Walking routes: Mrs Dalloway, Septimus & Rezia, and Peter
Click HERE to see an interactive map of these characters and their walks through the city.
Setting: London, England
One day in June, 1923 - many speculate that the story takes place on a Wednesday
Click HERE to see an interactive map of these characters and their walks through the city.
Setting: London, England
One day in June, 1923 - many speculate that the story takes place on a Wednesday
What do I need to know about the structure in order to make my reading experience more enjoyable?
“Like Freud, Woolf believed that much in adult identity was formed in early childhood. In her novels, and especially in Mrs Dalloway, she made brilliant use of flashbacks and fragments from childhood experience, images that have stayed in a character’s consciousness, preserved and frozen like photographs or snapshots, and that come up in unexpected contexts…For Woolf, the external event is significant primarily for the way it triggers and releases the inner life. While an exterior incident or perception may be only a brief flash of chronological time, its impact upon the individual consciousness may have a much greater duration and meaning. Like other modernist writers experimenting with the representation of consciousness, Woolf was interested in capturing the flux of random associations. In addition, she wanted to understand how half-buried memories and interpretations created mood” (p. xviii-xx).
- What do we expect to encounter when reading this novel?
Key Characters in Mrs Dalloway
Richard Dalloway a conservative Member of
Parliament Clarissa Dalloway his wife – a society hostess Elizabeth Dalloway their 17 year old daughter Septimus Warren Smith a shell-shocked WWI veteran Lucrezia (Rezia) Smith his wife – an Italian millener Peter Walsh a romantic admirer of Clarissa’s Sally Seaton childhood close friend of Clarissa’s Hugh Whitbread a vacuous English gentleman Doris Kilman born-again Christian, Elizabeth’s teacher Sir William Bradshaw renowned London psychiatrist Dr Holmes Septimus’ unimaginative doctor Lady Bruton society lady and do-gooder Evans Septimus’s close friend in the war |
Virginia Woolf: 1882-1944
For more info, click HERE
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Virginia's love life:
Her marriage: "Through her siblings’ connections, Virginia became acquainted with several members of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals and artists who became famous in 1910 for their Dreadnought hoax, a practical joke in which members of the group dressed up as a delegation of Ethiopian royals and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their warship, the HMS Dreadnought. Woolf disguised herself as a bearded man. After the outrageous act, Leonard Woolf, a writer and a member of the group, took a fancy to Virginia. By 1912, she and Leonard were married. The two shared a passionate love for one another for the rest of their lives."
Her affair: Virginia had an ongoing affair with a woman named Vita Sackville-West. Her husband knew about the affair but did not mind. He understood how important it was for Virginia to be happy.
Her marriage: "Through her siblings’ connections, Virginia became acquainted with several members of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals and artists who became famous in 1910 for their Dreadnought hoax, a practical joke in which members of the group dressed up as a delegation of Ethiopian royals and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their warship, the HMS Dreadnought. Woolf disguised herself as a bearded man. After the outrageous act, Leonard Woolf, a writer and a member of the group, took a fancy to Virginia. By 1912, she and Leonard were married. The two shared a passionate love for one another for the rest of their lives."
Her affair: Virginia had an ongoing affair with a woman named Vita Sackville-West. Her husband knew about the affair but did not mind. He understood how important it was for Virginia to be happy.
Essential Questions:
- Who is Clarissa Dalloway?
- How does Woolf use Clarissa's character to criticize society?
Task: Use pages 8-12 to support your ideas about Clarissa. Let's build a picture. Who is this woman?
Who is Clarissa Dalloway?
Who is Clarissa Dalloway?
- What does she look like?
- What is her attitude towards life?
- What is her attitude towards marriage?
What is Clarissa's life like? Is she content? Is Woolf content?
How does Woolf use Clarissa's character to criticize society?
How does Woolf use Clarissa's character to criticize society?
Essential Questions:
What elements of the setting place this story in a specific time and place?
What impact does the setting have on the story?
What elements of the setting place this story in a specific time and place?
What impact does the setting have on the story?
Literary Feature: Local color
a detailed setting of the characteristics of a particular locality, enabling the reader to “see” the setting. It focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region. According to the Oxford Companion to American Literature, "In local-color literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description" (439).
a detailed setting of the characteristics of a particular locality, enabling the reader to “see” the setting. It focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region. According to the Oxford Companion to American Literature, "In local-color literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description" (439).
- Where is the story set and how do you know? What elements help to determine the setting?
- How is regionalism exhibited in language? Interpersonal dynamics? Clothing? Landscape?
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- Could the first part of the novel take place anywhere else but London in 1925? Why or why not?
- What is it about the elements of this story that slots it into this particular time and place?
Essential Question:
How does Woolf characterize mental illness through Septimus Smith?
How does Woolf characterize mental illness through Septimus Smith?
WWI: Trenches and Chemical Warfare
- Trench Warfare
Click HERE for information - Poison gas: mustard gas
- First used in April 1915
- Released from cylinders or fired in shells
- Chlorine or phosgene attacked eyes and lungs. Caused "knife-edge pain...and the coughing up of greenish froth...ending in insensibility and death
- Click HERE for more information
What three words would you use to describe WWI?
Shell Shock
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Use pages 15-17 & 23-28 to explore Septimus Smith, his mental illness, and his wife, Rezia.
- Choose 3 quotations that offer insight into Septimus' state of mind. What does each quotation tell you about him?
- How would you characterize Rezia? What is her attitude towards her life and her husband, and why?
"...she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought he was brave; he was not Septimus now...For he was not ill. Dr. Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him" (p. 25). - Compare/contrast shell shock with hysteria.
Essential Questions
What purpose do objects such as the motor car, the aeroplane, and the clock serve?
What purpose do objects such as the motor car, the aeroplane, and the clock serve?
- In what ways do the motor car and the airplane reflect the age of modernism?
- Why are we never told who is in the motor car?
- How does the aeroplane allow Woolf to shift perspectives?
"'Dear, those motor cars,' said Miss Pym, going to the window to look, and coming back and smiling apologetically...as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all her fault....The violent explosion which made Mrs Dalloway jump and Miss Pym go to the window and apologise came from a motor car which had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry's show window (p. 14-15).
"Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-gray upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind...But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wale's, the Queen's, the Prime Minister's? Whose face was it? Nobody knew" (15).
"The face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state" (p. 17).
"It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, coming out of Mulberry's with her flowers; the Queen...The British middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this, were, she thought, more ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been than one could conceive; and the Queen herself held up; the Queen herself unable to pass" (p. 18).
"Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-gray upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind...But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wale's, the Queen's, the Prime Minister's? Whose face was it? Nobody knew" (15).
"The face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state" (p. 17).
"It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, coming out of Mulberry's with her flowers; the Queen...The British middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this, were, she thought, more ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been than one could conceive; and the Queen herself held up; the Queen herself unable to pass" (p. 18).
Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Everyone looked up. Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. But what letters? (p. 22).
"Then suddenly, as a train comes out of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the sound boring into the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent's Park, and the bar of smoke curved behind and it dropped down, and it soared up and wrote one letter after another - but what word was it writing? (p. 23).
"Ah, but that aeroplane! Hadn't Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts?...Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed ot Mr Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwhich) of a man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree" (p. 30).
"...while he hesitated out flew the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus. It was strange; it was still. Not a sound was to be heard above the traffic. Unguided it seemed; sped of its own free will. And now, curving up and up, straight up, like something mounting in ecstasy, in pure delight, out from behind poured white smoke looping, writing a T, an O, an F" (p. 31).
"Then suddenly, as a train comes out of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the sound boring into the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent's Park, and the bar of smoke curved behind and it dropped down, and it soared up and wrote one letter after another - but what word was it writing? (p. 23).
"Ah, but that aeroplane! Hadn't Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts?...Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed ot Mr Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwhich) of a man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree" (p. 30).
"...while he hesitated out flew the aeroplane over Ludgate Circus. It was strange; it was still. Not a sound was to be heard above the traffic. Unguided it seemed; sped of its own free will. And now, curving up and up, straight up, like something mounting in ecstasy, in pure delight, out from behind poured white smoke looping, writing a T, an O, an F" (p. 31).
Essential Questions
How does Woolf use the relationships in the novel to display the characters' repressed sexualities?
How does Woolf use the relationships in the novel to display the characters' repressed sexualities?
1. On pages 31-33, Woolf uses religious imagery to characterize Clarissa and Richard's marriage.
2. On page 34-35, what evidence is there to suggest that Clarissa's sexuality is being repressed?
3. Use pages 35-39 for your exploration of Sally Seton
4. Use p. 66-70 for your analysis of Peter Walsh's relationship with Clarissa.
5. Peter's pocket-knife is mentioned on pages 44, 47, 50, 57.
- Why is Clarissa being referred to as a nun?
- Who is being compared to God?
- Identify and explain the use of a phallic and yonic symbol in the passage.
2. On page 34-35, what evidence is there to suggest that Clarissa's sexuality is being repressed?
- How is language used to contrast Clarissa's sexual desires for men and women?
- Identify the use of sexual diction in the passage. Is it used more to describe men or women?
3. Use pages 35-39 for your exploration of Sally Seton
- Describe Clarissa's reaction upon first spotting Sally.
- In what ways does Sally influence Clarissa and give her life meaning? (use page 36).
- How does Sally contrast Richard?
4. Use p. 66-70 for your analysis of Peter Walsh's relationship with Clarissa.
- Describe how Clarissa and Richard met, according to Peter Walsh.
- In your opinion, does Peter love the girl in India, or is he still hung up on Clarissa? Explain.
5. Peter's pocket-knife is mentioned on pages 44, 47, 50, 57.
- What does Peter do with his pocket knife? Why does he do that?
- What significance could the pocket-knife hold?
6. Use p. 115-131 for your analysis of Richard Dalloway.
"It was vaguely flattering to them all. [Peter Walsh] had come back, battered, unsuccessful, to their secure shores. But to help him, they reflected, was impossible; there was some flaw in his character...(p. 118)
What do Richard, Hugh Whitbread, and Lady Bruton think about Peter, and why do they feel that way? - "But he wanted to come in holding something. Flowers? Yes, flowers...grasping his red and white roses together (a vast bunch in tissue paper)" (p. 126).
- "Bearing his flowers like a weapon" (p. 127). - "...in came Richard! What a surprise! In came Richard, holding out flowers." - "He must be off, he said, getting up But he stood for a moment as if he were about to say something; and she wondered what? Why? There were the roses" (p. 131). What do roses symbolize? What do they symbolize for Richard and Clarissa? Refer to the bottom of p. 29 for another reference to roses that corresponds to this one. "You'll get married, for you're pretty enough, thought Mrs. Dempster. Get married, she thought, and then you'll know. Oh, the cooks, and so on. Every man has his ways. But whether I'd have chosen quite like that if I could have known, thought Mrs Dempster, and could not help wishing Maisie Johnson; to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old face the kiss of pity. For it's been a hard life, thought Mrs. Dempster. What hadn't she given to it? Roses; figure; her feet too...Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash, m'dear. For really, what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been no mere matter of roses (p. 29). |
"Goodness knows he didn't want to go buying necklaces with Hugh...he would go straight to her, in Westminster (p. 124-126).
What does Richard think about his life? What motivates him to consider buying a brooch for Clarissa? - "...holding out his flowers, 'I love you.' Why not? Really it was a miracle thinking of the war, and thousands of poor chaps, with all of their lives before them, shovelled together, already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he was walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her. Which one never does say, he thought. Partly one's lazy; partly one's shy" (p. 126).
- "...as he walked across the Park to tell his wife that he loved her...Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought" (p. 127). - "(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words. But how lovely, she said, taking his flowers. She understood; she understood without his speaking" (p. 129). - "He had not said 'I love you'; but he held her hand. Happiness is this, is this, he thought" (p. 130). What are your reactions to all of these quotations, considering they are husband and wife? Why does he repeatedly think, "He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought"? |
How does Woolf use the relationships in the novel to display the characters' repressed sexualities?
Essential Question: What is the importance of time in Mrs Dalloway?
"Woolf gives us a full range of portraits spanning the seven ages of woman.
Elizabeth Dalloway is almost eighteen, just beginning her adult life.
Rezia Smith is in her twenties.
Milly Brush and Doris Kilman are past forty.
Clarissa and Sally Seton are in their fifties.
Millicent Bruton is sixty-two
Miss Helena Parry, past eighty, lives in her memories of India
Finally, there is the nameless old woman Clarissa sees from her window, alone, putting out her light, and going to bed" (xxx).
Elizabeth Dalloway is almost eighteen, just beginning her adult life.
Rezia Smith is in her twenties.
Milly Brush and Doris Kilman are past forty.
Clarissa and Sally Seton are in their fifties.
Millicent Bruton is sixty-two
Miss Helena Parry, past eighty, lives in her memories of India
Finally, there is the nameless old woman Clarissa sees from her window, alone, putting out her light, and going to bed" (xxx).
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Essential Question:
How does Septimus' death affect Clarissa?
Why does the novel end with Peter and Sally chatting?
How does Septimus' death affect Clarissa?
Why does the novel end with Peter and Sally chatting?
Death: The act and the discussion
1. Septimus' Suicide
2. The discussion of Septimus at the party
How does this line apply to Clarissa and Septimus?
1. Septimus' Suicide
- How do you feel about Septimus' suicide? Why?
- In your view, was his suicide inevitable? Explain.
2. The discussion of Septimus at the party
- Why does Clarissa envy Septimus for committing suicide?
- One of the most famous lines Shakespeare's Cymbeline, taken from a funeral song: "Fear no more the heat of the sun"
How does this line apply to Clarissa and Septimus?
- What does the old lady in the window represent?
- Woolf created Septimus Smith as a double for Clarissa. In what ways are they similar?