Mrs Dalloway Critics

Front 1

Critics Fay Chen and Chung-Hsiung Lai

Back 1

The rendering of present time is difficult for the characters, since time itself seems to be torn, or “haunted by its ghosts and thus ‘out of joint,’ entangled, confused and mad”

Front 2

Critic Dorothy Goldman

Back 2

'Modernist writing suggests a cultural crisis: language awry, cultural cohesion lost, perception fragmented and multiplied'

Front 3

Critic Alexandra Harris

Back 3

Commented that the lack of cohesion for the reader relates to Septimus' mind where 'a busy street becomes a nightmarish vision of the trenches and where there were men trapped in mines’.

Front 4

Critic Bernard Blackstone

Back 4

"Mrs Dalloway is an experiment with time. It is a mingling of present experience and memory".

Front 5

Virginia Woolf

Back 5

“In the vast catastrophe of the European war,” wrote Woolf, “our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction”

Front 6

Virginia Woolf writes in her diary

Back 6

“I adumbrate here a study of insanity & suicide: the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side – something like that”

Front 7

Critic Elizabeth Abel

Back 7

That “Rather than influence, Mrs. Dalloway demonstrates the common literary prefiguration of psychoanalytic doctrine, which can retroactively articulate patterns implicit in the literary text”

Front 8

Critic Sigrid Nunez

Back 8

“Mrs. Dalloway represents Woolf’s fullest self-portrait as an artist; it contemplates the relationship between her own madness and her creativity”

Front 9

Critic Phyllis Rose

Back 9

“Mrs. Dalloway is the first novel in which she taps unabashedly the great reservoir of feminine experience”

Front 10

Critic H. Lee

Back 10

Argues that “there is a continual interplay between her sense of reaching out to others and withdrawing from them; between her sense of failure, loss and coldness, and her involvement with the vivid, energetic pulse of life”

Front 11

Critic H. Lee

Back 11

What separates Septimus from Clarissa is that he “is not always able to distinguish between his personal response and the indifferent, universal nature of external reality”

Front 12

Critic H. Lee

Back 12

It is argued that they share a way of translating “their emotions into physical metaphors”

Front 13

Critic H. Lee

Back 13

“Clear parallels can be drawn to Septimus’ reaction to Evans’s death, as well as Clarissa’s loss of her mother when she was young. She[Woolf] found it hard to write the mad scenes in the novel, saying: “of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the next weeks at it”

Front 14

Critic H. Lee

Back 14

It is argued that Mrs Dalloway reflects Woolf’s rejection of a society where “powerful men talk a great deal of nonsense and the woman’s place is decorative, entertaining and subservient”

Front 15

Critic T.E. Apter

Back 15

They also share a kind of conviction that death is an option that should not be dismissed, or as T.E. Apter claims: “Images of death are never merely deadly”

Front 16

Critic T.E. Apter

Back 16

“Septimus Smith is the perfect victim: his sensitivity to the pain in the world makes him intolerable to those who do not wish to see the pain; the individuality of his vision makes him unable to survive in a world that demands crafty self-defence and shallow self-assurance”

Front 17

Critic T.E. Apter

Back 17

“The capacity of the present to contain the past naturally makes the past appear as immediate. Memories become entangled in present thoughts and perceptions”

Front 18

In A Room of One's Own Woolf Claims

Back 18

That it is fatal for writers to “think of their sex … to be a man or woman pure and simple.” Instead they should be “woman-manly or man-womanly”

Front 19

Critic Rachel Bowlby

Back 19

By marrying Richard she gave up passion, but kept her independence. She hid her emotions and, because of that, the pain inflicted by her choice till torments her today: “Clarissa is both perfectly conventional in her role as a lady and hostess and, at the same time, a misfit: Mrs Dalloway is all about the fact that she is still unresolved in a choice apparently completed a generation before”

Front 20

In her diary, Woolf writes about her work on the novel:

Back 20

“I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work at its most intense.”

Front 21

Critic Deborah Parsons

Back 21

The narrator reports the speech or thought of a character ‘while moving inside the character’s consciousness to take on the style and tone of their own immediate speaking voice.’

Front 22

Critic Sigrid Nunez

Back 22

“Everyone is death-hunted, everyone is a poet, everyone is neurotic, everyone is a genius, everyone is Virginia Woolf”

Front 23

Critic Nancy Taylor

Back 23

Suggests that “Woolf tries to create an androgynous ideal by letting the language of Clarissa and Septimus change between prose and poetry, two forms that are thought to be examples of masculine and feminine writing respectively.”

Front 24

Critic Barbara Hill Rigney

Back 24

Claims that “Clarissa and Septimus are both “feminine” characters because they are both victimized by a ‘male-supremacist system’”

Front 25

Critic J. Hillis Miller

Back 25

Points to 'the same images of unity, reconciliation, of communion [that] well up so spontaneously from the deep levels of the minds of all the major characters'.

Front 26

Critic H. Lee

Back 26

“Septimus is not so much a character as an idea.”

Front 27

Critic Jonathan Culler

Back 27

"Men have aligned the opposition male/female with rational/emotional, serious/frivolous, or reflective/spontaneous”

Front 28

Critc E.M. Forster

Back 28

“She has, among other achievements, made a definite contribution to the novelist’s art”,

Front 29

Critic Elizabeth Abel

Back 29

Clarissa occupies a role that changes when she leaves Bourton. From a secure, feminine environment, where she could experience homosexual feelings, she went into a male world where only heterosexuality was accepted and other sexual feelings had to be repressed. She describes this as “an emotionally pre-Oedipal female-centred natural world” in contrast to “the heterosexual male-dominated social world”.

Front 30

In a letter to E.M. Forster, Woolf writes:

Back 30

“Not that I haven’t picked up something from my insanities and all the rest. Indeed, I suspect they’ve done instead of religion” indicating that she was able to find other aspects of her insanities than just bad ones.