Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" is a day-in-the-life story that folds back and forth in time, examining one woman's life decisions and one man's postwar nightmare. The woman is Clarissa Dalloway, a "perfect hostess" in her early fifties. She contemplates the decisions she made thirty years ago. The ... for example, is used as a spatial device to unify the individual characters as they respond to it with curiosity, terror or patriotism. "Mrs. Dalloway... looked out with her little pink face... Everyone looked at the motor car. Septimus looked...as if some horror had come almost to ... not succ...

• Word Count: 2217
• Approx Pages: 9
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

Both Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith are viewed superficially as two completely different people with no relation. However, after analyzing the behaviors and mannerisms of both, the reader discovers that both characters are more similar than they appear to be. Because both characters grow up under the same social rules, they both have very similar opinions about the society that set the guidelines for their lives. The thoughts and actions of both Septimus and Clarissa parallel each other throughout the novel, despite the fact that the two never meet. Clarissa sees death through time. She ...

• Word Count: 588
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: High School

... moment." (Virginia Woolf, in her diary, August 30, 1923) Failure is one of these "connecting caves" that Woolf and Cunningham have dug out beneath their characters. In the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway the theme of failure is brought to the attention of the reader quite quickly. When Clarissa remembers her girlhood days and it brings to her memory that Peter, her one ... special and intimate in her youthful friendships with Peter and Sally that was lost in the flurry of social appointments and the process of "living" from day to day.. Throughout Mrs. Dalloway everyone accuses everyone else...

• Word Count: 1603
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School