Mrs Dalloway Context

Historical Context

• First World War

• Spanish Flu

• Society for Women

• Interwar Politics

• Imperialism and Eugenics

Literary Context

• Modernism - Bergson

• Woolf’s own vision of her novel/Victorian Realism

• Cities in Modernist Literature

• Literary Allusions

• Woolf’s other works

Biographical

• Woolf’s childhood and mental breakdowns

• Feminism

• The Bloomsbury Group

• What was Virginia Woolf afraid of?

First World War

• June 1923 - Five years since the Armistice

• Richard exempted from conscription ‘a tremor made holding a rifle dangerous’

• Septimus Smith and his treatment - lack of empathy for patients suffering with their mental health

• The First World War as a call for increased empathy

Spanish Flu

• Clarissa suffered the Spanish Flu

• Eagerness to re-enter life with vibrancy

Society

• Big Ben was first heard in 1923

• The working title for the novel was ‘The Hours’

• Skywriting - reflections of the War

• Softening of rigid class definitions

• Mrs Dalloway celebrates the new freedom enjoyed by women to explore London

Interwar Politics

• Threat of an impending Labour Government

• Clarissa confuses her Armenians and Turks after the Muslim Turks’ massacre 1915 (contemporary equation to mixing up Palestinians with Iranians etc) is indicative of Clarissa’s ignorance to global matters

Imperialism and Eugenics

• Britain’s imperial power was beginning to wain

• Woolf satirises the patriotic spirit and attacks eugenicist ideologies

• Charles Clarke - Canadian Eugenicist ‘pumping Canada full of defective and mentally diseased immigrants’

• Woolf sees national/imperial power as being chauvinistic

• Offers insight into her own mental capacity through the connectedness of the novel

Modernism

• Literary modernism characterised by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing

• Modernism experimented with literary form and expression

• Henri Bergson

• Woolf’s style of writing influenced by Cubist and Post-Impressionist styles

• Post-impressionist work is based more on feeling than visual fact

• Cubism presents a number of different perspectives at the same time

Bergson and Modernism

• Emphasised the difference between scientific clock time and the subject, human experience of time

• Influenced the stream of consciousness technique

• Bergsonian approach of time

Cities in Modernist Literature

• The city as a significant motif

• Privacy, social isolation, communication, and connection in the city

• Dickens’ London?

Literary Allusions

• Clarissa → Samuel Richardson’s famous epistolary novel Clarissa - immortal Robert Lovelace who plots to rape Clarissa

• The Rape of the Lock - Clarissa holds scissors as an allusion to cutting a lock of Belinda’s hair in Pope’s Rape of the Lock

• Each Clarissa has had to navigate their moralistic society’s demands upon women

• Shakespeare’s Cymbeline - Fear no more the heat o’ the sun → death is not a thing to be feared but as a relief

• Cymbeline allusion to reconcile with death

Woolf’s other works

• Orlando - a tribute to Woolf’s aristocratic lover Vita Sackville West

• Explores the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman, a significant work that influences women’s writing and gender/transgender studies

• Clarissa Dalloway first appeared in Woolf’s first novel Voyage Out, where Clarissa is presented satirically as a frivolous upper-class snob