Mrs Dalloway - critics

Paul Bailey

At her most interesting she is a snobbish, vain, repressed lesbian who has dabbled in culture, but for the greater part of the novel she is only a shadow, poetically enshrined

Gilbert and Gubar (Clarissa)

Clarrissa is "a kind of queen" who "with a divine grace…regenerates the post-war world”

Gary Carey

“the death of Clarissa's soul began the moment she married Richard”

Julia Courtney

Clarissa simultaneously "experiences the party as unreal, and herself as superficial" but also sees it as "a gift, an offering, an affirmation of life"

Sutherland and Hislop

She takes off her feathered yellow hat as if discarding her social pretensions

A.D. Moody

Clarissa performs her role, a “shallow embodiment of society's codes”

Kresich

Clarissa's parties provide meaning to a world that would otherwise be wasted in the aftermath of war

Shannon Forbes (perfect hostess)

Clarissa’s role as the ‘perfect hostess’ “limits and confines her, and functions only as a substitute for the self”

Elaine Showalter (Septimus)

"Unable to reconcile his unconscious desire with his strong feelings of propriety and even class superiority, Septimus sees all sexual desire as evil and sordid"

Elaine Showalter (suicide)

"we tend to see Septimus as the victim of medical power, whose suicide is, as Clarissa says, a heroic act of defiance"

Isabel Gamble

Septimus has recognised certain necessities evaded by Clarissa, or perhaps never encountered by her

Bonnie Kime Scott

Septimus' death leads Clarissa to 'reach for an understanding that goes beyond 'the people she knew best''

Julia Courtney (admiration)

Clarissa admires Septimus "as if his suicide is an act of personal reintegration"

Lauren Barr

Clarissa and Septimus “each feel like a caged bird within their life”

Barbara Hill Rigney (feminine)

Clarissa and Septimus may be seen in their relationship to society, as essentially 'feminine' in that they are both victimised, to varying extents, by a male-supremacist system

Barbara Hill Rigney (individuality)

The world is perceived by both Clarissa and Septimus as threatening to one's individuality, one's sense of the self

Barbara Hill Rigney (sex)

Sex and love, for both Septimus and Clarissa as for Jane Eyre, threaten a violation of the inner self which one must struggle to keep intact

Rathee

Septimus being Clarissa's 'double’ reaffirms Woolf's vehement indictment against the horrors of women's psychiatric incarceration

Elaine Showalter (Peter sex)

Peter's "sense of the social changes in England is primarily sexual"

Elaine Showalter (men vs women)

"While women live their lives vicariously through their daughters, men have the chance to renew their lives through action"

Elaine Showalter (Peter youth)

As Peter ages he makes a 'defiant attempt to recapture his sense of youth, virility and romance through following women on the street'

Rachel Bowlby (ambition)

'Elizabeth is driven by ambitions beyond the ken of women thirty years before, and unencumbered by the pressure of masculine interference'

Rachel Bowlby (imagination)

'Elizabeth's imaginative nature could be seen as a positive sign of women's progress' but she 'readily returns for the time being, to her domestic calling, as a good, civilised daughter'

Rachel Bowlby (Jane Eyre)

Whereas Jane Eyre dreams out from a distant rooftop, Elizabeth Dalloway is already on top of the bus, travelling through the city in which she may well fulfil her ambitions

Shannon Forbes (Elizabeth)

Elizabeth decides to adopt her mother's performance as her own

Elaine Folton

'Miss Kilman searches for human connection in a world that has rejected her.'

Phyllis Rose

Miss Kilman share[s] in the masculine crime of 'forcing' the soul, where forcing has the meanings…of rape"

Alex Zwerdling

"Woolf gives us a picture of a class impervious to change in a society that desperately needs or demands it, a class that worships tradition and settled order, but cannot accommodate the new and disturbing"

Elaine Showalter (war)

The war seems to have left the governing classes curiously untouched

Sutherland and Hislopp

'In her attempts to criticise the social system, Woolf is trying to show that what proportion and conversion really amount to is coercion'

Alex Zwerdling (party)

Clarissa's party is strictly class-demarcated. No Septimus, no Rezia, no Doris Kilman could conceivably set foot in it.

Alex Zwerdling (Establishment)

The fundamental conflict is between those who identify with Establishment and those who resist or are repelled by it

Alex Zwerdling (integration)

Clarissa's integration is horizontal, not vertical

Jaqueline Rose

The name of the husband is the strongest insignia of patriarchal power

Carolyn Heilbrun

'After youth and childbearing are past, women have no plot, there is no story to be told about them'

Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown (1)

In or about December 1910, human character changed

Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown (2)

"All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature"

Caroline Webb

By the end of the novel Clarissa “has chosen a life beyond her role”

Virginia Woolf

Killing the angel in the house was part of the occupation of women writers

Elkin

Writing is “a way of stepping out of bounds”

Alice van Buren Kelly

Clarissa is determined never to “bow to the laws of limitations set up in society”

Dierkes

Mrs Dalloway is killed and Clarissa remains

Kirsty Hewitt

Clarissa Dalloway embraces the past, Peter Walsh wallows within it and traumatised Septimus Smith tries his utmost to repel it

Sutherland and Hislop (attic)

 The attic is "a place of deathly renunciation and excited new life and discovery"

Kristina Groover

Clarissa has chosen this life…for the deep sense of privacy it affords her, and with that privacy the freedom of her imagination

Barbara Hill Rigney (madness)

In Jane Eyre, the price of sexual commitment is the loss of self in madness and death. Sexual love and passion are also dangerous in Mrs Dalloway, but madness becomes a kind of refuge for the self rather than its loss

Sutherland and Hislop (Sally)

Clarissa's recollection of her relationship with Sally is 'practically orgasmic'

Woolf

It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly