Mrs Dalloway AO3 context

the first world war

• novel is set on a wednesday in june 1923 - barely five years since armistice

• exemption from military service (for medical reasons) would have been perceived as cowardice. Both Woolf and Clarissa’s husbands were exempt from service (Woolf’s for having a tremor, Clarissa’s for being too old)

• Septimus is at any rate far from a coward as is evident from his ‘[military] crosses’ awarded for acts of bravery. This is another way that Woolf rebuts the claim that those suffering from neuroses are ‘weak’.​

• septimus deals with shellshock (PTSD) + society’s lack of understanding of this condition

• woolf connects characters on their personal and national pasts - motif of human empathy

the spanish flu

• 1918-19

• estimated to have killed around 230,000 Britons and over 20 million people worldwide

• clarissa has recovered from the spanish flu - parallels with her and septimus both being survivors

society in the interwar period

• summertime act (1916) → introduced daylight savings time

• 1922 → first use of skywriting for advertising purposes (tentative/fearful atmosphere due to fears of air raids)

• Big Ben was first heard on the radio on New Year’s Eve 1923. The chimes of Big Ben are heard throughout the novel and are used to structure the book into 12 sections

  • working title for the novel was ‘the hours’ - pertains to big ben and the motif of time more overtly

• Clarissa opting to buy her own flowers and sleeping up in an attic room (usually reserved for servants) suggests a softening of rigid class definitions. Peter Walsh also observes women wearing makeup

imperialism and eugenics

• woolf satirises extreme patriotism in the novel

• woolf created characters like lady bruton as an attack on the deplorable eugenicist ideologies that were prevalent in this period

• The Muslim Turks’ massacre of the Christian Armenians in 1915 might be considered the century’s first act of genocide. Earlier slaughters of the Armenians had occurred in 1894-6. Clarissa confuses her Armenians and her Albanians, showing that she can be shockingly ignorant of the matters of the world (and of her husband’s work)

• Woolf sees national/imperial forms of power (symbolised in the novel by the PM and the Royal Family) as being chauvinistic (feeling or displaying aggressive or exaggerated patriotism)

• an article entitled ‘Immigration and the Unfit’ (published in The Times, May 1923)

• mention of this challenges the supposed ‘connectedness’ national/official systems were supposed to give its citizens and offers instead her own inclusive system of intertwining

literary modernism

• henri bergson, french philospher & bergsonian time → characterised by emphasis on the difference between scientific clock time and subjective, human experience of time

• a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing + experimented with literary form and expression

• woolf’s 1919 essay ‘modern fiction’ criticises writers for not experimenting more and thus not portraying the human condition truthfully enough

• woolf’s writing style influenced by cubist and post-impressionist artwork

• post-impressionist art based on feeling/personal expression rather than visual fact/realism

• cubist artwork deals specifically with showing a number of different perspectives at the same time

what is the significance of the quote “fear no more the heat o’ the sun” from shakespeare’s ‘cymbeline’?

• quote is from a funeral dirge

• suggests that death is not a thing to be feared, but should be seen as a relief from the hard struggles of life

• as clarissa says “there is an embrace in death”

which other of woolf’s works feature water as an extended motif?

• the waves (1931)

• to the lighthouse (1927)

how does woolf’s personal mental health draw connections with her mentions of mental health in the novel?

• she was often ill with depression and anorexia

• she attempted suicide on more than one occasion (jumping from a window in 1904)

• she drowned herself in 1941

what was woolf’s experience like in the bloomsbury group?

• established herself as a bohemian intellectual

• formed close friendships with other artists and writers

• had intimate relationships with women throughout her life

• met and married her husband, while continuing to have homosexual affairs

flâneur

• term coined by baudelaire, 19th century french poet

• a leisured wanderer who was able inconspicuously to observe the vivid modern city

  the flâneur revels in the sense of anonymity he experiences while drifting through a stream of people - sonder