Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf (1925)
“One day in London, 1923 — a party-giving society woman and a shell-shocked veteran who will never meet spiral toward the same moment of recognition: that life is everything, and it is ending.”
Character Analysis
Fifty-two, upper-class, a hostess by vocation. She chose Richard's steadiness over Peter's passion, and the choice has been both correct and costly. Her social world is elegant and hollow; her interior world is philosophical and fearless. She is not Woolf's self-portrait but she contains Woolf's questions: how do you preserve the privacy of the soul while giving yourself to a social role? What is the value of beauty and gathering? Is a party a trivial act or an act of creation? The novel refuses to answer definitively — and so does Clarissa.
Her speech is light, social, pleasurable — she does not need to impress because her position is secure. In her interior monologue, however, she is precise, philosophical, self-critical. The gap between her social voice and her interior voice is the novel's central irony.