Mrs Dalloway Critic Quotes

“Bradshaw and Holmes are representative of the gentlemanly desire to evade all talk of abnormality”

Whitaker

[Septimus] “assult on his individuality in the form of Dr Holmes and Bradshaw”

Dr Manjeet Rathee

“she has both conformist and rebellious side, a public and private self”

Alex Zwerdling

“Woolf told us ten thousand things about Mrs Dalloway but did not show us Mrs Dalloway”

Arnold Bennett

“Mrs Dalloway uses the idea of a public and a private life as a means of exploring an opposition between a masculine view of the world (that of doing) and a feminine view (that of feeling)”

John Batchelor

“Clarissa has chosen this life, not only for its privileges and protections but for the deep sense of privacy it affords her”

Kristina Groover

“a public and private self”

Elaine Fulton

“Peter Walsh represents the romantic hero who she rejects”

Rachel Bowlby

“The secret space within Clarissa’s self is symbolised by the attic to which she ascends”

Sutherland and Hislop

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

Sutherland and Hislop

“Clarissa’s bedroom… a sacred space and suggests the spiritual nature of her seclusion”

Kristina Groover

“lid of convention…so her intense emotional life must be lived entirely in her own mind”

Alex Zwerdling

[Septimus’s] “leap into death and [Clarissa’s] into the life she has chosen… are both suicidal”

Jensen

“Septimus does not want to die, but society demands his sacrifice”

Barbara Hill Rigney

“I want to criticise the social system and to show it at work at its most intense”

Woolf

“all that is snobbish and artificial about London society converges at the party”

Elaine Showalter

“a sharply critical examination of the governing class”

Alex Zwerdling

“Clarissa is a slave to society’s rules of behaviour which ultimately cuts her off from any substantial relationship”

Leigh Kincer

[Kilman] “outside the acceptable realm of society”

Elaine Fulton

“the name of the husband is one of the strongest insignia of patriarchal power”

Jacqueline Rose

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

Gary Carey

“under the rubric ‘Clarissa’… her memories of Bourton, her relationship with Peter Walsh, her sexual fascination with other women and… under ‘Mrs Dalloway’ her marriage to Richard, her daughter Elizabeth, her role of hostess'“

Perry Meisel

[Septimus] “intended to be [Clarissa’s] double”

Woolf

“Clarissa sees the truth, Septimus sees the insane truth”

Woolf

“Mrs D was originally to kill herself”

Woolf

“societified lady and the obscure maniac”

E.M. Forster

“while women relive their lives vicariously through their daughters, men have the chance to renew their lives through action”

Elaine Showalter

[Clarissa] “a recessed homosexual victimised by patriarchal culture”

Ann Ronchetti

“modernism offered a new understanding of the world”

Simon Otillia

“almost all the characters have failed to live up to their youthful dreams”

Susanna Hislop

“Miss Kilman searches for human connection in a world that has rejected her”

Elaine Fulton

[Clarissa and Septimus] “may be seen in their relationship to society, as essentially ‘feminine’ in that both are victimised… by a male-supremacist system”

Barbara Hill Rigney