Jumping into the book Mrs. Dalloway, I wasn’t really sure what to expect because I’ve never read one of Virginia Woolf’s works before and also because reading books from the twentieth century didn’t really appeal to me until now. I thought the book would just have a mundane plot line about the life of this Mrs. Dalloway. I thought we’d be focused solely on her, her hopes, dreams, regrets, insecurities etc. But I was happily surprised to see that the focus didn't remain on her but that the narration shifts from character to character; whose stories end up being intertwined in some way.
On a normal occurrence, books with multiple character narrations don’t really appeal to me. From my own experience, I find that these types of narrations simply add a bit of messiness and confusion to the book. But for some weird, unexplainable reason, I actually really like the way that Woolf veers between characters and especially the transitions she used to do.
One of my favorite character transitions in the book is the first deviation we see from Clarissa, to strangers in the street, to Septimus. I love the way she brought everyone together and used their focus on the fancy car and modernistic sky writer to switch perspectives from character to character. While reading this specific part of the book, I imagine seeing a cloud of smoke (or something, I don’t really know) flowing in and out of the characters. Moving down the line, gathering different point of views until it finally settles into Septimus, in which it remains for a while before flowing away once more. But there are times when you don’t know for sure whose head you’re in, or if it’s the narrator simple telling you how this character feels, which is another aspect of Woolf’s writing style that I really appreciate. How she puts so much reflection, detail and effort into her characters.
In class, we read the article Woolf wrote in which she expresses that characters are the most important part of book. She states that to make the book more enjoyable and intriguing, the characters need to be more realistically human and have to be thoroughly focused on. Their thoughts and emotions have to be expressed deeply so that the reader is able to connect with them. And I feel this is exactly what Woolf has done in Mrs. Dalloway.
I don’t really think of myself as a 52 year old woman or as a traumatized war veteran, but the way she constructs both Clarissa and Septimus thoughts and feelings sort of resonate with my own. I’m not really sure that I feel or perceive the world as intensely as Septimus does. Maybe a mini breakdown over a math test or something. But at points, I’m mostly like Clarissa; wondering if I made the right choice in a certain situation. Like what would my day or life look like if I choose C instead of A on that physics quiz. Would the change be so drastic? Sometimes we all can’t help but wonder “what if”, even if we are completely satisfied with the life we are living. At this point in her life, she has been Mrs. Dalloway for so long, that she has sort of forgotten what it feels like to be Clarissa. In Mrs. Dalloway’s case, she lost the fun-loving and carefree spirit she once had when she younger. She had to adjust, “improve” herself to take on the name Dalloway. She had to change things about herself in order to secure others’ opinions about her and her husband. Clarissa recognizes this change but it may be a little too late to act upon it now. You spend a large amount (basically your whole life) being influenced by other’s opinions and thoughts, which intertwine with your own; and this path either helps you discover your true self or turns you into someone else. There are points where we all feel like Clarissa does at some point; you ask yourself the question, who is the real me? But does anyone really know?
The connection you describe at the end here gets at the essence of how fiction works for me: bridging the gaps between me as a reader and other people's experience of the world. There's a profound insight into the interconnectedness and common experience of all people in the observation that young, twenty-first-century readers like you can feel pretty intense connections to and a sense of understanding of people who appear so different from them, like Clarissa, or moreso, Septimus.
ReplyDeleteI really like your discussion of how Clarissa's identity and behavior changed after she married Richard, and her reasons for doing so. Everyone has gone through personality changes of some sort and felt the same confusion about who they are, and its fascinating to see this theme examined in Mrs. Dalloway. Characters in many books reflect on who they are, but mostly I've seen this topic handled from the perspective of teenagers trying to find themselves. I find Mrs. Dalloway a refreshing look at this concept - an adult contemplates on her life so far and the decisions she made.
ReplyDeleteIt's fun to read Mrs. Dalloway as Woolf's attempt to exemplify the ideals for fiction that she lays forth in her essays. Her characters are not only weirdly relatable, the way in which they move through their thoughts is relatable as well. Of course, the familiarity of their thought processes feed into their overall relatability. And our understanding of them. An interesting effect achieved in Mrs. Dalloway is that we feel we know the characters better than anybody else, whereas in other fiction, I would assume that other characters know each other better than I do.
ReplyDeleteI like how you ended this blog post with reflections about what it means to have a 'real' self. It connects nicely with the scene that we discussed at the end of class on Thursday, where Clarissa had to put effort into constructing her self for the rest of the world to see. That passage stuck out to me because at the same time as she was reassembling the same face for the public, her internal self was changing as she experienced different things and made new decisions. It's very strange to think how oneself is both constantly in flux and yet somehow constant throughout everything, and Mrs. Dalloway did a good job of bringing those thoughts to light.
ReplyDeleteI like how you described Woolf's style of switching the viewpoints as a cloud of smoke. Sometimes it is like a relay, where we see part of an interaction of situation from one point of view and then the event continues, but we see the rest from another character's point of view. I think that Virginia Woolf lives up to her idea that characters are the most important element of a story by doing this as it forces us to pay attention and almost discover the characters for ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI think as a book written during a time with little knowledge about psychology, Mrs. Dalloway entices readers to really study their own and other people's thoughts. In just the way that the Mezzanine got its readers to think about mundane things in their own lives, Woolf gets us to think about our real self as well as other people's true self. I think most people finish this book with a brain full of new questions about nothing other than... the brain. Just a few of mine would be: 'Do we all have the same extent of an inner and outer appearance?' and 'If we could see into the thoughts of other people, would it be like in Mrs. Dalloway?'. These are just some of the questions provoked by Woolf's book and I am sure that there are many other questions you all have after finishing this novel.
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