Woolf, Virginia - Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses

Woolf, Virginia - Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, comparison with Joyce’s Ulysses

Mrs. Dalloway is a Virginia Woolf's novel, written in 1925. In this novel, Virginia Woolf successfully experimented with the new narrative techniques: the stream of consciousness but mostly the interior monologue. Joyce used the stream of consciousness (in Ulysses for example), to the extreme: Joyce's characters show their thoughts without punctuation, without capital letters, also in an incoherent way because it's a continuous flow of ideas and emotions in the character's mind, without control. Differently from Virgina Woolf that never lost contact with reality, she used punctuation, grammar and so on. So her
method is the interior monologue, with verbalization of thoughts, emotion, sensations but without losing contact with the world around. However, there is still the "stream of consciousness" and the "interior monologue" because the writer's mind is more important than the action itself, the writer is more interested in what happens within the mind of the character.
Comparison between Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses.

Critics compare Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway to Joyce' Ulysses. There are differences, for example regarding the technique. But they are similar in fact the time covered for Mrs. Dalloway is also only one day (Joyce tooks 18 hours, one day more or less). But for Mrs. Dalloway the setting is London, differently from Joyce in which the setting is Dublin. The main character is Mrs. Dalloway, even if there are other important characters. When Virginia Woolf wrote this novel it was 1925, immediately after the I world war, an historical event that shocked a lot her mind, she was strongly affected by the consequences of the I world war. There's another important character, Septimus Warren Smith, Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus never met each other but there are a lot of things in common between them. Mrs. Dalloway is a very rich woman of the London upper class, because she decided to marry a parliamentary man, Richard Dalloway. She has a very prestigious, conservative kind of life, she lives among the elite of London, differently from Septimus that is a war veteran, a shell shock veteran. A lot of soldiers who fought during the I world war, were psychologically affected by the bombing, by the tremendous
reality of the war and when they came home, they were different men, a lot of them were shell shocked. The consequence of the shell shock is to be mentally insane, is the mental instability. The problem was that these men were not helped by doctors, because they didn't know how to help them, most of the doctors didn't feel empathy because they simply couldn't help them, it was something totally new.