ANALYSIS OF AN EXTRACT (page 536-538, What An Extraordinary Life) FROM V. WOOLF’S MRS DALLOWAY

         The extract is the end of V. Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, in which the realization of Clarissa’s party becomes a pretext for examining the Modernist concept of Truth. The main characters of the novel, Mrs Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, deals with the meaning of life and death and experience different attitudes to the challange of living. 

         In the first sequence Clarissa knows that Septimus has just committed suicide. She is annoyed by having come to know about that during her party, as repetitions of her party! emphatise. However, the importance of the sequence is revealed by Mrs Dalloway’s reaction to that piece of information. A third person narrator, adopting the character’s point of view, makes the reader feel Clarissa’s physical and mental responce to Septimus’s death by means on the interior monologue and a poetic use of the language. Death is associated by Clarissa to blackness. The clue suggests me that V. Woolf arranged F. Nietzche’s God is dead in her novel: she imagines death as blackness, as nothing. In addition it is a suffocation of blackness, which adds to meaning the pain of dying and maybe of living too.

         The function of the second sequence is developing the relationship between life and death in a human being. The reader knows about Clarissa’s view of death through an interior monologue. Inner emotions and considerations of the character are mixed with the external world (the party is taking place) so that the reader feels Mrs Dalloway’s isolation. While going back with the mind to her adulescence, Clarissa try to explain Septimus’s suicide. Death is presented as a defiance, an attempt to communicate, an evasion from the impossibility of reaching the centre. As a result it is in opposition with life, having rare and significant raptures, moment of being. The vision well sintetizes Modernist belief. The reader finds its fondamental elements: quest for a centre in life, death as a sign in life, human isolation, sufference and weakness.

         The third sequence is an intertextuality with Shakespeare’s Othello, since the novelist uses a quotation (If it were now to die, ‘twere now to be most happy) from the tragedy to present the character’s approach to death. According to the quotation, death comes during a moment of being.

         In representing death as a sign, the narrator conduces the reader to find out the causes of it. In the fourth sequence Mrs Dalloway try to understand the reasons why Septimus committed suicide. She believes that Sir William, a doctor considerated evil may be responsible for his life become intolerable. In the interior monologue the reader knows the novelist’s scepticism towards doctors’ attemps in threating mental diseases.

         In the fifth sequence the narrator reveals the complex relationship between the characters’ approach to live. Both of them, since Modernist characters, experience the terror, the awful fear in the depths of own heart to keep linving a life not chosen but just given by others. V. Woolf’s idea of life as an obligated condition is also present in G. Leopardi’s poetry (Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia, Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese ). The behaviur toward the condition is different in the character because Clarissa escapes from the tentation of death, while Septimus decides to die. In the choice of names Woolf anticipates the destinies of her characters: Clarissa reminds to light, and so to life, while Septimus reminds to death. As a result decisions reveal one’s identity.

         In the sixth sequence the narrator adopts Mrs Dalloway’s perpective to reflect on her decision to continue living. The choice is presented as her disaster, her disgrace. In addtion the reader feels the character’s dissatisfaction thanks to the stream of consciousness in the sequence. Despite her party is taking place, Mrs Dalloway is not happy, she appears alienated between joyful people and regrets not to be as successful as Lady Bexborough.

         The seventh sequence has the function to recollect a moment of happiness in Clarissa’s life. She reminds the joy felt during her youth at Bourton and she misses the unique pleasure of daily activities.

         The last sequence is the longest of the extract. Clarissa is in front of a window looking at an old woman opposite, while starring at her before going to bed. The image is a symbol for Clarissa’s life proiected in time and space and confirms her attitude toward life: she will go on living. Sky is present as a second emblematic image: Clarissa looks at an ashen, pale sky, which can be another symbol for “the death of God”.  The images together show to the reader the crisis felt by Clarissa and by Modernist men in general: they lived an ontological conflict.

When the clock begin striking the hours, when the old woman put out her light, Clarissa decides to join to people enjoying the party. The clock, as in the beginning of the novel, symbolizes time and announces the beginning of a moment of being. In addition there is a second quotation from Shakespere (Fear not more the heat of the sun). It is taken by the funeral song Cymbeline and its function is to express Clarissa’s decision not to be afraid of life but to accept its instability. As a result of the awarness of time, Mrs Dalloway experiences joy, exclaming What an extraordinary night!. In addition the narrator reveals the reader her thought: she is glad about Septimus’s death. Her happiness does not due to a cynic view of life but it depends on human need for safety: Clarissa can live because of Septimus’s death. It seems to be a paradoxal conclusion but humans usually understand the value of something by knowing its opposite.

At the very end of the novel Clarissa turns into a dinamic character and the narrator tells the reader her actions. Clarissa can go back to the others and assemble just with reference to the previous self-analysis.

         I appreciate the character of Mrs Dalloway because she experiences a self-growth. In according to Modernist philosophy, men have to face ontological conflicts even if their conclusions are not definitive. At the end of the novel the reader is not sure about the stability of Clarissa’s choice and he/she does not know if she would ever find the centre but that is not the point. In my opinion the realization of the quest in life is the meaning of existence itself.