Mrs. Dalloway

A landmark work of world literature, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is an account of one day in the life of an upper class British woman, her husband, and her circle of friends. Woolf's narration of Clarissa Dalloway's day begins with her protagonist's preparations for a party she is holding at her house that evening, and it ends as the party gets underway. In between, Clarissa is visited by an old friend, Peter Walsh, and her mind is returned to a time thirty years earlier when she considered marrying him. Instead, she opted for the staid Richard Dalloway, and, as she goes about her daily business, Clarissa reflects on the choices she has made and the significant moments that have shaped the course of her life. By juxtaposing Clarissa's present experience with flashbacks to her life as it was thirty years ago, Woolf sets up a number of remarkable tensions that in many ways define the thematic import of the novel. Moments of seemingly tremendous consequence, where life decisions are made and future paths are chosen, are set in stark contrast to the seemingly insignificant moments of perception, thought, and recollection that define her experience of a relatively ordinary day. The moments are "seemingly" insignificant because Woolf is interested in questioning whether the so-called defining moments in one's life actually matter all that much. She suggests, in fact, that it is the small moments of simple experience and perception that give meaning to life. Engaging so determinedly with the particular is how an entire novel can be written about a single day's experience. Powerfully influenced by Joyce's groundbreaking tour de force, Ulysses (1922), which details the comings and goings of life during a single day in his native Dublin, Woolf depicts the ever-shifting moods, thoughts, perceptions and memories of her heroine and other characters as they go about their lives.The contrast between past memory and present experience also infuses the novel and Clarissa's life with a sense of contingency. For example, by thinking about the decision to marry the traditionally-minded Richard instead of the restless Peter, Clarissa becomes acutely conscious at various points throughout her day that the life she is leading is only one of many possible lives that she could be leading. There is not a clear sense-for Clarissa or for the reader-that the decision to marry Richard was a bad one. We do not know if a life roaming the globe with Peter would have been a better; it just would have been a different. The point is, life hasn't really answered the questions it posed thirty years ago. It remains a mystery. And the awareness of the contingency of her own life infuses everything around Clarissa with a sense of insubstantiality that is to be marveled at, if never fully assented to or understood. Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925 during one of most astonishing and impressive periods of achievement and development in English literary history. Indeed, not since the heyday of English Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, have so many enduring and groundbreaking masterworks been produced. To the Lighthouse was published just three years after that annus mirabilis, 1922, which saw the publication of both Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Woolf's own To the Lighthouse(1926) are just a few of the remarkable works of a period which also found artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Wallace Stevens in the United States and D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats in Great Britain working at the height of their powers.