Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf

There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put on their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe... Narrower and narrower would her bed be.

hears the birds singing messages to him in Greek, and sees the dead watching him from behind the railings.

It's the summer sensation that reminds her of youth, and Peter Walsh. This tells us that he was basically the one that got away.

We're not a unified unit; we have different facets that we show to different people. So Clarissa as a young woman is completely different from Mrs. Dalloway.

Woolf allows us to see different versions of Clarissa. No version is the ultimate version of her.

A response to something that was said to her. We can assume that Lucy is a kind of servant. We later find out that a party is happening.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning - fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the

French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the breath of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding around them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, 'Musing among the vegetables?' - was that it? - 'I prefer men to cauliflowers' - was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace - Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished - how strange it was! - a few sayings like this about cabbages.

He doesn't submit to the rules of society. He should be more reserved and dignified.

"I prefer men to cauliflowers": his sarcastic tone is shown. He actually means it; to him establishing an intimate connection is more important than wasting that potential on nature.

This offhand remark is the reason she rejected him.

For her, such an intimate connection is very self-consuming. She wanted to protect herself and that's why she decided to go for the passionless life. This is similar to Septimus.

Woolf is precisely letting Clarissa out of the house to allow us to see her perceived from different people.

She stood a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright

Vivacious: She loves life. But she still goes by the rules of society.

A shift in perspective happened here.

She took the decision that was aligned with her fears not her character which is why she's not over him.

Why does she appreciate her surroundings more? Her illness/ her heart was affected which means that for a while, she must've been limited in her home. This is a good excuse for her to return to life/ take a plunge back to life/ returning back to humanity.

For having lived in Westminster - how many years now? over twenty, - one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuing and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

Bright context but death is the undertone. This is punctuated by big ben's clock.

Facets of industrialized, modern life or urban settings.

Note of death reiterated. So it's not just on the personal level, but on the general life. A lot of them are still mourning losses. The losses are compounded.

Life and death intermingle on the personal and public level.

For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven - over. It was June.

Note of death reiterated, showing death as it intermingles on both the public and personal level.

We see the presence of death not only on a personal level but also on a broader political and public level. Although people are celebrating, many are also grieving. Loss is shown as something sudden and overwhelming: overnight, a person can become destitute when property passes to a distant cousin instead of a son, or a woman may be forced to begin a new business while the news of a death is still fresh, holding the telegram in her hand. Life and death are therefore deeply intertwined, both privately and publicly.

Clarissa Dalloway continues to appreciate the world around her, yet we are soon introduced to another character who is ill, dull, and sickly, reinforcing the atmosphere of fragility. This contrast becomes especially clear in the flower shop scene and the episode of the car backfiring. The moment is fascinating because different people interpret it in different ways. Mrs. Dalloway and the woman in the flower shop are initially frightened, but then realize that the noise is only a car backfiring. However, speculation quickly follows: some believe the car belongs to the Prime Minister, others to the Queen or a prince. No single explanation is confirmed, and Woolf deliberately leaves the moment open to multiple interpretations.

Through this scene, we see how ordinary people try to attach glamour and importance to an otherwise ordinary day. This response is closely linked to the post-war context, where meaning and excitement are sought in public events. On this same street, we are also introduced to a new character, Septimus Smith, whom we will examine more closely later.

But Peter - however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink - Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the world that

Unlike Clarissa, Peter isn't infatuated by the world's appearance or its baseness. Instead, he views the state of the world deeply and what truly captures his attention is people's depth and soul.

interested him; Wagner, Pope's poetry, people's characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom), she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said

So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's Park, still making out that she had been right - and she had too - not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning, for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when someone told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. But those Indian women did presumably - silly, pretty, imsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he assured her - perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still. She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly.

She chose security over passion, which is ridiculous because she is someone who is deeply passionate.

She's looking at it from a social perspective; Peter only goes where his passion takes him whereas Richard is a member from the parliament and he's successful in the eyes of society.

In the eyes of society, Peter is seen as a failure.

She's still having her doubts and regrets.

It could be that he's trying to evoke any sense of emotion from her.

Objectively- he wasn't just being mean, he doesn't understand why she's not going after her passions. He feels that she's damaging her own life. He views her marriage to Richard as a life in death.

She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of

She doesn't like to put labels on things.

Reminiscent of The Picture of Dorian Gray's quote: "to define is to limit"

Modernist were dealing with this uncertainty, so the idea of defining someone as one certain aspect is not only limiting but it's not realistic.

All of the different versions of her are contradictory but they're still her. She didn't get any education which is also reflective of society back then. No judgement on her as a person.

knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton - such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the wagons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But everyone remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow 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, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards' shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun Nor the furious winter's rages.

The novel explores several key themes, including the urban setting, time, mortality and death, and alienation. One important idea is that there are no isolated or standalone moments; every moment is connected to the past. Time is fluid rather than fixed, and this fluidity is a central element of the novel. Another major theme is health and illness, particularly insanity, which is closely connected to Woolf's own life and experiences and will be discussed in more detail later. The themes of science and technology are also present throughout the text.

We also encounter strong ideas of duality, contrast, and doubling, with characters and situations reflecting or mirroring one another. These doubles appear in several passages that are worth close attention. In addition, the novel presents an uncharacteristic protagonist. Instead of a young woman whose story ends in marriage, we follow a fifty-two-year-old woman who is already married and has raised a child. According to traditional social and gender norms, there is seemingly "nothing more" for her to do, which makes her an unconventional central character.

Structurally, the novel has no clear divisions or rigid organization. It unfolds as a continuous flow of thoughts through the stream-of-consciousness technique, with no definite beginning or end. The story feels as though it is already in motion when it starts. For example, we are introduced to Lucy without knowing who she is or why she is busy. We gradually understand the narrative step by step.

This understanding is shaped by Woolf's repeated use of the past. Through brief memories and flashbacks, the reader "digs" into the characters' inner lives to understand their motivations, their consistency, and how they change over time. These constant recreations of the past allow us to trace character development and psychological depth throughout the novel.

Vivacious

The entire country is still recovering from the great war and everyone was contemplating death and life. Mrs. Dalloway in particular dwelled on that. So we have the public versus the private theme.

A dark morbid undertone even in the midst of all the happiness, but her conclusion isn't a dark one; life is interconnected and her legacy will continue on.

Interconnections, an organic network. It's a comfort to know that even after she dies, life won't end. The continuation or legacy of life. The description of life is in terms of a body of water; a very beautiful imagery.

"Fear no more ..." lines of comfort that the person who died doesn't have to worry about anything. Those lines reflect her line of thoughts; a sense of rebirth, consolation after death, Clarissa is scared of submitting to those passions, which were mentioned in "furious". She's going to relate this to the public at the end.

How much she wanted it - that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even differently! She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough, with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large; interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified, very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird's. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing - nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

She regrets a lot of things. The image of her as Mrs. Dalloway is related to her looking old, contrasting with her description of Clarissa

She is dissatisfied even though she meets the expectations of societal norms. She married Richard only because it was the rational and respectable thing to do. She hid behind gender norms.

Lady Bexborough is not traditional in any sense; she defies gender norms, expresses her political beliefs unapologetically, and appears in an unconventional way, but Clarissa deems her as a model to emulate.

This passage highlights the inner conflict: Clarissa's character versus how she presents herself (appearance versus reality). She's not following her natural impulses.

It's all about the inner worlds of the characters. How they came to be.

Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond Street to a shop where they kept flowers for her when she gave a party. Elizabeth really cared for her dog most of all. The whole house this morning smelt of tar. Still, better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman; better distemper and tar and all the rest of it than sitting mewed in a study bedroom with a prayer book! Better anything, she was inclined to say. But it might be only a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who had been badly treated of course; one must make allowances for that, and Richard said she was very able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to Communion; and how she dressed, how she treated people who came to lunch she did not care a bit, it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school during the War - poor embittered unfortunate creature! For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that

She starts to think about her daughter and how she doesn't like what recently influenced her.

Conflicting class, ideology and a religious context: Miss Kilman is a religious figure who's a history teacher and Clarissa's problem is miss Kilman's sense of superiority and judgmental character. She is similar to Dante. She passes judgment on everyone and that's why Clarissa feels that her hold on her daughter is slipping.

There is a parallel between them; both deem themselves superior, they protect themselves with a certain societal norm as a shield from society.

was not Miss Kilman; had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.

Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson's scent shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud's sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales's, the Queen's, the Prime Minister's? Whose face was it? Nobody knew

Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend? Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body. The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped outside Mulberry's shop window; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang out. Trac accumulated. And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what purpose? 'Let us go on, Septimus,' said his wife, a little woman, with large eyes in a sallow pointed face; an Italian girl. But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car and the tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there - the Queen going shopping? The chauffeur, who had been opening something, turning something, shutting something, got on to the box. 'Come on,' said Lucrezia.

The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still ruing the faces on both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. The face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known.

It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway,

Clarissa guessed

Clarissa guessed;

Episode of an airplane

Vagueness: Everyone will have an interpretation of the plane's writing. It will end up to be a toffee ad.

How industries and civilization changes society.

An intro to Septimus' character: he's described as bird like, similar to Clarissa. We know that he's shell shocked. And we have a parallel between the sane and the insane; his thoughts echo Clarissa's views on life.

Like Clarissa, Septimus is actually appreciating life around him.

He feels overwhelmed by the beauty of life; his appreciation is, however, unfiltered. He was of a sensitive and passionate nature. This appreciation of beauty isn't limited to nature but it's also the human sounds that create a sense of harmony within him.

We're not self-contained but we're part and parcel of everything around us.

Septimus says it in a way that makes us question if those are the ravings of an insane man or if there is a seed of truth within them.

"scientific" the terminology used is very industrial and modern. The city from different eyes.

Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James's Street. Tall men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tailcoats and their white slips and their hair raked back who, for reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window of White's with their hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale light of the immortal presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa Dalloway. At once they stood even straighter, and removed their hands, and seemed ready to attend their Sovereign, if need be, to the cannon's mouth, as their ancestors had done before them. The white busts and the little tables in the background covered with copies of the Tatler and syphons of soda water seemed to approve; seemed to indicate the owing corn and the manor houses of

England; and to return the frail hum of the motor wheels as the walls of a whispering gallery return a single voice expanded and made sonorous by the might of a whole cathedral. Shawled Moll Pratt with her owers on the pavement wished the dear boy well (it was the Prince of Wales for certain) and would have tossed the price of a pot of beer - a bunch of roses - into St. James's Street out of sheer light-heartedness and contempt of poverty had she not seen the constable's eye upon her, discouraging an old Irishwoman's loyalty. The sentries at St. James's saluted; Queen Alexandra's policeman approved.

K, an E, a Y perhaps?

It had gone; it was behind the clouds. There was no sound. The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a mission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed, and yet

It was toee; they were advertising toee, a nursemaid told Rezia. Together they began to spell t . . . o . . . f . . . 'K . . . R . . . said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say 'Kay Arr' close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientic, above all scientic) can quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transxed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a

Key ideas: Different interests and perceptions. The idea of imposing meaning to a mundane moment. The pervasiveness of technology and the usage of industrial diction.

hollow wave, like plumes on horses' heads, feathers on ladies', so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.

Men must not cut down trees.

Clarissa's home is described as a vault; it's a life in death way of living. It's also where she retreats and "sheds" her facade of performance.

The hall of the house was cool as a vault. Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions.

Peter is very aware of his failures.

Why does she hide her dress? - she's not expecting someone to barge in her private space. It's an intimate moment of vulnerability, so she's flustered by this lack of decorum and this goes against everything she projects and the social norms. She then regains her composure and Peter actually gets to see the facade of her composure.

She's fulfilling the prophecy of Peter; preparing for the party and being married to a prime minister.

Spontaneous visiting, which is very fitting for Peter. This isn't part of the social norm and Clarissa thinks this is outrageous. Peter is actually anglo-Indian, which is why he went to India as he had a family there.

Tunneling: two aspects of Clarissa. How they meet and act like teenagers again.

There isn't any facade to Peter unlike Mrs. Dalloway who performs most of her time.

Heavens, the front-door bell!' exclaimed Clarissa, staying her needle. Roused, she listened. 'Mrs. Dalloway will see me,' said the elderly man in the hall. 'Oh yes, she will see me,' he repeated, putting Lucy aside very benevolently, and running upstairs ever so quickly. 'Yes, yes, yes,' he muttered as he ran upstairs. 'She will see me. After five years in India, Clarissa will see me.' 'Who can - what can,' asked Mrs. Dalloway (thinking it was outrageous to be interrupted at eleven o'clock on the morning of the day she was giving a party), hearing a step on the stairs. She heard a hand upon the door. She made to hide her dress, like a virgin protecting chastity, respecting privacy. Now the brass knob slipped. Now the door opened, and in came - for a single second she could not remember what he was called! so surprised she was to see him, so glad, so shy, so utterly taken aback to have Peter Walsh come to her unexpectedly in the morning! (She had not read his letter.) 'And how are you?' said Peter Walsh, positively trembling; taking both her hands; kissing both her hands. She's grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan't tell her anything about it, he thought, for she's grown older. She's looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his pocket, he took out a large pocket-knife and half opened the blade. Exactly the same, thought Clarissa; the same queer look; the same check suit; a little out of the straight his face is, a little thinner, dryer, perhaps, but he looks awfully well, and just the same. 'How heavenly it is to see you again!' she exclaimed. He had his knife out. That's so like him, she thought. He had only reached town last night, he said; would have to go down into the country at once; and how was everything, how was everybody - Richard? Elizabeth?

And what's all this?' he said, tilting his pen-knife towards her green dress. He's very well dressed, thought Clarissa; yet he always criticises me. Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here she's been sitting all the time I've been in India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the House and back and all that, he thought, growing more and more irritated, more and more agitated, for there's nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage, he thought; and politics; and having a Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard. So it is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a snap.

He champions experiencing new things and he feels like Clarissa is missing out. He is agitated by her wasted potential. He's calling for women to have a sense of self that is independent from their husbands.

so bad for some women as marri

Lady Bradshaw wasn't as lucky as Clarissa. Peter's influence on Clarissa was more dangerous for her. It can turn into conversion, which can kill her. Clarissa escaped that trap through her logical reasoning; protecting her soul by marrying Richard.

attic room: she needed rest. It was a space that was considered a temporary strategic retreat. (A scene where she shedding her clothes highlights how she's shedding the social facade at that time).

Interesting trajectory of Mrs. Dalloway, room nineteen, the hours.

The brutal interview scene between Septimus et cetera.

The moment of danger - he has to remind his wife that he loves her and bring her flowers since Peter arrived.

Lady Bruton is trying to hold on to anything that would provide meaning to her life. The thing that she wanted to write the letter about was immigration, she also mentioned that it could be literally anything.

Luncheon: She asked Richard for help in writing the letter.

Tell me, he said, seizing her by the shoulders.

Are you happy, Clarissa? Does Richard

This is like an attack; this daring of the soul done by Peter and she can't really stand that, which is why she hides behind the facade of claiming Elizabeth in a dramatic manner.

She has a conflict within her because she doesn't follow her desires; she decided to rationally protect her soul.

The door opened. 'Here is my Elizabeth,' said Clarissa, emotionally, histrionically, perhaps. 'How do you do?' said Elizabeth coming forward. The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that. 'Hullo, Elizabeth!' cried Peter, stuffing his handkerchief into his pocket, going quickly to her, saying 'Good-bye Clarissa' without looking at her, leaving the room quickly, and running downstairs and opening the hall door. 'Peter! Peter!' cried Clarissa, following him out on to the landing. 'My party tonight! Remember my party tonight!' she cried, having to raise her voice against the roar of the open air, and, overwhelmed by the traffic and the sound of all the clocks striking, her voice crying 'Remember my party tonight!' sounded frail and thin and very far away as Peter Walsh shut the door.

The element of time; it passes by even if she wants it to stretch.

(A reverse) At the end, it's very interesting that she's the one who's calling out to him.

Those five years - nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty-three - had been, he suspected, somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different. Now, for instance, there was a man writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water-closets. That you couldn't have done ten years ago - written quite openly about

The modernist changes. People are talking more openly about their bodily functions. People are getting away from all the decorous ideals. It's a different reaction to London than the one we see by Clarissa and Septimus; the fragmentation of not getting a singular image of any setting.

water-closets

By traditional standards, women are deemed spinsters if they're not married by their twenties. Now, it's completely different.

water-closets in a respectable weekly. And then this taking out a stick of rouge, or a powder-puff, and making up in public. On board ship coming home there were lots of young men and girls - Betty and Bertie he remembered in particular - carrying on quite openly; the old mother sitting and watching them with her knitting, cool as a cucumber. The girl would stand still and powder her nose in front of everyone. And they weren't engaged; just having a good time; no feelings hurt on either side. As hard as nails she was - Betty Whatshername - but a thorough good sort. She would make a very good wife at thirty - she would marry when it suited her to marry; marry some rich man and live in a large house near Manchester.

suited her to marry

Oddly enough, she was one of the most thorough-going sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in sceptics

Her vision of religion was that God always had a negative influence; her sister dying, hardships. She thinks that it's a point of resistance, so despite all of this suffering, she'll do good to spite the higher powers.

from an agnostic to an atheist. life in death; life will continue on this earth. Tyndall: greenhouse effect. His influence was in the field of radiation and he gave lectures to regular people as he aimed to make science more accessible. He thought that religion and science should be separated. He also believed in social darwinism. her own readings reflect her beliefs; she appears to be very traditional on the outside, but the more we hear about her, the more we understand the layers beneath the facets of her personality. Huxley: a scientist who created the field of biology. He too believes that religion and science should be separated.

others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those rascals, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way - her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives, were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia's death - that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin Parry's fault - all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn't so positive, perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy (though, goodness only knows, she had her reserves; it was a mere sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all these years, could make of Clarissa). Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. (Very likely she would have talked to those lovers, if she had thought them unhappy.) She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn't mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination. There she would sit at the head of the table taking infinite pains with some old butler who might be useful to Dalloway - they knew the most appalling bores in Europe - or in came Elizabeth and everything must give way to her. She was at a

High School, at the inarticulate stage last time he was over, a round-eyed, pale-faced girl, with nothing of her mother in her, a silent stolid creature, who took it all as a matter of course, let her mother make a fuss of her, and then said 'May I go now?' like a child of four; going on, Clarissa explained, with that mixture of amusement and pride which Dalloway himself seemed to rouse in her, to play hockey. And now Elizabeth was 'out', presumably; thought him an old fogy, laughed at her mother's friends. Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent's Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained - at last! - the power which adds the supreme flavor to existence - the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fortieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a hero of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has become famous.

London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging on the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: - It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room on the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare. Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a square. 'It has flowered,' the gardener might have said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o'clock in the morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw. Something was up, Mr. Brewer knew; Mr. Brewer, managing clerk at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents; something was up, he thought, and, being paternal with his young men, and thinking very highly of Smith's abilities, and prophesying that he would, in ten or fifteen years, succeed to the leather arm-chair in the inner room under the skylight with the deed-boxes round him, 'if he keeps his health,' said Mr. Brewer, and that was the danger - he looked weakly; advised football, invited him to supper and was seeing his way to consider recommending a rise of salary, when something happened which threw out many of Mr. Brewer's calculations, took away his ablest young fellows, and eventually, so prying and insidious were the fingers of the European War, smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook's nerves at Mr. Brewer's establishment at Muswell Hill. Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog's ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other. But when Evans (Rezia, who had only seen him once, called him 'a quiet man', a sturdy red-headed man, undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, September, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference. When peace came he was in Milan, billeted in the house of an innkeeper with a courtyard, flowers in tubs, little tables in the open, daughters making hats, and to Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became engaged one evening when the panic was on him - that he could not feel. For now that it was all over, truce signed, and the dead buried, he had, especially in the evening, these sudden thunder-claps of fear. He could not feel. As he opened the door of the room where the Italian girls sat making hats, he could see them; could hear them; they were rubbing wires among coloured beads in saucers;

they were turning buckram shapes this way and that; the table was all strewn with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors were rapping on the table; but something failed him; he could not feel. Still, scissors rapping, girls laughing, hats being made protected him; he was assured of safety; he had a refuge. But he could not sit there all night. There were moments of waking in the early morning. The bed was falling; he was falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamplight and the buckram shapes! He asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the gay, the frivolous, with those little artist's fingers that she would hold up and say 'It is all in them.' Silk, feathers, what not were alive to them. 'It is the hat that matters most,' she would say, when they walked out together. Every hat that passed, she would examine; and the cloak and the dress and the way the woman held herself. Ill-dressing, over-dressing she stigmatised, not savagely, rather with impatient movements of the hands, like those of a painter who puts from him some obvious well-meant glaring imposture; and then, generously, but always critically, she would welcome a shop-girl who had turned her little bit of stuff gallantly, or praise, wholly, with enthusiastic and professional understanding, a French lady descending from her carriage, in chinchilla, robes, pearls. 'Beautiful!' she would murmur, nudging Septimus, that he might see. But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste (Rezia liked ices, chocolates, sweet things) had no relish to him. He put down his cup on the little marble table. He looked at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the tea-shop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him - he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily ('Septimus, do put down your book,' said Rezia, gently shutting the Inferno), he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then - that he could not feel. 'The English are so silent,' Rezia said. She liked it, she said. She respected these Englishmen, and wanted to see London, and the

English horses, and the tailor-made suits, and could remember hearing how wonderful the shops were, from an aunt who had married and lived in Soho. It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning. At the office they advanced him to a post of considerable responsibility. They were proud of him; he had won crosses. 'You have done your duty; it is up to us-' began Mr. Brewer; and could not finish, so pleasurable was his emotion. They took admirable lodgings on the Tottenham Court Road. Here he opened Shakespeare once more. That boy's business of the intoxication of language - Antony and Cleopatra - had shrivelled utterly. How Shakespeare loathed humanity - the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same. There Rezia sat at the table trimming hats. She trimmed hats for Mrs. Filmer's friends; she trimmed hats by the hour. She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned, under water, he thought.