English Essay: Exploring Trauma in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

This essay provides an in-depth analysis of Virginia Woolf's novel, *Mrs. Dalloway*, examining its themes, characters, and narrative techniques. The essay explores the impact of World War I on characters like Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, highlighting their psychological struggles and the novel's exploration of trauma, memory, and identity. It delves into Woolf's use of the stream of consciousness technique, the depiction of societal issues, and the complexities of relationships, including the love triangle. The essay also discusses the novel's modernist elements, such as the fragmented narrative and the focus on subjective experiences, offering insights into Woolf's unique perspective on the human condition and the challenges faced by individuals in a rapidly changing society. The essay also touches on the themes of love, loss, and the search for meaning in a post-war world.

Running head: ENGLISH
English
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Introduction
Mrs. Dalloway is a novel that was written by famous British novelist Virginia Woolf. The
novel was published back in 1925 at the time when Britain was dealing with the trauma of World
War 1. The novel is depictive of the subjective experiences and the memories of the key
characters over a duration of one day in post-World War 1 London. The novel is divided into
parts instead of chapters, which highlights the excellently interlaced texture of the character’s
thoughts. The novel was not just daring in its form, but even in its content. Woolf gave life to an
ugly truth that was less talked about during that period - the war had already messed up the
minds of people, weakening them psychologically. Critics have widely agreed that the writer
found her voice with this novel. The novel did acquire a fair share of commercial and critical
success. This book, commonly focusing on the most commonplace tasks like parties, shopping
and eating dinner, presented that nothing is too small or too ordinary for any writer’s attention.
Mrs. Dalloway was successful in transforming novel as an art form. The novel is widely deemed
as being one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century.
Discussion
Mrs. Dalloway has been created as a modern novel in its true sense by Virginia Woolf.
The novel has been created from two short stories, Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street and the
unfinished The Prime Minister. The novel is describing a day in the life of its main character,
Clarissa Dalloway on a June day in post-World War I London, England. In the character of
Clarissa Dalloway, personality is one of the underlying themes of both the character and Virginia
Woolf’s fiction. The social image of the character screens the discordant features of the
personality that could be diverted into different and opposing images. Each of the other
characters can see just one of these features and then takes that as her actual personality. With

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the progress of the novel, the initial static image of the mirror paves the way for a series of
moving and opposing views of Mrs. Dalloway, and her identity swells into encompassing all the
different images while continuing un-encompassed by them. In recording the preparations by
Clarissa of hosting a party, Woolf is recording all the views, impressions and remembrances of
her own as well as of other characters. There exists no plots or sub-plots, no actual story, no
action in its real sense and there is nothing actually happening in the novel, except the myriad of
impressions that have been created by Woolf’s fresh style of writing in opposition to the
conventional one (Freedman 2014; Herman 2013).
The novel is depicting a swiftly changing society and the narration is reflecting these
changes. Mrs. Dalloway presents scathing impeachment of the then British class system and a
tough assessment of the existing patriarchy. The social satire of the work extracts the majority of
its force from ironic patterns of mythic reference that permits the mix of dramatic models from
Greek tragedy and from the Christian liturgy. Woolf is envisioning an allegorical battle between
good and evil – amongst Clarissa's comic merriment of life and the disastrous death-dealing
forces that are driving Septimus Smith towards suicide. The repetitive use of memory and
flashbacks are the methods used by Woolf for creating interior time. The depiction of Big Ben at
the start of a new chapter signifies the existence of external reality. The image of the city is
neither lifeless nor static - it is full of buses, cars, and crowds of people who are simultaneously
living their lives. Identity, which is a continual obsession of modernists is cast in a very different
light. In the view of Woolf, the self is dependent on the other, still, it is separated from it.
Intangible, ephemeral and elusive, true identity is difficult to capture (Edmondson 2012; Latham
2015).

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One more technique that helped Woolf unite interior and exterior time is repetition and
the characters are joined by the consistent use if memory. The characters are placed in such a
way as if searching for their own identities and they are feeling, thinking and experiencing
instead of just acting. It is evident that the writer is not narrating her story like the way her
predecessors did and the technique she has used is very commonly used by many modernist
writers and that is what is shown as the stream of consciousness technique. As narrations are
mostly mirrored in the mind of one character or another, it is most of the time fragmented and
dreamlike, just like Mrs. Dalloway (Park 2012).
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which is written in the form of a stream of consciousness, is
vivid, authentic and representative of the different traumatic experiences of the characters that
have been caused by World War 1. Two main characters, Clarissa and Smith, show signs of
traumatic suffering that has been incurred by World War 1. Both their spiritual discomfort and
psychic problems are relevant to their experiences with war. The overall tone of the novel is of
depression and melancholy, consistent with the thematic problem of the War incorporated
imperceptibly in the narrative of the character’s spirituality. Clarissa’s self rejects her husband's
deference at all time, which goes in a perpetually conflated manner with her actual rebellious
spirit, signifying an unequal competition among free individuality and the male-dominated
society that she was dwelling in. what Clarissa is representative of is free individuality that is
repressed by compulsive control of males. Clarissa is entertaining a doubtful hatred for Richard
that defies the supreme male society he is standing for and is perceived by her as being a man’s
brutal claim over political interests and individual liberty. Clarissa sees Richard’s plausible
demand as amounting to a form of hypocrisy hiding his male-chauvinism, which is actually
coinciding with the military power and the forceful influence it had in the war that just was over

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and has rendered Clarissa a sense of being old and shriveled. Her despising resistance of the
enclosed attic is bound up with her delicate feelings for the white sheets, which is metaphorically
interconnected with her being in the hospital where there were wounded soldiers covered in
white sheets. Therefore, when Clarissa gets shut up with the white sheet in the attic, she gets
enforced with her memories and thoughts of the wounded and dead in the Great War, which was
no less punishing than getting subdued by military brutality. Alignment, thus, arises between
dictation by a male and the cruelty of the war. Many critics have diagnosed Septimus Smith as
being a case of schizophrenia and even applied a conventional psychoanalytic interpretation of
his character. However, they have actually failed to identify that he suffers not from any
psychological pathology, but instead from a psychological injury, that has been imposed by his
culture by means of war and has been made septic by the very same culture’s postwar treatment
of veterans (Czarnecki 2015; Hogan 2013).
There existed a dominant belief for long that women suffered from pathological grief
more than men, which was explored by Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. She has explored the harmful
effects of medicalizing and feminizing grief, with Septimus being left with no avenue of
expressing his sorrow and suffering from melancholia. He hallucinates one for his dead
comrades, showing the severity of war and the death toll that he has experienced with his own
eyes. He ultimately took his own life to free himself from human nature, hypocrisy, and
insincerity. In Clarissa's eyes rest is imagined as a preparation for death, with bed becoming the
grave. Where Septimus has no other outlet other than death, Clarissa made efforts in maintaining
her connectedness with the people she cared about the most, even validating herself and her
relationships. Even though throughout the novel her sense of emptiness was repetitively

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exhibited, she made efforts in keeping herself connected with the past good memories (Wang
and Xie 2017).
It is an extremely amazing thing that within a span of a single day, a lot of things took
place with the characters inside Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and the past and the present life of
Clarissa, particularly her love story got revealed. In the first of the novel itself, Clarissa
Dalloway is seen with ally Seton, Peter Walsh, and Richard Dalloway. She had feelings and love
for each one of them. Clarissa’s love for Sally is shown vividly by the narrator. Clarissa was
attracted by the beauty of Sally, after which very quickly they became intimate. Sally was the
first person to tell her about sex and different social problems. They had discussions about
literature, life and so on, and danced with each other the whole life. She was happy with Sally,
and Woolf describes her happiness as something with integrity and purity, with no self-interest.
Even if they were always together, marriage was an impossible option for them. Back then,
female homosexuality was not criminalized, but female love affairs were unacceptable. Their
love affair was an illusion and disappeared fast. After thirty years of meeting at Clarissa’s party,
they both felt no affection for each other (Blair 2012).
Thirty years ago, Peter had feelings for Clarissa and he even loved her a lot and wanted to
marry her. They were at parties and dances together. They seemed like an ordinary couple in the
eyes of others. However, when Peter interrupted the kiss between Sally and Clarissa, Clarissa felt
for the first time his jealousy and hostility and then ended up quarreling with him. Even though
their romance period was not short, they lacked harmony. Among all three of Clarissa’s friends,
Peter was her first lover. He understood the immeasurable effect of Clarissa on him. However,
Clarissa did not choose him, but Sally. She thought he was like a little boy, which became more
intense after meeting with Richard Dalloway. She could no longer tolerate the jealousy and

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narrow-mindedness of Peter. Even after leaving him, Clarissa could not, however, forget her
time spent with him, which confused Peter about her actual feelings. She was living her life
peacefully with Richard after their marriage, but still, her sudden remembrances about her past
lovers and experiences confused Peter (Russell 2015).
There was a time when Clarissa loved all three of them equally - Sally, Peter, and
Richard. She cannot ever give an affirmative answer. She is always living in her part, thinking
about her love stories and looking for answers to her decision of marrying Richard and justifying
her reasons for not marrying Peter. She feels no desire for either Peter or Richard and is unaware
of by whom she is loved and whom she loves. For her, there is no one true love as she cannot
love any one of them calmly, strongly and with ease. Instead, she might be loving a combination
of them. Imagination and remembrance have led to her spiritual problem. Even though she is
speculating, she might never find the answer till her last breath. In this context, Woolf is
seemingly telling everyone that if a woman is thinking over her own experiences then she would
find that there is nothing more confusing than love. Woolf is attempting at defining a woman’s
goals in life and seeking for the answer of what a woman is and what they are hoping to be and
do. Mrs. Dalloway is a different take on the age-old concept of a love triangle (Gelfant 2012).
Conclusion
The First World War was a major catastrophic event that struck people with countless
wounds and deaths. Even after it ceased, the grief and agony did not get dispelled, continuing in
the form of traumatic memories. Mrs. Dalloway is a good example of the inescapable effects of
traumatic experiences, also serving as a reflective on the traumatic narratives of different
protagonists. The novel displays pathetic diffusions of traumatic suffering. The novel has also
helped draw attention to the external threats of War, something dreadful and inhuman. Even

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inside her very modernistic approach of narrative, Woolf has managed to stuff in a love triangle,
at the time of war.

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References and Bibliography
Blair, E., 2012. Virginia Woolf and the nineteenth-century domestic novel. SUNY Press.
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Czarnecki, K., 2015. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony (1977) Smith. Virginia Woolf: Writing the World, p.190.
Edmondson, A., 2012. Narrativizing Characters in Mrs. Dalloway. Journal of modern
literature, 36(1), pp.17-36.
Freedman, A., 2014. Death, Men, and Modernism: Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction
from Hardy to Woolf. Routledge.
Gelfant, B.H., 2012. Love and Conversion in" Mrs. Dalloway". Criticism, 8(3), p.2.
Herman, D., 2013. Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in
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Latham, M., 2015. A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway.
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Russell, R.R., 2015. Radical Empathy in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Genre, 48(3), pp.341-
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