Exercises from the book pages 534-535

Comprehension

-          Mrs Dalloway is going to the flower-shop, for buying some flowers.

-          She feels in good mood because she considers the moment she’s living a lovely morning.

-          The two different settings are present time, a morning of June in London, when Clarissa is fifty-two years old, and past time during Clarissa’s girlhood, in Burton, when she was eighteen years old. The past times are evoked by the sound of the door’s hinges. 

-          Peter Walsh is an old friend of Clarissa, probably a boy that loved her in girlhood. She thought he was quite boring but for his striking mottos.

-          Scrope Purvis thinks Clarissa is “charming” and “vivacious” as a small and colored bird, though she was not young anymore and convalescent from an illness.

-          Clarissa has a philosophical quest in her mind, walking in Westminster. She wonders why people (even poor and unlucky) is so attached to life.

Interpretation

-          The narrator used is a 3^rd person omniscient narrator. It coincides with the main character, so it’s a reliable narrator. Finally he’s non intrusive, because he disappears giving voice to it’s characters.

-          Example of repetitions is “how fresh, how calm” (here anaphoric) or “like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave” (also a simile). Imagery can be individuated in the description of Clarissa by Purvis (“a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious) or in the “plunge” made by the woman in the morning. The device of list is used several times: one of the most evident is at the end of the extract describing the city elements (“in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead”). Finally examples of alliterations are  “when, with”, “rooks rising”.

-          Characterization of Clarissa is given by her thoughts and feelings, her behavior and also by writer’s use of imagery and symbols.

-          Clarissa’s stream of thoughts begins with the sound of “little squeak” of her home door’s hinges that reminded her the same noise of the French windows at Bourton.  The stream of consciousness is a literary technique of representing the continuous flow of sense‐perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form. The stream of consciousness is a confused and mixed "storm" of thoughts, a free representation of thoughts before they are ordered in a logical way. The interior monologue is also a literary expedient to depict character's thoughts, so it can be considered one particular kind of stream of consciousness writing: the character’s thoughts are presented directly, imitating as much as possible the character’s mind style. Anyway the thoughts are presented in a more well-arranged style, nearer to literary language.  

-          The picture is a not detailed portrait of a woman: the outlines are well marked but the inner part of the figure is quite incomplete, especially face’s features are really confused. Vanessa Bell seems to ask the reader to add details and imagine how is the character. Mrs. Woolf, and modernists writers in general, has the same approach towards characters’ presentation.