The illustration of how the waves “collect, overbalance, and fall” symbolize the habitual nature to Clarissa’s everyday life and society as a whole. Yet, moments of “overbalance” occur when “the body alone listens” breaking this continuous pattern and allowing for a moment of freedom from the daily pattern in Mrs. Dalloway’s life. In these times, Clarissa listens to herself and breaks away from the waves of life that the super-ego acts to maintain. However, such moments can only be short-lived as the waves collect once more and the constant presence and force of the super-ego force Clarissa to return to her “Mrs. Dalloway” identity. While Clarissa’s ego is distinctly present in maintaining her societal identity, Septimus Smith demonstrates …show more content…
Dalloway in 1925, the multitude of connections between the Bloomsbury group and the publishing house Woolf founded with her husband called Hogarth Press, suggests that Woolf was greatly exposed to psychoanalysis as she wrote Mr. Dalloway. Two members of the Bloomsburg group and good friends of the Woolf’s, James and Alix Strachey, were practicing psychoanalysts, deeply interested in Freud’s works. Just one year before Mrs. Dalloway was published, James Strachey approached Leonard Woolf with a proposal that Hogarth Press become the official English translators of the International Psychoanalytical Library, which published Freud’s works. Soon thereafter, the Hogarth press became the English publisher of Freud’s works (Bennett, Maxwell 2013). While Woolf presents a profound exploration of identity within the oppressive society in Mrs. Dalloway, many Freudian ideas can be applied to each character. In the end, Woolf shows how identify is created in relation to the external world through one’s experiences and interactions with others. It is impossible to become fully aware of one’s natural instinctual self, yet it is not impossible to maintain some degree of dignity under the super-ego’s processes, which Septimus does through suicide and Clarissa does through gaining individuality by the end of the novel. The way in which each character projects a different aspect of the id, ego, and super-ego shows the inescapability of Freudian’s revolutionary ideas during the time Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway, and allows for a deeper understanding into the dynamic aspect of identity as a