Woolf, Virginia - Mrs. Dalloway (5)

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882. She came from an upper class, in fact both her parents were intellectual. There were many tragic event in her life, such as the death of her mother and two sisters marked a nervous breakdown that will led to migraine attacks and phantom voices in her head. After the death of her father, she moved to Bloomsbury where she founded a circle of intellectuals known as Bloomsbury group, and here she met her future husband, Leonard Woolf.

Later, Virginia and her husband founded the Hogarth press that will publish all the works by Virginia,including also " Mrs Dalloway" in 1925.The story was set in London on a single ordinary day in June of 1923, the protagonist of the novel is Clarissa Dalloway she is fifty-one and she is the wife of a politician,she is characterised by opposing feelings:her need for freedom and independence and her class consciousness.The novel starts with Clarissa that goes to Bond Street to buy some flowers for a party she giving that evening at her house. While she in the flower shop, a car drives noisily past and shifts the attention to the street, where Septimus and Lucrezia Warren Smith are walking;he is an estate agent's clerk anch shell-shocked veteran of First World War, she is an Italian girl. Septimus is an extremmely sensitive man who can suddenly fall prey to panic and fear or feelings of guilt.The cause of this feelings lies in the death of his best friend, Evans, during the war. He is a 'shell-shock' case, one of the victims of industrialised warfare. After the war, Septimus is haunted by the spectre of Evans; he suffers from headaches and insomnia. He cannot stand the idea of having child , he's sexually impotent.Septimus's mental disorder he needed the calling in of doctors, first Dr. Holmes, and now Sir William Bradshaw, a famous nerve specialist. In the meantime Clarissa walks back home and there she receives an unexpected visit from Peter Walsh, the man she used to love in her youth. He then leaves Clarissa's house and goes to Regent's Park, where he catches a glimpse of the Warren Smiths, who are going to Sir William Bradshaw's for an interview where the doctor advises to Septimus to go into one of his clinics. In the evening Septimus jumps out of the window of his house , and the ambulance carrying his body passes by Peter Walsh , who is going back to his hotel. All the characters who have been in some way important during the day are present at Clarissa's party. The Bradshaws arrive and Clarissa hears from them of Septimus's death,with which she feels a strong connetion. The plot does not connect Clarissa and Septimus, apart from the news of his death at her party. However, they are similiar in many respects : their response to experience is always given in physical terms , and they depend upon their partners for stability and protection. There are a fundamental difference , however, which has given rise to the theory that Septimus is Clarissa's double. He is not always able to distinguish between his personal response and external reality. His psychic paralysis leads him to suicide, whereas Clarissa never loses her awareness of the outside world as something external to herself. In teh end, she recognises her deceptions , accepts the idea of death, and is prepared to go on. Unlike Joyce , Woolf does not elevate her characters to the level of myth, but shows their deep humanity behind their social mask. Moreover, through what she defined as the "tunneling technique", she allows the reader to experience the characters' recollection of their past, thus providing a sense of their background and personal history. Clarissa Dalloway's party is the climax of the novel and unifies the narrative by gathering all the people Clarissa thinks about during the day. Furthermore we can find in Woolf novels the Moment of being,it is very similar to Joyce’s epiphany. It is a moment of intensity, perception or vision that illuminate our lives so we be become aware of something that has peach our consciousness. Virginia explains this concept examining an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. We receive many impressions that come to us in every moment of our life. Life is not divided into bit but it is something completed, like a halo that surrounds us. When we receive them so we became aware of something, and this is a moment of being. As for James Joyce, also for Virginia Woolf, subjective reality came to be identified with the technique called "stream of consciousness". However, differently from Joyce's characters, who show their thoughts directly through interior monologue and sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically unorthodox way, Woolf never lets her characters' throughts flow without control, and she maintains logical and grammatical organisation. Her techniques is based on the fusion of streams of thought into a third-person, past tense narrative. Thus she gives the impression of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer world, the past and the present, speech and silence. While Joyce was more iterested in language experimentation and worked through the accumulation of details, Woolf's use of words was almost poetic, allusive and emotional.The novel Mrs Dalloway also deal with the way people react to new situations . Woolf makes use of some cinematic devices such as close-up, flashback and trackingshot.The insistent chiming of clocks reminds the reader of the temporal grid which organizes the narrative, of the passing of time in life and of its flowing into death.