Learning Paths » 5B Interacting
LZentilin - Modernist Fiction. V. Woolf and J. Joyce. What an Extraordinary Night, Textual Analisys
by - (2012-01-10)
Up to 5B - Modernist Fiction. V. Woolf and J. Joyce
The extract is taken from the last part of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway . The main character, Clarissa, recently informed of Septimus’s suicide, leaves the party for a moment and reflects about life and death and her approach to them.
In eight paragraphs the novelist offers the reader Clarissa’s feelings and thoughts using interior monologue narrative technique. The firs passage portrays Mrs. Dalloway’s reaction to Septimus’s death. She feels angry that the Bradshaws brought death to her party and imagines the moment of the accident. The second sequence tells the reader Clarissa’s memories: she remembers her happiness at Bourton and people met there during the childhood. In the paragraph the reader can appreciate the right flowing of Clarissa’s thoughts, indeed her memories are staggered with her consideration about Septimus’s act (as an attempt at communication) and her worries for the party. The following paragraph is also the description of a moment of Mrs. Dalloway’s past, where she felt she could die in total happiness. The fourth passage is functional to explain the role of Sir Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, in Septimus’s decision to commit suicide. The physician is depicted in a not positive way, somebody able to “make life intolerable”.
Instead, in the following paragraph the narrator underlines the importance of loves in life trough the account of Richard’s support in his wife’s life.
The theme of the contrast between Clarissa’s easy and successful life with the death and suffering of other people marks the sixth paragraph, that has the function to give the reader additional elements about Mrs. Dalloway’s consideration of herself (“She was never wholly admirable”). Anyway she finds she is now happy: this is the main reflections that emerges from the seventh sequences. In the last part the narrator wants to compare Clarissa’s social life and the world outside: she looks out the window and sees the old woman in the house across the way going to bed, while she hears the party behind her and thinks of the words from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat of the sun.” The main function of the passage is to underline a moment of epiphany in Mrs. Dalloway’s life.
In eight paragraphs the novelist offers the reader Clarissa’s feelings and thoughts using interior monologue narrative technique. The firs passage portrays Mrs. Dalloway’s reaction to Septimus’s death. She feels angry that the Bradshaws brought death to her party and imagines the moment of the accident. The second sequence tells the reader Clarissa’s memories: she remembers her happiness at Bourton and people met there during the childhood. In the paragraph the reader can appreciate the right flowing of Clarissa’s thoughts, indeed her memories are staggered with her consideration about Septimus’s act (as an attempt at communication) and her worries for the party. The following paragraph is also the description of a moment of Mrs. Dalloway’s past, where she felt she could die in total happiness. The fourth passage is functional to explain the role of Sir Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, in Septimus’s decision to commit suicide. The physician is depicted in a not positive way, somebody able to “make life intolerable”.
Instead, in the following paragraph the narrator underlines the importance of loves in life trough the account of Richard’s support in his wife’s life.
The theme of the contrast between Clarissa’s easy and successful life with the death and suffering of other people marks the sixth paragraph, that has the function to give the reader additional elements about Mrs. Dalloway’s consideration of herself (“She was never wholly admirable”). Anyway she finds she is now happy: this is the main reflections that emerges from the seventh sequences. In the last part the narrator wants to compare Clarissa’s social life and the world outside: she looks out the window and sees the old woman in the house across the way going to bed, while she hears the party behind her and thinks of the words from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat of the sun.” The main function of the passage is to underline a moment of epiphany in Mrs. Dalloway’s life.