Analysis of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway

According to Chronicles magazine, "Woolf was undeniably a brilliant writer." Woolf's work of Mrs. Dalloway was read by fifteen-year-old Michael Cunningham in order to impress an older girl in school. As he stated, "the book really knocked me out." Once older, Cunningham wanted to write about Mrs. Dalloway, but thought not too many people would want to read a book about reading a book. He then thought he might want to read a book about reading the right book. Hence, The Hours was written. Cunningham would incorporate Mrs. Dalloway into "a book about reading a book." The Hours weaves through three woman's lives. As the novel unfolds, it shows that these three women

The ongoing relationship between the literary movements of modernism and post-modernism is encompassed by the intertextual relationships between Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”. These relationships communicate the inadequacy of previous writings to convey trauma, cultural crisis and the deep fragmentation within their respective societies. The immediate context of these social dialogues creates a clear division between each text, however the intertextual similarities between minor and major characters create an effective parallel to traverse decades, years, months and days. This is in order to assess the lasting impacts of society on an individual’s desire to escape either physically or metaphorically.

  Clarissa Dalloway, the central character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, is a complex figure whose relations with other women reveal as much about her personality as do her own musings. By focusing at length on several characters, all of whom are in some way connected to Clarissa, Woolf expertly portrays the ways females interact: sometimes drawing upon one another for things which they cannot get from men; other times, turning on each other out of jealousy and insecurity.

In the book Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted to cast the social system and bash it for how it worked. Her intricate focus is focusing not on the people, but on the morals of a certain class at a certain historical moment.

Throughout her life, novelist Virginia Woolf suffered with mental illness, and she ultimately ended her life at age 59. As art often imitates life, it is not surprising that characters in Woolf’s works also struggle with mental illness. One of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman living in London, and those who run in her circle. As the novel progresses the reader sees one of the characters, Septimus, struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by serving in war. At the end of the story, he commits suicide. While there is no explicit articulation of any other character suffering from mental illness in the novel, Septimus is not alone. Through her thoughts and actions, we can deduce that Clarissa also endures mental and emotional suffering. Though Clarissa does not actually attempt to end her life in the novel, her mental and emotional suffering lead her to exhibit suicidal tendencies. To prove this, I will examine Clarissa’s thoughts and actions from a psychological perspective.

"Mrs. Dalloway" written by Virginia Woolf is about the fictional life of a character by the name of Clarrisa Dalloway, who is seen to be this high class woman living in an era after the war, who is preparing for a party that she is to be hosting later on. Virginia Woolf seemed to use time as a main part of the setting of her story too by setting it in the morning and ending the next day at three in the morning. Using time like this is significant because then now the reader must really pay attention since every detail seems important. For example when characters reflect on past incidents that happened in their lives and then the story suddenly turns back into the present and in reality of the story a few minutes have only gone by. An example of that is when Clarrisa reflects her youth, "What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges,

Moreover, the fluidity, represented by the thoughts of the characters, is enhanced by the form of the novel: Mrs Dalloway is not divided into chapters; thus, it does not leave behind a sense of completeness. It is largely intertwined with the narration of Clarissa and that of the other characters and the action largely takes place in the mind. This is presented in form of free indirect discourse: the narrative conveys the thoughts of the selected character. This leaves the readers with an impressionistic story. To demonstrate how different characters bring about unequal messages, here is an illustration from the work: when Clarissa is strolling the streets of London, she and Septimus both see the same car. The vehicle leads them to different thoughts: for Septimus it is seeing in it the power of the modern world, which “was about to burst into flames” (13) or rather the oppressive relationship of technology and war, which ultimately leads to his suicide. He is bound by the internal, his suffering thoughts cannot help but to be captured in the memories of the World War I he fought in. For Clarissa, hearing the noise of the car provokes her to think she has heard “a pistol shot in the street” (12) (which later turns out to be true). By using such a form of representation, Woolf points to the invisible connections of people in a dehumanised, yet technology-bound, world, which create between them a form of interaction that serves as compensation for what Septimus (and

In Virginia Woolf’s “Night and Day”, we, as the reader, can examine various feminist themes throughout the novel. Even though, “Night and Day” is one of her more conventional novels, many of the issues fly in the face of traditional values and capitalizes on the female oppression that was present in that time era. Even though, this was one of her earlier works, I believe that her conventional structure was an intentional creation, as she was trying to make a point on literary tradition and feminism. In contrast to many of her later novels, like “To The Lighthouse”, which had much anti-structure and stream of consciousness, “Night and Day”, is full of carefully written

Post World War I London society was characterized by a flow of new luxuries available to the wealthy and unemployment throughout the lower classes. Fascinated by the rapidly growing hierarchal social class system, Virginia Woolf, a young writer living in London at the time, sought to criticize it and reveal the corruption which lay beneath its surface. Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s fourth novel, was born in 1925 out of this desire precisely. A recurring focus in many of Woolf’s major novels is the individual and his or her conscious perceptions of daily life. Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses this technique, known as a “stream-of-consciousness,” to trace the thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith during one day in London five years after the Great War. It is exactly this narrative technique which allows Woolf to compare the lives of these two characters which belong to different social classes to argue that social placement has a negative effect on one’s life and psychological being.

During the time of a young modern society, there were ideals and social standards that led people to feel isolated from their own expressions and thoughts. In Mrs. Dalloway, identity is a significant theme depicted in the novel and is prevalent between the characters portrayed throughout. One character in particular that represents the image and reflection of identity in the British society during the first world war is Clarissa Dalloway. All the attributes such as her love for flowers, her lavish entertaining parties, and the bonds she has between her friends and lovers reveal something about her identity that she discovers about herself at the end of the book. Clarissa’s personality is complex and moving as her emotions and life events are unraveled in the moment as things happen.

War is an important theme in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a post World War I text. While on the one hand there is the focus on Mrs. Dalloway’s domestic life and her ‘party consciousness’, on the other there are ideas of masculinity and “patriotic zeal that stupefy marching boys into a stiff yet staring corpse and perniciously public-spirited doctors” , and the sense of war reverberates in the entire text. Woolf’s treatment of the Great War is different from the normative way in which the War is talked about in the post world war I texts. She includes in her text no first hand glimpse of battlefield, instead gives a detached description. This makes it more incisive because she delineates the after effects in personal ordinary lives. Judith

The comparative study of texts and their appropriations reflect the context and values of their times, demonstrating how context plays a significant role. Virginia Woolf’s novel modernists Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Steven Daldry’s post modernists film The Hours (2002), an extrapolation, explore the rapid change of social and philosophical paradigms of the 20th century, focusing on women whose rich inner lives are juxtaposed with their outer lives. They place the characters in their respective context, to respond to, the horrors of the consequences of war and AIDS and the vagaries and difficulties of relationships, sexuality and mental illness. Through their differing intertextual perspectives the film and novel represent similar values, within different contextual concerns.

‘Mrs. Dalloway’, by Virginia Woolf is a derivative text of ‘The Hours’, written by Michael Cunningham. The novels both share an important theme of mental health. The circumstances of mental health are commonly sympathetic, and empathetic. The characters Septimus and Clarissa in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and Richard, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf in ‘The Hours’ show the strongest symbols for this theme. Most of the problems and treatments these characters face are in direct result of the age they live in. Both novels express a relationship between era, illnesses and treatments.

E.M. Forster’s classic novel “A Passage to India” tells the story of a young doctor, Dr. Aziz, and his interactions with the British citizens who are residing in India during the time of the British Raj. Throughout the novel, the reader gets many different viewpoints on the people and the culture of India during this point in history. The reader sees through the eyes of the Indian people primarily through the character of Dr. Aziz, and the perceptions of the British through the characters of Mr. Fielding, Adela Quested, and Mrs. Moore. Through the different characters, and their differing viewpoints, the reader can see that Forster was creating a work that expressed a criticism that he held of the behavior of the British towards their Indian subjects.

Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses the characters Clarissa and Lucrezia not only to further the plot of the story but to make a profound statement about the role of wives in both society and their marriages. While these women are subjected to differing experiences in their marriages, there is one common thread that unites each of their marriages: oppression. These women drive the story of Mrs. Dalloway and provide meaning and reason in the lives of the men in the story; however, these women are slowly but surely forced to forsake their own ambitions in order to act in accordance with the social standards set in place by marriage for women. For women outside of many modern cultures, marriage has been a necessity for a woman’s safety and security, and it required her to give up her freedom and passions and subjected her to an oppressed lifestyle. Ultimately, through the wives in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf communicates that marriage is an institution where in women are forced to suppress their individual desires and passions in order to serve their husband and further his own ambitions as first priority.