...ENGL 314 Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread in a Jewelry Shop In the film adaptation of the narrative “Mrs. Dalloway”, the movie omits several scenes from the novel thereby diminishing the overall emotional effect conveyed by the author in her book. An example of such a scene is when Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread are in a jewelry shop. According to the book, Richard and Hugh peer into a jewelry shop window and look at the antiques. Hugh Whitbread spots a Spanish jewelry and goes into the shop hoping to buy it for his wife, Evelyn (113). Richard, on the other hand, believes Hugh’s exercise to be worthless. Yet, he exclaims, “Right you are!” (113) and follows Hugh into the shop. Inside the shop, he is overcome with the fact that he hardly “gave Clarissa presents” (114). He feels “awfully odd” and “pained” to recall that some years ago he had gifted her a bracelet – but “she never wore it” (114). The self-reflections of Richard convey a sense of void between Richard and Clarissa’s relationship. Was her act of not wearing the bracelet a sign that she didn’t love Richard? His feelings also portray the lack of communication in their marriage as he fails to understand her personality. He does not ask Clarissa for reasons but assumes that she probably hates presents given by him. He delves deeper into his thoughts about his wife just as “a single spider’s thread…attaches itself to the point of a leaf” (114). As he recollects the old memories, he draws a tray of old jewels...
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...“The external situation shapes the experience of the inner life”. –How have similar ideas about the importance of the inner life been represented in different contexts in Mrs Dalloway and The Hours? “The external situation shapes the experience of the inner life”. –How have similar ideas about the importance of the inner life been represented in different contexts in Mrs Dalloway and The Hours? An individual’s experience of both internal and external life is shaped by our surroundings, the physical environment and our human relationships. Mrs Dalloway, a novel by Virginia Woolf explores the life of a women in one day, the audience is able to see what she is doing, what she feels and what is going on in her head all at the same time. Similarly a film directed by Stephen Daldry titled the Hours explores three narrative streams looking at both the external events and internal thoughts of three separate women. These texts use the context of Virginia Woolf’s own life and the time periods in which they focus on including the 1920’s, 1949 and 2001 to express various thematic concerns. They delve into the multifaceted nature of individuals, women’s experience, a sense of mortality felt by the protagonists and ones sensitivity to nature and people. In searching for one’s identity and true self we often question the nature of our experiences and the relationships we have with those around us. It is a constant battle between putting on a social mask to manage perception, or alternatively...
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...Gymnasium 20/10/2015 Comparative Essay of The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway “There are still the flowers to buy”, are the first words uttered by two different “Clarissas”. The first time was in Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway”, the second time in Cunningham’s novel “the Hours. Subsequently Clarissa rushes into the city to buy the flowers herself. There are many more ways in which Cunningham induces the aura of Woolf’s novel; however, the main similarity, which can be seen, is the stream of consciousness form of narrative, which encompasses the length of one day. With this opening scene being repeated in both novels we see our “Clarissas” plunge into the city to buy flowers. Virginia Woolf is known for being a modernist novelist in the same way that Michael Cunningham is known for his postmodern writing. If you have read Mrs. Woolf’s novel you are immediately meant with a striking de ja vu, in the opening scenes of “the Hours”, only to be meat with a striking difference: The Hours is based around the lives of three different women, in comparison to Mrs. Woolf’s novel. One can argue that the story of Virginia in “the Hours” is a retelling of Mrs. Woolf’s writing process, while the story of Laura is an example of the reception of Mrs. Woolf’s novel, and the Clarrissa is a modernised retelling of Mrs. Dalloway’s day. This addition augments the novel, because it focuses the reader’s response on several aspects of the novel. Mrs. Dalloway’s perfect party is what the whole novel focuses...
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...present to past and future. Simply, in our mind past, present and future can be experienced at the same moment. In his theory of duration, Henri Bergson explains that there are two times: private, or internal time, which is the real authentic time, and standard, public or clock time, which is, in fact, a mere social, artificial construct.[1] Modernist writers, such as James Joyce or Virginia Woolf were fascinated by the theories of time, which influenced greatly their works. In Mrs Dalloway, (1925), which may be considered 'the first important work of the literary period initiated by Ulysses'[2], Woolf is concerned with both, public and private time. In Mrs Dalloway, the public, or the clock time, is represented by the striking of Big Ben, the symbol of England and the precise time. The striking of the hours is repeated throughout the novel as a reminder of time, which restricts the lives of the characters, reminding them constantly of the time and their life passing, of their mortality. Clarsissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh are in their middle ages, period of lives, when they tend to think about their past and contemplate if they had made the right decisions. The constant presence of the hours striking interrupts their thoughts and warns them that the time passes: 'Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning; musical; then the hour,...
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...Flirting with Social Conventions A generation of turmoil emerged during the First World War in Britain. With innovations such as mustard gas and heavy artillery, it caused not only the deaths of close to 60,000 people in Britain alone, but the destruction of the social policies of the time as well. Pandemonium ensued, and World War I, with a profound influence on British society, brought down one world, and created an entirely new one. World War I was a violent awakening for the British people, though they still remained oblivious to the detriment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and the now unstable social conventions of the time. In Mrs. Dalloway, written by Virginia Woolf, mental illness and social conformity are used to illustrate the connectedness between Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway, and the difficulties with a developing society that fails to understand just how great of an impact the postwar Empire has. By drawing parallels between the two characters it is revealed that there is true chaos amidst the superficial calm, that there is an unwillingness to conform to societal conventions, and that emotions are sometimes like flowers hidden beneath the snow. Septimus Warren Smith is a veteran of war, misunderstood by those around him, and is ultimately unable to function in the postwar society. Septimus "went to France to save England" during the First World War and shows the classic symptoms that he suffers from “shell shock” or PTSD, which, until after...
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...Virginia’s London Complex in Mrs. Dalloway Fang Yuling Introduction Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an experimental novelist, critic and essayist of the 20th century, has been regarded as a major modernist writer, whose great contribution to the innovative techniques is undeniable. Susan squire once said: “Whether she thought it "the most beautiful place on the face of the earth" or "the very devil," to Virginia Woolf the city of London was the focus for an intense, often ambivalent, lifelong scrutiny.” (488) Ever since Woolf was born in London in 1882, not only did she make her home there for nearly all of her fifty-nine years-first in the narrow streets of Kensington and then in the spacious square of Bloomsbury-but she found it a powerfully evocative figure in the literary tradition within which she wrote. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, we can clearly see that Woolf elaborately arranges Clarissa Dalloway’s one-day life in the City of London. By a simple description of Mrs. Dalloway’s buying flower for an evening party, the reader has been actually taken around London, a city etched in Woolf’s memory. Woolf makes repeated mention of the landmarks or detailed street names in the City of London such as Oxford Street, Bond Street, the Regent’s Park, St. James Street, the Abbey, and the Big Ben, which are all quite familiar to readers. This article is attempting to, under the guidance of the cultural symbol of London itself and several major landmarks in the novel, figure out Woolf's...
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...The ongoing relationship between the literary movements of modernism and post-modernism is encompassed by the intertextual relationships between Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”. These relationships communicate the inadequacy of previous writings to convey trauma, cultural crisis and the deep fragmentation within their respective societies. The immediate context of these social dialogues creates a clear division between each text, however the intertextual similarities between minor and major characters create an effective parallel to traverse decades, years, months and days. This is in order to assess the lasting impacts of society on an individual’s desire to escape either physically or metaphorically. Woolf’s 1923 novel “Mrs Dalloway” reflects on the need for a new convention to express the struggle of coming to terms with the lasting and catastrophic effects of modern warfare. Woolf achieved this through the binary oppositions of the inside and outside self. Woolf creates two alternate personalities within Clarissa through the use of parenthesise, punctuating the otherwise flowing modernist technique of free indirect discourse with Clarissa’s personal thoughts and opinions. The sub-commentary on the events offers the reader an alternate perspective to that provided by the narrator where upon Peter Walsh’s unexpected arrival “(she had been quite taken aback by this visit – it had upset her)”, and thus offers an insight into the private feelings...
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...show the ways in which women are suppressed, as well as, a silver lining for women to become empowered. These authors express their views through their literature, especially in their most well-known works, Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) and Love Medicine (Erdrich). The women in their novels are suppressed in multiple ways. The characters are emotionally, physically, and sexually, and within their marriages. In Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, the main character Clarissa Dalloway is a suppressed middle class wife, who enjoys throwing parties for guests. Clarissa is suppressed internally or emotionally by her time period and culture. She lives her life according what is and isn’t appropriate. Virginia Woolf wrote her novel with an emphasis on description, however in her writing she doesn’t go into much detail on certain incidents. Such incidents are those of intimate nature. Woolf writes these scenes with barely any description compared to the rest of the book. One such scene is that of Clarissa kissing another woman named Sally, when she was a young girl. The absence of depiction of detail on the matter shows the sexual suppression of women. “In her novels, sexual passion becomes masculine property, comprehended by women in moments of empathy rather than experience, as in Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa kisses Sally Seawall and experiences with brief intensity what men feel” (Showalter). Suppressing that women aren’t supposed to feel or enjoy their sexuality the way that men do. There is also...
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...Final Critical Essay | Mrs. Dalloway: Perceptions of One’s Life | Brittney Davey | In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf involves two main characters whose personalities and life styles are on complete opposite’s sides of the spectrum, which do not know one another but are linked through the concept of different ways each person views the world they live in. Clarissa Dalloway is a high-class, wealthy woman who cares about what others think of her so she indulges herself in parties to be commonly liked, yet struggles with her internal thoughts and memories to the outside world. Septimus Warren Smith is a man who survived the war with severe post-traumatic stress from witnessing many tragic events including watching his friend Evans die from an invasion. Through each of these individuals experiences, and what they both have been through – tragic or sane – they have perceived the world differently, therefore, they both have one view of the world. These two characters were most important in the sense of perception of two different worlds because not every life is the same, many people grow up in a terrifying neighbourhood, whereas others grow up in a wealthy secure home, others witness death and others never break a bone in their body. It depends on how and where you were raised, what background you came from, what hobbies interests you, which group of friends you fall into, every step can lead to a different life, but it is the independent persons choice on which...
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...Mrs. Dalloway (1998) presents a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class English woman. Clarissa Dalloway is the wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative Member of Parliament. The story takes place in London on a day in June 1923, a day when Clarissa is giving a dinner party. She walks to the florist shop to buy flowers for the party. Admittedly, it's no easy task to make a silly woman's foolish choices an engrossing cinematic experience. For that reason alone the people who tried to make a film of Virginia Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway" get an "E" for effort. It has a sumptuous look, excellent supporting performances, and I wish I could have liked it more. The title character, Clarissa Dalloway, is played by Vanessa Redgrave while she plans a party at her impressive home. As she does, she begins to recall the choice she made years ago when pursued by two suitors who could not have been more different. Rather than reckless passion, her choice, born of cowardice, was for the security of a quiet life full of privilege. Peter Walsh, an old and close friend of Clarissa’s, has returned to England after five years in India, and comes to visit her. Peter Walsh once loved Clarissa, but she had refused to marry him. Clarissa introduces Peter to her daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth is 17 years old, and has an older friend and tutor named Doris Kilman. Elizabeth goes to lunch with Miss Kilman. Miss Kilman is poor and physically unattractive, and resents the upper-class Mrs...
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...dramatise London so perpetually’ Woolf wondered in the final months of her life. This essay will seek to examine Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Eliot’s The Waste Land to observe their perpetual fascination with expressing metropolis as a vision of modernity. It will attempt to scrutinize the overwhelming nature of urban life, urban life’s effect on humanity, metropolis being the forefront of society, and also the depiction of a single urban consciousness. Through examining these depictions of urban life, this essay aims to observe the effects rapid urbanisation had on the modern movement and its respective authors. Woolf presents Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness as a vessel to voice the overwhelming nature of urban life and the problem of anxiety experienced in modern metropolis. Immediately in the first paragraph Clarissa’s anxieties are voiced as she embarks to the city to prepare for her party. Clarissa’s consciousness jumps to her memory of a ‘girl of eighteen’ and the solemn and ‘feeling that something awful was about to happen’. The contrast to her feeling of excitement to a feeling of anxiety is stark. The protagonist begins by exclaiming ‘how fresh how calm’ and then to experiencing feeling threatened as her attention reverts from the natural to the ‘uproar of the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans… she loved; life; London’. Woolf plunges the reader into Mrs Dalloway’s consciousness, where the protagonist experiences both awe and anxiety at the spectacle of the metropolis. The...
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...Treatment of time in Mrs Dalloway. In 1925 Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway was published. Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway about the perambulations of a middle aged woman on a sunny June day in London, and it became one of the main Modernist classics. One of the most prominent themes in Mrs Dalloway is time and the distinction between two types of time. The clock measures time, but on the other hand time is represented by the duration of experiences as the human consciousness registers them. The time told by the timepiece of the mind is called psychological time, a term taken from the philosopher Henri Bergson. There are two different types of time: the time the clock tells and time in the human mind. These two types of time have distinct characteristics, which clearly separate one from the other. Clock time governs the relentless progress of life, ordering events in a chronological, linear sequence according to when they happened in time. It is what history is made of. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, years and centuries are all indicators of clock time. The other type of time is the temporal experience in the human mind: it is flexible; it is constantly in flux and can be compressed or extended. A period that is compressed in the mind seems to pass very quickly in comparison to clock time: an event took more clock time than the human mind perceived. When time is extended, the actual time span of an event was much shorter that experienced. Time on the mind is also referred...
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...(Dalsimer). Despite her tumultuous childhood, she was an original thinker and a revolutionary writer, specifically the way she described depth of characters in her novels. Her novels are distinctively modern and express characters in a way no other writer had done before. One reason it is easy to acknowledge the importance of Virginia Woolf is because she wrote prolifically. Along with many novels, she wrote essays, critiques and many volumes of her personal journals have been published. She is one of the most extraordinary and influential female writers throughout history. Virginia Woolf is an influential author because of her unique style, incorporations of symbolism and use of similes and metaphors in her literature, specifically in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Virginia Woolf’s eccentric style is what causes her writings to be distinct from other authors of her time. The unique characteristics of her works such as the structure, characterization, themes, etc are difficult to imitate and cause a strong impression in her literary pieces. “Virginia Woolf’s works are strongly idiosyncratic, strange, a surprise to the new reader” (Goldman). Due to the level of peculiarity in Woolf’s works, many consider her writings to be...
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...Comparative essay (incomplete) “An examination of a pair of texts reveals similarities in their concerns and their contexts” The last hundred years have been characterised by wide scale and extremely rapid change: both Modernism and early 21st century United States were shaped by extraordinary social, cultural and political upheaval. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Daldry’s “The Hours” (2002) show overlapping and interwoven ideas that reveal their contextual concerns – decay of faith in authority (such as God, politicians and doctors), changing ideas about gender equality and sexuality, and how our perception of time shapes our lives. Both the novel and film convey these ideas through the appropriate techniques of the Modernist and Post Modern contexts. In Britain during the early 20th Century, and again in the USA late in the century, a declining belief in authority figures and religion was expressed in the work of many creative composers, as well as in Mrs Dalloway. Woolf expresses this shared belief through Septimus, and the conflicting values of Miss Kilman and Mrs Dalloway. In the introduction, the motor car with its unknown entity inside symbolising authority and upper class privilege slowly drives through the crowd of working and middle class. Woolf establishes the tendency of the upper class to float over the middle and working class, and their tendency to not connect with anyone of lower class which implies that they never really gain a clear understanding...
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...A Gap of Sky A) In the short story “A Gap of Sky” we follow a young woman on her quest for the essence of life. Throughout the story, which stretches across an afternoon, she digs deeper into herself, through sleepiness, drugs, university and a general indifference towards life, until she sees herself, on a grey afternoon in the centre of London, “filled with something fizzing and alive and beautiful”. Ellie wakes up around 4 pm after a rough night with alcohol and various drugs that ended on a rooftop somewhere in London. She remembers that she felt happy that early morning, affected by the drugs and the surreal surroundings, but as she wakes up in her wretched little apartment, the joy of last night seems far away. She needs to hand in an essay on Virginia Wolf the next morning, so she rushes of to get some printer ink, cigarettes and possibly also some more coke. Ellie seems tired, worn out from last night and you understand that she has a hard time getting out of bed. You might get the impression that her life is a bit shallow, for instance when she tells that last night she was surrounded by people who laughed and had a good time, but now she is alone, coping with the harsh realities of a Monday morning. She seems tough, or wanting to seem tough, but she changes towards the end of the short story to a more real toughness of calm confidence. The core of Ellie's life isn't exactly to fulfil society's or her parent's wishes for a bright young woman. She has already had...
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