Mrs Dalloway - AO1

Clarissa

• " a touch of the bird about her" 

• "She felt like a nun who has left the world"  

• "She was like iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone" (Peter about Clarissa after she rejects him)

• "this woman did nothing, believed nothing; brought up her daughter" (Mrs Kilman) 

Septimus

• "beak-nosed"

• "the world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames"

• "leaves were alive; trees were alive”

• "Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society"

• "like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world"

Sally

• "The wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!"

• "The last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester"

• “Who on earth was Lady Rosseter?”

• “The lustre had left her”

• “I have five enormous boys”

Peter Walsh

 

• "He was attractive to women, who liked the sense he was not altogether manly"

Dr Holmes

 

• “The repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils"

Rezia

 

• “without friends in England” 

Elizabeth

 

• "she inclined to be passive"

• “Law, medicine, politics, all professions are open to women of your generation” (Doris to Elizabeth)

Doris Kilman

• "Kilman her enemy"  

• "Ah, how she hated her – hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth's seducer; the woman who had crept in to steal and defile" (Clarissa about Doris)

• She was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were" (Clarissa about Doris)

• “one of those…dominators and tyrants” (Clarissa about Doris)

• “She had her degree. She was a woman who had made her way in the world. Her knowledge of modern history was more than respectable”

• "There rose in her an overmastering desire to overcome her...but it was not the body; it was the soul and its mockery that she wished to subdue...but this was God's will, not Miss Kilman's" (Doris about Clarissa)

Love

 

• "to love makes one solitary" - Rezia feeling isolated in marriage to Septimus 

• Richard unable to tell his wife he loves her

• “what was this except being in love?” (Clarissa about Sally)

• “the most exquisite moment of her whole life” (Sally kissing Clarissa)

Marriage

• “For in marriage a little license, a little independence there must be between people living day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her and she him”

• “with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into”

• "This being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway"

• “They spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe”

Class

• "but it was over; thank Heaven - over"

• "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"

• "A small crowd had gathered at the gates of Buckingham palace...poor people all of them, they waited"

• "There was in Sir William, who had never had time for reading, a grudge deeply buried, against cultivated people"

• “her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit” (Mrs Kilman about Clarissa)

Attitudes towards women

• "She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess" (Peter about Clarissa)

• "Now this body she wore...seemed nothing, nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now"

• "Narrower and narrower would her bed be"

• "Richard insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed"

Domestic sphere

• "Mrs Dalloway's parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon with which a goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in the field of battle"  

• "Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went upstairs"

• "Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here she's been sitting all the time I've been India" (Peter)

• "Her ladyship waited with the rugs about her knees an hour or more, thinking of...the wall of gold that mounted between them" (Lady Bradshaw)

• "He would go on saying 'an hour's complete rest after luncheon' to the end of time because a doctor had ordered it once" (Richard)

• "Both of them criticised her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties" (Peter and Richard)

Rebellion

• "They meant to found a society to abolish private property, and actually had a letter written, though not sent out" (pg 36) 

• Sally “cut [flowers’] heads off, and made them swim on the top of water in bowls” → subverting feminine symbol → later Clarissa “cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians”

• “completely reckless…bicycled round the parapet on the terrace; smoked cigars” (Sally at Bourton)

• "death was defiance" (Clarissa about Septimus) 

Inner world

• "She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone" 

• "Women live much more in the past than we do"

Religion

• "religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes)"

• “Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to Communion”

• "Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians"

• "She evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness"

• “Love and religion…how detestable, how detestable they are…would destroy…the privacy of the soul” → invasive and intrusive → questioning of fundamental building blocks → threatening rather than formative

Tradition vs modernity

• "Gloves and shoes; she had a passion for gloves; but her own daughter, Elizabeth, cared not a straw for either of them"

• "The Queen herself held up; the Queen herself unable to pass"

• "The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd...and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it"

• "Little island of grey churches, St Paul's and the rest" - Mrs Dempster dismissive, modernity diminishes relevance of religion 

• Prime Minister "looked so ordinary" 

Health/mental illness

• "So you're in a funk" (Dr Holmes)

• Septimus "had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts" (Dr Holmes)

• "It was merely a question of...rest, rest, rest; a long rest in bed" (Dr Bradshaw)

• "Sir William...called it not having a sense of proportion" (pg 106) 

• "the criminal who faces his judges...the drowned sailor" (pg 106) - everyman figure 

WW1

• "but it was over; thank Heaven - over." - Clarrisa about WW1 

• "That little shindy of schoolboys with gunpowder" (Bradshaw) 

• "congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him... that he could not feel" 

• "thousands of poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled together, already half forgotten" (Richard)  

Empire

• "Craving which lit her husband's eye so oilily for dominion, for power"  

• Peter attends Clarissa's party "to find out what they were doing in India – those conservative duffers" 

Education/intellect

• “read Plato…read Morris…read Shelley” (Clarissa and Sally at Bourton)