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How Does Clarissa Dalloway Change Throughout The Novel

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The setting of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolfe began in Westminster, England. The main character, Clarissa Dalloway, suddenly bought herself some flowers one morning. Although she is a rich, high-class woman and has a servant named Lucy, she bought herself her own flowers that day and then began to reminisce of her younger days in Bourton (Woolfe 1). This scene demonstrates that she is not content with her life, and feels as if she made regretful decisions that led her to backtrack her life. Clarissa was able to achieve higher status by essentially forfeiting her personal happiness. Virginia Woolfe exposes Clarissa Dalloway’s character by portraying Dalloway’s anxiety from past relationships and repression as a female in a patriarchal society. …show more content…

Because of this, she makes decisions based on statuss and not love. Her fear of intimacy was apparent when she chose Richard Dalloway over her former lover Peter Walsh, “But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into” (Woolf 8). The thought of having a real relationship petrified her, consequently choosing privacy over affection. The relationship between Richard and herself are solitary, they do not communicate physically, however they have a mutual understanding of their relationship, “she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa” (Woolf 118). Clarissa has shown her insecurities when she unconsciously debates on whether she has made the right decision in marrying Richard, “Still making out that she had been right- and she had too- not marry him” (Woolfe 10). Obviously marrying Richard, she can evade her personal feelings with the privacy that he provides. Choosing a conservative marriage with Richard illustrates Clarissa insecurities, acknowledging that Peter will be able to hurt her because she truly cares for him, “Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared for Richard. Sally was positive of that” (Woolf

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In this passage Clarissa reflects on her decision of not getting married to Peter and she decides that she is happy she did not. It sounds like she was doubting herself, as most people would with a major decision like this, but upon hearing of Peter’s actions after she rejected him, those doubts were gone. Clarissa is an independent woman so she would of had issues being with Peter because he is clingy, while Richard gives her the space she needs to be happy. Though, I feel that she would have been a much different person if she had married Peter; she would of had a more attached husband

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In two passages, Virginia Woolf compares meals she was served at a men’s and at a women’s college. The contrasting meals reveal Woolf’s frustration at the inferior treatment that women face. The first meal at the men’s college is elegant, enjoyable, and satisfying while the second is plain, cheap, and bland. This clearly juxtaposes the expense and luxury afforded to the men with the “penny-pinching” nature of the women’s in order to show Woolf’s underlying attitude of dissatisfaction against the inequality that women are not granted the same privileges and investment as men.

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Adding to the ever growing library of women, Virginia Woolf used her unique stream of consciousness style of writing to convey new ideas about gender roles and gender identity, paving the way for more women to find rooms of their own. One can only hope to influence generations of people with one’s writing, bringing about new conversations and ways of communicating. Eventually, Virginia Woolf committed suicide, ending her highly original career and perhaps echoing a point she makes in her own essay, “To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was a poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her”

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Peter on the other hand was not fearful of homosexuality and he expected the same from Clarissa. Clarissa tried to explain this to Peter but all her efforts were in vain. This negligence of Peter towards Clarissa’s concerns resulted in Clarissa marrying Richard. Clarissa do not regrets

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Clarissa clearly rejects heterosexual relations according to Gay (2007), Gay continues with stating that Clarissa doesn’t sleep with her husband which could indicate that she is a virgin. Even though Clarissa is presented as the perfect society wife, Woolf offers alternative potentialities of Clarissa’s attraction for Sally Seaton (Gay 89). Woolf has illustrated homoerotic desires in a very subtle way; it feels like she is testing the field. Homosexuality was not acceptable during her days, this is also one way for her connecting the past and the present because homosexuality among men was common in Greek literature. It seems like she has twisted things to make a point, women are commonly seen as mentally ill in books and in life and men were ‘accepted’ as homosexuals in ancient Greek.

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If one were to sum up Woolf’s essay, it could be said in one sentence, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” In her time, and in Shakespeare’s time, a woman having access to the privilege of time and money to pursue things as writing would have been unheard of and truly rare. Woolf argues that the lack of women in fiction literature is due to the unfair dispensation of time and money to men instead of women. She

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By using casual diction, simple sentences, and well-known allusions, Woolf is able to shift the audience’s attention from the gender of the

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Instead of reflecting directly onto herself, she uses the people she interacts with as a proxy for her own feelings and opinions. In doing so, Woolf empathizes with the people while engaging in a cold deconstruction of her surroundings, making the

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The potential marriage of Miss Morton to Robert or Edward is based on her financial endowment; “of Robert’s marrying Miss Morton’… ‘The lady, I suppose, has no choice in the affair.’ ‘Choice? —how do you mean?’ ‘I only mean, that I suppose from your manner of speaking it must be the same to Miss Morton whether she marry Edward or Robert” (Austen 278). Austen discusses a valid point where women are married because of financial endowment than for love with little choice in the matter. In the case of Willoughby, he married Miss Gray for “Fifty thousand pounds, my dear.

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One of the most significant works of feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One`s Own”, explores both historical and contemporary literature written by women. Spending a day in the British Library, the narrator is disappointed that there are not enough books written by or even about women. Motivated by this lack of women’s literature and data about their lives, she decides to use her imagination and come up with her own characters and stories. After creating a tragic, but extraordinary gifted figure of Shakespeare’s sister and reflecting on the works of crucial 19th century women authors, the narrator moves on to the books by her contemporaries. So far, women were deprived of their own literary history, but now this heritage is starting to appear.

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This can be exhibited when she states “..that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.” Woolf desires to validate the idea that “woman cannot write the plays of Shakespeare” but intends to clarify that this is not due to a lack of talent or ability equal to that of men, but simply because the societal structures at the time rendered it impossible for them to be equally successful. In the development of her argument, Woolf starts out by exposing the belief that it was impossible for women to “have the genius of Shakespeare” and she contextualises the reader with some basic information, given by an authority figure “Professor Trevelyan” about women’s conditions during the era. Woolf then provides the reader with a hypothetical situation to ponder on: What if Shakespeare had had a sister — that is, a female sibling of

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