MRS DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf

-What a Morning!-

Comprehension

-        Mrs Dalloway is going to buy some flowers.

-        She feels positive, amused and calm. She can't help feeling that she loves her city (London), and that life is beautiful.

-        The two different time dimensions mixed in the text are Mrs Dalloway's youth and the day in which the story takes place. The sound that evokes the past in Clarissa's mind is the squeak of the door's hinges.

-        Peter Walsh is an acquaintance of Mrs Dalloway (perhaps a lover during her youth?). Clarissa says that that she doesn't remember much of him, just a few things such as his smile, his grumpiness and, very strange in her opinion, some sayings about vegetables(!) when everything else about him has vanished.

-        Scrope Purvis thinks that she is a charming woman, although she is over fifty and white since her illness; a little like a bird, a jay: blue-green, light, vivacious.

-        Mrs Dalloway thoughts while walking through the streets in Westminster are:

-       People, even those who have lived in Westminster for a long time, feel a particular hush or solemnity, a suspense, before the Big Ben strikes.

-       Everyone loves life, also the "veriest frumps" and the "most dejected of miseries"

-       The surrounding world reminds her how she loves life, London and the present moment of June.

Interpretation

-        Narrator:

-       3^rd person

-       Omniscient

-       Reliable

-       Not coinciding with the main character

-       Not intrusive

-        Repetitions: "like the flap of a wave, the kiss of a wave", "why one loves it so, how one sees it so".

      Similes: "fresh as issued to children on a beach", "like the flap of a wave, the kiss of a wave".

      Lists: " his eyes, his pocket-knife, his grumpiness...", "a particular hush, or solemnity, an indescribable pause, a suspense".

      Alliterations: "brass brands", "shuffling and swinging".

-        Clarissa's character is created through: dialogue, Clarissa's thoughts and feeling, Clarissa's behavior, people's thoughts about her.

-        Clarissa's stream of consciousness starts in the second paragraph. Virginia Wolf's "interior monologue" is different from Joyce's "stream of consciousness" as the former shows the intercession of the narrator, while the latter is simply a report of the character's thought without any filter.

-        I can find a similarity in the way the two sisters portray characters. Both of them present a vision of what the characters are doing, vision from which the psychology of the subject can be deduced.