Clarissa Dalloways Double
Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" is a day-in-the-life story that folds back and forth in time, examining one woman's life decisions and one man's postwar nightmare. The woman is Clarissa Dalloway, a "perfect hostess" in her early fifties, confronts the decisions she made thirty years ago. The man, intended by the author to be Clarissa's "double", is the "shell-shocked" war veteran Septimus Warren Smith who suffers delayed flashbacks over the wartime death of a comrade. The novel follows parallel stories of Clarissa and her "double," whom she has never met. Their lives are connected through interaction of external events in time and space, such as Clarissa's evening party, a motor car ...
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Clarissa's party.
Virginia Woolf manages to make use of time and space to join the apparently disconnected journeys of Clarissa and Septimus. Their stories take place in a single June day in 1923, within the city of London. The day culminates with the party to be held in the evening. The party is not only looked forward to as a great event for Clarissa and her guests. More significantly, the party also foreshadows the only direct connection we could find between Clarissa and Septimus, with a doctor who, having treated Septimus, shows up at the party to report his fate.
Again, Clarissa and Septimus are joined in time and space as Clarissa is shopping on Bond street. Among the London traffic, Clarissa is pondering how to make sense of her life in relation to other people: "in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being...part of the people she had never met"(11). Clarissa's feeling that we are part ...
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strikes of Big Ben mark the climax of their journeys. Clarissa's party is about to begin while Septimus is undergoing a nervous breakdown and eventually commits suicide.
Water is the recurring imagery used by Woolf to associate Clarissa and Septimus. Water is something that cannot be contained, it therefore suggests irregularity. Despite that Clarissa is being seen as a realist by the others, she identifies herself strongly with different images of water, and these indicate the irrationality in her characters. Standing on the street, Clarissa suddenly feels "herself being out, out, far out to the sea"(10). Sea appears as a dangerous element and the individuals are likely to be carried ...
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"Clarissa Dalloways Double." Essayworld.com. November 5, 2006. Accessed April 25, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Clarissa-Dalloways-Double/55101.
"Clarissa Dalloways Double." Essayworld.com. November 5, 2006. Accessed April 25, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Clarissa-Dalloways-Double/55101.
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