Mrs. Dalloway
When discussing Virginia Woolf's fictitious character's in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, one can ultimately decide that these characters are filled with diversity and dimensional character. As the reader, I wholeheartedly disagree that the characters "are not perfect illustrations either of virtue or of vice." They are quite the contrary! These characters are perfect illustrations of virtue and high merit. Their lives are filled with commonalities that all humans can relate to. This gives Woolf's characters the pizzazz that keeps readers coming back for more generation after generation.
Clarissa Dalloway, the central character, is a complex woman. Her relations with other women reveal as much about her personality as do her own rumination. By focusing at length on several characters, all of whom are in some way connected to Clarissa, Woolf expertly portrays the ways females interact: sometimes drawing upon one another for things which they cannot get from men; other times, turning on each other out of jealousy and insecurity.
According to author Jacob Littleton, "the most fundamental fact of Clarissa's psyche is the pleasure she takes in physical, sensual existence." (Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 41. Issue: 1. p.36).Although the entire novel tells of only one day, Woolf covers a lifetime in her enlightening prose and consistently explains the mystery of the human personality. The
Dalloway may be viewed by some as random congealing of various character experiences but, it appears to be a fragmented assortment of images and thought, there is a psychological coherence to the deeply layered novel. Part of this coherence can be found in Mrs. Dalloway's psychological tone which is tragic and human in nature.
According to literary critic and author Harold Bloom, Mrs. Dalloway is made up of remnants through precise imagery.
Mrs. Dalloway is made up of "fragments." has a story and some characters -- by conventional standards, a fragmentary dramatic design -- but the fragments of which the novel is composed would not seem related or particularly significant without another sort of connection. The dramatic sequences are connected through a single metaphorical nucleus, and the key metaphors are projected and sustained by a continuous web of subtly related minor metaphors and harmonizing imagery. "
Bloom p. 67)
This imagery is what sustains Woolf's characters and ultimately brings them to life in a personal way. Perception is Reality in Mrs. Dalloway. The delicate Clarissa Dalloway, a disciplined English lady, provides the perfect contrast to Septimus Warren Smith, our resident insane ex-soldier living in chaos through imagery conjured up by Woolf.
But not only imagery is what fulfills the reader with a personal relationship to the characters in Mrs.…
It would take an entire paper just to explicate all of the roles that women play today and how society has changed as a result. The point is that it has changed and that women play a much different role in literature today than they did even just a century ago during Woolf's time. Woolf saw just a glimpse into the social turn that has led to the present
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