhibited through Septimus, as society ignores his PTSD.
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.
The empty tradition and conservatism of the aristocracy is also shown in the characters
of Lady Bruton, Aunt Helena, and Hugh Whitbread, who have traditional values and
manners but are hopelessly removed from modern life. Richard works for the
Conservative Party, which is portrayed as outdated, stuffy, and soon to be replaced by
the Labour Party. The futility of classism and outdated conservatism culminates in the
figure of the Prime Minister. He is first mentioned as Peter’s critique of Clarissa and then
his “greatness” is discussed by people in the street, but when the Prime Minister actually
appears in person, he is ordinary and almost laughable. The Prime Minister belongs to
the old order of Empire, repression, and classism, which Woolf shows must be discarded
so that England can survive in the modern era.
TIME
Mrs. Dalloway takes place over the course of one day, and in its very framework Woolf

emphasizes the passage of time. There are no real chapter breaks, and the most notable
divider of the narrative is the chiming of Big Ben as the day progresses. All the novel’s
action is so compressed that a few minutes can fill many pages. The chiming of Big Ben
is a reminder of the inevitable march of time and fits with Clarissa’s fear of death and the
danger of living even one day.
The circular presence of the past is also deeply intertwined with the forward ticking of
the clock. Clarissa, Peter, Richard, and Sally interact very little in the present, but
Clarissa and Peter relive in great depth their youth at Bourton, so their past relations add
weight and complexity to their present interactions. Septimus is more ruthlessly pursued
by the past, as he actually sees visions of Evans, his dead soldier friend. One of Woolf’s
original titles for the book was “The Hours,” so she clearly finds the idea of time important,
and by emphasizing the chiming of the hours and the ubiquity of past memories, she
ends up showing the fluidity of time, which can be both linear and circular at once.
PSYCHOLOGY AND PERCEPTION
The novel mostly consists of inner dialogue and stream of consciousness, so the inner
workings of the characters’ minds are very important to the work. Woolf herself suffered
from mental illness, and certain aspects of her own psychological struggles appear in
the book, particularly through Septimus. Woolf had a distrust of doctors regarding
psychology, which she shows in Dr. Holms and Sir William Bradshaw. Septimus is a
tragic example of just how much harm doctors can do when they prefer conversion to
understanding, refusing to truly examine another’s mental state.
In Septimus Woolf shows the inner workings of PTSD and mental illness, but in her other
characters she also gives a brilliant, sensitive treatment of how the mind understands
external sensations and time. Long, poetic passages capture the perception of images,
sounds, memories, and stream of consciousness all at once. The science of psychology
was still young in Woolf’s time, but in her intricate, penetrating character development
she shows her own knowledge of the brain, creating personalities that exhibit the inner
workings of all kinds of minds.
DEATH
Though much of the novel’s action consists of preparations for a seemingly frivolous
party, death is a constant undercurrent to the characters’ thoughts and actions. The
obvious example of this is Septimus, who suffers from mental illness and ends up killing
himself. In his inner dialogue Septimus sees himself as a godlike figure who has gone
from “life to death,” and his situation as a former soldier shows how the death and
violence of World War I have corrupted his mind. Peter Walsh fears growing old and
dying, and so tries to pretend he is young and invincible by living in fantasies and
pursuing younger women. Clarissa is also preoccupied with death even as she goes
about the business of enjoying life, making small talk, and throwing parties. In the parallel
characters of Septimus and Clarissa, Woolf shows two ways of dealing with the terror of
living one day – Clarissa affirms life by throwing a party, while Septimus offers his suicide
as an act of defiance and communication. These two characters never meet, but when
Clarissa hears about Septimus’s suicide she feels that she understands him.
TONE
What makes Mrs Dalloway so tricky in terms of tone is that Virginia Woolf has to wear
two hats. First, she has to capture a general tone of post-war life. A great example comes
at the beginning of the novel when Woolf writes: "For it was the middle of June. The War
was over, except for someone like Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her
heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a
cousin […]". She sets up the mood with a tone of lightness and joy, relief and new
possibility, but then immediately turns it back to the horror of war. Just this one sentence
contains two totally different tones and suggests that the war cannot be easily forgotten:
it’s still haunting peoples’ daily lives years later.
Second, Woolf has to capture the tone of each character that takes a turn telling the
story. Without over-complicating her descriptions, she manages to move from Clarissa’s
delight with beauty to Peter’s feelings of nostalgia and regret; from Miss Kilman’s
murderous hatred to Septimus’ deep anxiety and visions of the walking dead.

While juggling these tones, Woolf manages to strike a delicate balance between damning
critique and undeniable admiration. She manages to negatively characterize some of the
less appealing qualities of British life. She is very careful with irony. She does not tell
us what to think, but she subtly mocks some of the pretensions of British life through her
careful play with tone.
LANGUAGE
Mrs. Dalloway is the name of the main character, Clarissa Dalloway. She is a wealthy
middle-aged Englishwoman who re-examines her relationships with others and her
attitude about the passage of time during the events of a single day.
A major narrative technique used in Mrs Dalloway is a particular method of representing
what the characters are saying and thinking, which is called “free indirect speech”. In this
method, the narrator tells us about what a character has said or thought without
reproducing the exact words used. The irony also functions on the narrative level,
determining characters in their various relations to one another and to life as a whole.
FLOWERS
The first line of the book is Clarissa Dalloway saying she will “buy the flowers herself,”
and she soon enters a flower shop and marvels at the variety. Flowers are a traditional
symbol of love and femininity, but for Clarissa they also represent the joy and beauty that
can be found in everyday life. Woolf also uses the symbol in a more satirical sense as
well, as Elizabeth is compared to a flower by would-be suitors and Richard brings
Clarissa roses instead of saying “I love you.” Sally, the most rebellious female figure of
the book cut the heads off of flowers instead of cutting their stems, and Aunt Helena
found this “wicked.” This shows how Sally deals differently with femininity (flowers) than
is traditional to the older generation.
THE PRIME MINISTER
Mrs. Dalloway began as two different short stories, and one of them was called “The
Prime Minister.” In the novel the Prime Minister acts as a symbol of England’s traditional

values and social hierarchy, which have begun to decline as a result of World War I.
When Peter Walsh wanted to insult Clarissa and suggest she would give up her ideals
to become a “perfect hostess,” he said that she will marry a prime minister. Lady Bruton,
on the other hand, uses “Prime Minister” as a compliment to Hugh Whitbread, another
figure of English tradition. The car that is possibly bearing the prime minister is a
spectacle in the street, but then people turn away from it to look at the airplane
advertisement. At Clarissa’s party the Prime Minister’s arrival is greatly anticipated, but
when he actually shows up, he is a disappointment. Throughout the novel people cling
to their ideas of “greatness” in English society, while the reality becomes more and more
sobering and pathetic.
BIG BEN
Big Ben is a famous clock tower and London monument, but it also serves as a symbol
of time and tradition in the book. The clock tower is part of the Palace of Westminster,
and in one way it acts as a symbol of English tradition and conservatism, the attempt to
pretend that the War and modern life haven’t changed anything. But Big Ben is also a
clock, and it dispassionately marks the endless progression of time, which waits for no
one. The striking of the clock is the main divider in the narrative of Mrs. Dalloway, and
interrupts characters’ thoughts and actions with “leaden circles dissolving in the air.”
Time is an important theme of the novel, as Clarissa and Septimus both feel the danger
of living even one day, and all the characters experience vibrant memories of the past.
The striking of Big Ben is then a continuous reminder of ever-present time, which is both
linear (the progression of hours) and circular (the constant presence of the past).

Mrs Dalloway examines one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class
Londoner married to a member of Parliament. Mrs. Dalloway is essentially plotless; what
action there is takes place mainly in the characters’ consciousness. 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. The two characters can be seen as foils for each
other.


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Literatura Inglesa IIi: Pensamiento y Creación Literaria en la

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VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MODERNIST GEOGRAPHIES OF

1.- PRESENTATION: WOMEN AND MODERNISM

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2.- TEXT ANALYSIS

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FINANCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM

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WOMEN AND SOCIETY

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CREATING A LEGACY OF WOMEN WRITERS

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A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

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SEPTIMUS WARREN SMITH

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