Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf -- Analysis and themes

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Themes

  • Descriptions of sensations
  • Memories
  • Disaster

feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling
...
one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes.

  • City life

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

  • Being in the moment
  • Mixed, nonlinear temporality

For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven — over.

  • Consumerism

and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth)

  • Flaneurism

“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really it’s better than walking in the country.”

  • Dynamic, energetic, vital descriptions

June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.

Style and devices

  • Stream of consciousness: frequent change of topic
  • Deliberate lack of consistency in recollections
  • “I prefer men to cauliflowers”— … a few sayings like this about cabbages.
  • Ubiquitous use of names of people and things, in a way not found in traditional narratives- excess information is confusing and uninteresting

People and places

  • Clarissa Dalloway 
  • Rumpelmayer’s
  • Lucy
  • Bourton
  • Peter Walsh
  • Durtnall’s
  • Scrope Purvis
  • Westminster
  • Hugh Whitbread

Virginia Woolf

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