Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
>> 1 Clarissa is told of Septimus's death and images him throwing himself from a window;
2 She reflects on life and death;
3 She imagines the meeting between Septimus and Sir William Bradshaw;
4 She thinks life can be difficult, but she has the support of her husband;
5 She contrasts her easy and successful life with the death and suffering of other people;
6 She thinks of her happiness at Bourton and of the pleasure one derives from the activities of day-to-day life;
7 She walks to the window;
8 She parts the curtains and sees an old lady looking at her;
9 She watches the old ladt going to bed;
10 The sky is not as Clarissa had imagined it;
11 She thinks of Septimus again but does not pity him;
12 She decides to go back to her party.
INTERPRETATION
>>When Clarissa knew Septimus's suicide her dress flamed and her body burnt. For this reason her first reaction was to walk away from her guests into a side room
>> After his suicide, Clarissa believed that death was a sort of resistence, an attempt to communicate
>> She thought that Sir William Bradshaw was a great doctor, a powerfull man, and althought extremely polite to women, he was capable of some indescribable outrage
>> The overwhelming incapacity, her own life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely struggled Clarissa's existence
>> Throught her "moment of being", she realized that death is a relief from diseases of life. Therefore death is something inevitable.
>> " If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy" is the first quotation from Shakespeare's Othello which it could be linked to Clarissa's mood. Indeed as Othello was depressed and grieved for Desdemona's death at the same time Clarissa felt similar feelings for her own life. "Fear no more the heat of the sun" is the second one from Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Through this funeral song Clarissa understands death and its rules so she is in peace with herself.
>> There are lot of repetitions and conjunctions because the text is a collection of Clarissa's thoughts.