A Reflection of the Author’s 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 aeroplanes overhead was what she loved; London, this moment of June.”
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel detailing a day in the life of protagonist Clarissa Dalloway in London in the summer of 1923 five years after the end of World War I. In a stream of consciousness narrative, Clarissa Dalloway’s party acts as the central focus of the novel. Mrs. Dalloway is one of Woolf’s novels that have generated the most critical attention and is most widely studied. The novel is composed of movements from one character to another, or of movements from internal thoughts of one character to internal thoughts of another. Virginia Woolf was skilled of the stream of consciousness technique in this novel exploring with great subtlety problems of personal identity and personal relationships as well as the significance of time, change and memory for human personality. For this, she was regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures and one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a mere reflection of the author’s life. She was born and raised in London so it is not impossible for her to be in love with her place. Woolf’s adoration of her place is really apparent in the novel. London is almost a character and a beloved thing. Woolf was raised in a financially secured family for she was a member of the uppity English gentry’s class. Clarissa Dalloway, the protagonist of the novel, was a representative of the said class of English intelligentsia. In 1925, Mercantilism and Industrialism created a new ruling class, the bourgeoisie in where she belongs. Having that
References: 1.Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway.Vintage; New Ed edition (16 Jan 1992) 2.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf 3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs_Dalloway 4.http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/dalloway/