Mrs. Dalloway: Critical Issues
Divergent Ideas- woman as a symbol for intuitive knowledge/man as a symbol
for intellectual knowledge. In MD and TVO, for example, for character
development, Clarissa Dalloway and Terence Hewet illustrate a duality of
intellectualism and intuitiveness.
Meaning by Imagination- Time functions as a vehicle by which the reader
and the characters fill in the gaps, sense the continuity (or the falseness
of it), catch a glimpse of their lives, and are able to visualize the ruin
of the disorder over which the storyline takes place. The manner in which
their paths cross, or intersect, is what one literary critic, Ricoeur,
defines as "the fictive experience of time." For example, the
bells in MD signal the inevitability of change.
"She felt somehow very like him-the young man who had killed himself.
She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The
leaden circles dissolved in the air."-(MD 186)
- Another correlation with the idea of female consciousness is explored
within the characterization of Clarissa. In this portion of the novel Woolf
clearly demonstrates the dialectical images of her artistry. Since women
were discouraged in pursuing their femininity, Clarissa’s long illness,
and her conception of her narrow bed "like a grave," is a direct
result of the contraction of sexual coldness contrasted by the expansion of
illumination. When Sally kisses her, she experiences a rapture- at that
moment, their femininity is reflected in each other.
- Clarissa’s consciousness is fused with feminine consciousness. It is
pure and absolute-until the intrusion of Peter Walsh, of male interference,
and male domination.
- A Vision of Female Consciousness- this idea is at the core of Clarissa’s
hostess-identity. It is also reflected in her conception of what it is to be
" Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a
tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one
yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered
and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance,
some pressure of rapture, which split its skin and gushed and poured with an
extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores!" (MD 32)
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