Clarissa Dalloway Research Articles

The Art of Being Attentive and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is one of the penultimate works of modernist literature. Given its status, many scholars have analyzed the work, typically through the lens of class, gender, sexuality, or some combination of those categories. Something that often goes overlooked when viewing Mrs. Dalloway through those various lenses is the multitude of meaningful interactions with flowers that the novel’s namesake, Clarissa Dalloway, has throughout the novel. In this essay, utilizing the multi-species theory work “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness” (Dooren, et al.), I will look at the interactions that Mrs. Dalloway has with flowers throughout the novel and discuss what interacting with flowers at specific moments does for Mrs. Dalloway.

Discourse recognition and analysis of hate speech in Virginia Woolf's “Mrs Dalloway”

Hate speech is a notion that many people see as intuitively easy to grasp, while many others deny it is even an understandable concept. The present article aims to identify and examine the hate speech situations manifested in Virginia Woolf’s famous novel, “Mrs. Dalloway”. An alternative reading of the novel “Mrs. Dalloway” explores the seemingly minor character, but with a substantial impact on the unfolding of the plotline, Miss Kilman represents a secondary objective. Following the triangle, Clarissa Dalloway - her daughter, Elizabeth, and Doris Kilman, the present essay tries to explain the situations in which hate speech occurs in “Mrs. Dalloway”.

Clarissa's Party in the House of the Sleeping Beauties A Study of Memory and Time in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Kawabata's The House of the Sleeping Beauties

On the verge of death and in the Autumn of their lives, Clarissa Dalloway, in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Eguchi Yoshio, in Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping ­Beauties, find themselves facing the existential realization that life has been stripped out of them. The past is all that is left for them, but the present is all they have. They are haunted by the ticking of the cosmic clock, so they resort to their memories to shun death. The apparition of death, nevertheless, reveals itself for both protagonists at the zenith of their celebration of life, and this existential realization is carried out within a Modernist framework in which the narrative style gives meaning to the content of both works.

Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century by Sarah Cole

<i>Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century</i> by Sarah Cole

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

GENDERED GEOGRAPHIES OF POWER

This paper poses a parallel analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, two novels set in London around the First World War that complement one another with regard to representation of women in the city. In focus are Woolf’s and Rhys’s heroines who belong different social classes. With a view to producing a fuller picture of the London strata of the time, the essay concentrates on a dual front: it examines the position the protagonists enjoy in respect to their gender as well as in respect to their social status. While Rhys’s Anna is a young woman from a distant colony, that is an outsider with no permanent residence in London, Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, however seemingly privileged, is greatly disadvantaged by her restricted experience of the metropolis. The essay argues that in these two novels London is a source of double marginalisation – a city unjust to the colonial subjects but unjust to women of all strata. As a theoretical background, the essay uses the concept of gendered geographies of power, which are supposed to help us reveal how different power structures affect the cityscape on both macro and micro level.

Rethinking privacy and publicity: Reading the spatial reflections of gender through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

This article deciphers socio-spatial characteristics of the London scene in the early twentieth century. Analyzing excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a novel written by one of the prominent modernist and feminist writers, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), the literary space analysis aims to ascertain how the narrative elucidates the relation between assigned gender roles and spatial practices of the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway. Revealing the abundance of socio-spatial information hidden in literary fiction, the three-partite spatial analysis that examines Mrs. Dalloway’s living environment within the contexts of private (domestic) space, public space, and ‘internal’ space highlights new layers of textual meaning. Thus, the study exposes the spatial hints of Woolf that guide readers to understand the confined social position of a high society lady. Touching upon controversial issues that nurtured the private-public dichotomy, the study broadens the discussion of gendered space, discussing Woolfian space as a challenge to patriarchal codes. Excerpts examined throughout the article reveal that the author's critique on unequal power relations between men and women reveals itself in spatial portrayals in the novel. Therefore, scrutinizing Mrs. Dalloway allows rediscovering, reinvestigating, and rethinking privacy and publicity in the early twentieth century through modern fiction.

Negative Dialectics in Mrs Dalloway

ABSTRACT Critics have interpreted Clarissa Dalloway as an ontologically complete character who can be divided into private and public sides: the former is thought and kept to herself while the latter presents an exterior view of her to the members of the British elite with whom she associates. I take issue with this private/public split, however, and argue that, even in her thoughts, Clarissa never finds a permanent reprieve from the Victorian gender norms that are impressed upon her because her interiority is defined by the dialectical movement between her Victorian and anti-Victorian persuasions. I further contend that Woolf never provides a resolution to this dialectic, making it negative rather than affirmative, and thus reveals how she more generally felt about interwar women: as indefinitely between gaining full ownership of the newly won “rooms of their own” and forfeiting them in favour of a return to traditional Victorian mores.

Stream of Consciousness and Interior Monologue Techniques in Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu and Mrs Dalloway

Modernism is a movement seen in arts, literature, music and architecture in Europe and the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this study, Peyami Safa’s Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu, from Turkish Literature and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, from English Literature are compared and contrasted in respect to modernist tools of stream of consciousness and interior monologue techniques. The main motivation behind this research is that the stories in both novels are narrated strikingly in a similar way which is through the main characters’ thoughts. On the other hand, differences in narrative techniques in both novels are also striking. In Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu, stream of consciousness is present in the apogee of fits that the sick hero suffers; however, in Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway’s inner conflicts are presented in the form of interior monologue which is a subtler and refined way of emphasising the inner world of the main character.

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S NOVEL “MRS. DALLOWAY”

Following work is dedicated to the novel “Mrs.Dalloway”. The main characters are emotionally endowed Dreamer Clarissa Dalloway and humble servant Septimus Warren-Smith, who was a contusion in the first World War described only one day in June, 1923 year. In fact, the novel “Mrs.Dalloway” is the "flow of consciousness" of the protagonists Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren – Smith, their Big Ben clock is divided into certain peace with a bang. Virginia Woolf believes that "life" is manifested in the form of consciousness, death and time, she focuses her essays on such issues as the role of a woman in family and society, the role of a woman in the upbringing of children, the way a woman feels about the world, the relationship between a modern man and a woman.

The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood ed. by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso

Reviewed by: The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood ed. by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso Luke Mueller MIGUEL-ALFONSO, RICARDO, ed. The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 236 pp. $99.00 hardcover; $79.20 e-book. The story of the modernist novel usually involves an “inward turn”: against the nineteenth-century realists’ highly wrought social worlds, against their moral dilemmas and ostensibly objective descriptions, modernism (as the story goes) dramatizes private minds whose contacts with the world are perspectival, partial, and tenuous. It’s true that modernist novels are deeply concerned with the mind, but the inward turn offers a picture of mental experience that looks simplistic in the context of recent work in cognitive studies. This work examines how minds are always already in the world, and it has been the subject of seminal works such as Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds (2004), Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), and David Herman’s collection The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (2011). Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso brings this broader picture of mind squarely into the realm of modernist narrative in The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood, a collection of essays that thoughtfully challenges the “inward turn.” Miguel-Alfonso begins The Fictional Minds of Modernism by arguing that modernist narrative (exemplified by Gertrude Stein’s work) is fundamentally about the “continuity between mind and world” (12). Narrative is both an act of mind, giving sequence and structure to phenomena, and also an act of mind made available to other minds. In other words, narrative is fundamentally public. But Miguel-Alfonso acknowledges this publicness is problematic, contending that modernist narratives engage in “relentless questioning of the relationship between mind, language, and reality” (9). The book’s contributors take up this relentless questioning, seeking a more nuanced picture of mind that is not simplistically bifurcated into “internal” and “external” aspects. In the second essay, Jukka Mikkonen warns against too quickly accepting fictional minds as means for learning “about the workings of the mind” (18). Mikkonen recognizes the propensity of readers to ascribe realistic qualities of mind to fictional characters, but he argues that fictional minds must also obey the demands of narrative necessity. Narrative minds have both mimetic and poetic aspects, and these poetic aspects make trouble for those who would claim modernist literature can faithfully represent minds. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example, Clarissa Dalloway’s ability to understand others borders on extraordinary, and the portrayal of the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith is haunted by the fact that Woolf may not be “a real expert of schizophrenia” (21). In other words, there is a difference between narrative minds feeling real and being real. While Mikkonen is sympathetic to those who would [End Page 192] claim “that literary narratives could widen our ‘mental universe’ or ‘the cognitive horizon of human awareness,’” he concludes that such claims “are not proportional to their supporting evidence—no matter how evidence is understood—and at times look even like dogmas” (25). While Mikkonen’s skepticism is warranted, it is somewhat tempered by two following essays that argue that normal presentations of mind are always already conceptual and linguistic—making poesis a crucial part of investigations of mental experience. Marco Caracciolo argues that metaphors for mind break down barriers between inner and outer life because they express what is “internal” in terms of “concrete things that we can directly perceive” (34). Caracciolo explores metaphors of mind in three novels: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Federigo Tozzi’s Con gli occhi chiusi (Eyes Shut), and in Mrs. Dalloway. He shows how mind is conceptualized in terms of sensory activities (perceiving, seeing, having illusions, etc.), in terms of space (Tozzi’s protagonist feels his mind is a “large hall” [42]), and in relation to physical things and processes (Tozzi’s narrator reports of the protagonist, “A familiar ache dashed his brain like a cold jet that never let him get anything done” [42]). Caracciolo believes that these metaphorical “mind styles...

Dual Narrative Dynamics and the Critique of Privilege

Dual Narrative Dynamics and the Critique of Privilege

Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature by Elizabeth Outka

<i>Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature</i> by Elizabeth Outka

THE DEPRESSION SYMPTOMS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF AS THE AUTHOR PORTRAYED IN MRS DALLOWAY NOVEL

The purpose of this research was to find the depression symptoms of Virginia Woolf as the author portrayed in the characters Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway novel. It could be seen from the analysis of the data from biographical information of Virginia Woolf, narrations and utterances of the major characters Septimus and Clarissa. In order to determine the depression symptoms, Beck’s cognitive theory of depression was used in this research. This research belonged to qualitative method. The data sources were Mrs Dalloway novel and the biographies of Virginia Woolf. The data were the biographical information of Virginia Woolf, narrations and utterances in the novel refers to Woolf’s depression symptoms portrayed in the characters Septimus and Clarissa. The finding showed the depression symptoms of Virginia Woolf as were portrayed in Septimus such as negative expectation, self blame and self criticism, paralysis of the will, avoidance, escapist, and withdrawal wishes, suicidal wishes, loss of appetite, sleep disturbance, loss of libido, and hallucination.Meanwhile, the depression symptoms that were portrayed in Clarissa such as dejected mood, negative feeling toward self, low self evaluation, delusion of worthlessness, and suicidal wishes.

(Im)perfect celebrations by intergenerational hostesses

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf nourished a peculiar stream of parallel foreignness and kinship with each other as coetaneous writers. This article explores the likenesses and dialogues between Mansfield’s story “The Garden Party” and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to detect and depict how bourgeois women, like Laura Sheridan and Clarissa Dalloway, albeit from two different generations, are indoctrinated by social etiquette, class consciousness and the prevailing archetype of domestic femininity inherited from Victorian times. Integrated into their compulsory roles as angelic daughters and wives, Laura and Clarissa gladly perform the role of the hostess to organise (im)perfect parties at home until death knocks at the door. Paradoxically that uninvited guest precipitates escapades of self-discovery and mental emancipation, leading to transient or enduring transformations in the lives of these two women.

The New Madrigals (Gesualdo)

The New Madrigals (Gesualdo) Anna Maria Hong (bio) I All alms palm up: All aftermath at last—caress the cause—applause, applause—of thisappalled mismarriage—mass sans gravitas—to haste— the bride is dead. Her tender evidenceshed like a dress, ripped to a half, a beastof Eden—jeweled vowel—etched of sense. O vile lyric! Avid wrist, which killedthis wife—who killed the wife inside! O thickveil—bride-white, blind mirror, soldered will to sound, a soul of wood. To open/closeone's blood beloved, golden box unlockedand tossed, one cry forever shut and thus— left to device, devout was I to undertakethe timbre. Under sun and overher life, I buried another, building one pause and rung upon each rigor. Murder.Music. Could there have been a different order? II All . . . my . . . lump: All fate or myth to last,caress the case—p-please, p-please—of thisappl-lied miasma or rig, my . . . sense grave ties to host— [End Page 64] the bird is did. Her tune-drive-danceshed like duress . . . bestof din: jaw, lid, vow . . . itched of sins. O evil . . . race . . . which killedthe saw of, who killed the awe inside. O thickvial—bird-whit, blond mire, rear-slid, red wall— to sound. As life owed. To pain, close . . .guile done, box unlocked,no date as sad, no cure . . . no deaths left to devoice . . . to waste. No.. . . took that ember . . .bird not here . . . no pose, no dare, no gap, no cheer eager. More dear,my [sic]. III All: All lastcaress of thisshed,which killed, killed inside. O thick to sound. Close.Box locked.Left to a different ardor. [End Page 65] Anna Maria Hong Anna Maria Hong is the author of the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation's Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Age of Glass, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America's 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press's Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in September 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry and fiction in many journals and anthologies including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Green Mountains Review, Ecotone, ENTROPY, Poetry Daily, and The Best American Poetry. She is an Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke College. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Reference in Fiction

Abstract Most discussions of proper names in fiction concern the names of fictional characters, such as ‘Clarissa Dalloway’ or ‘Lilliput.’ Less attention has been paid to referring names in fiction, such as ‘Napoleon’ (in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) or ‘London’ (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). This is because many philosophers simply assume that such names are unproblematic; they refer in the usual way to their ordinary referents. The alternative position, dubbed Exceptionalism by Manuel García-Carpintero, maintains that referring names make a distinctive semantic contribution in fiction. In this paper I offer a positive argument for Non-Exceptionalism, relying on the claim that works of both fiction and non-fiction can express the same singular propositions. I go on to defend my account against García-Carpintero’s objections.

MODERNISM IN MRS.DALLOWAY

Modernism is a very interesting and important movement in literature, characterized by a very self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction. However, the most important literary genre of modernism is the novel. Although prewar works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist, Modernism as a literary movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. Other European and American Modernist authors whose works rejected chronological and narrative continuity include Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner. After First World War a lot of developments took place, new inventions opened up the mind of artists in the 1920s, one of them was Virginia Woolf, a very specific novelist. So, this paper deals with Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and the main focus is on the elements of modernism in this masterpiece. It is a modern novel which has also most of the features of modernism, or we can say that there are several ways in which one can see Mrs. Dalloway as a Modernist novel. The most dominant characteristic is the content and the narrative style. Virginia Woolf overstepped the traditional writing by describing characters not only superficially but also their inner thoughts. Rather than having a straightforward narrative with a beginning and end and a narrator who knows it all, with Mrs Dalloway we have several narrators, flashbacks, stream-of-consciousness style, and a totally fragmented story. Also there is a connection of the author and her characters; she putted a piece of herself in each one of them. This is how you can find about the author’s life path and how her sufferings, mental illness affected into her writing. Thus, Virginia Woolf is considered an iconic modernist writer and pioneer not only of the stream of consciousness narrative technique, but of the use of free indirect speech, psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Nevertheless, the unconventional use of figures of speech also makes a great characteristic and a symbol of her novels. Stream of consciousness writing allows readers to “listen in” on a character's thoughts. This will make you explore yourself in ways you have never thought before. Specifically, in Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations to host a party that evening Virginia Woolf records all her thoughts, remembrances and impressions, as well as the thoughts of other characters. There is no actual story, no plots or sub-plots, in fact, there is no action in the traditional sense in this novel, except from the “myriad of impressions” created by Virginia Woolf’s new style of writing.

Modernist Food Studies

Until recently, modernist food studies has been like dinner at Clarissa Dalloway’s party: apparently on offer, but mostly offstage. While scholars have counted chestnuts peeled and cocktails quaffed by Ernest Hemingway, and contemplated the savor of urine in the kidneys gobbled by Leopold Bloom, it is not until quite recently that the methodologies of food studies—rather than

Performing Mrs Dalloway (1925)

1. Before the curtain rises One writes for a very few people, who understand. A glorious June day in 1923: the “hot sun”; the “humming traffic ”; the people “walking the streets of London ” ; the “sound of Big Ben striking the half hour.” Clarissa Dalloway has “just broken into her fifty-second year.” She is giving a party in the evening, which the Prime Minister is due to attend. She decides on a dress suitable for the occasion, then goes out to “buy the flowers herself.” Meanwhile, Septimus...