Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Extract)

Analysis

The title refers to the main character, Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class, fifty-two-year-old woman married to a politician. In the extract, she decides to buy flowers herself instead of sending a servant to buy them.

In Woolf's novel, present and past continue to mix as she walks towards the flower shop.

Woolf's prose has blurred the distinction between dream and reality, between the past and present. An authentic human being functions in this manner, simultaneously flowing from the conscious to the unconscious, from the fantastic to the real, and from memory to the moment.

As Virginia Woolf writes in her novels, there is a "moment of being", where a character (in this case Clarissa Dalloway) is fully conscious of his experience and her memories are vividly reminded.

Leaving the house for the outside world stirs profound feelings in her, reminding her of the feeling of opening a window at Bourton (her family’s country home) and stepping out to breathe the fresh air and also she immediately recalls to her mind when she was eighteen years old.

Back in present day, Mrs. Dalloway also remembers how Peter Walsh interrupted her with some remark about vegetables and she thinks of how Peter Walsh will soon return from India, but she is unsure when because the memory of her past interfere with the present.