Virginia Wolf writings

Reality is something very erratic very undependable now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and takes the silent world more real than the world of speech - and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly, Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to dis-cern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway captures this sense of reality. She has sieved through the subtle thoughts and events in one wo-man's life and paralleled those subtleties with those of Septimus Smith, a one-time poet and clerk as an estate and land agent. Though the alternating plots appear disjointed, Woolf manages to manipulate them so they connect and in so doing she forces the reader to reflect more, to search deeper. Through the "bird-like" Clarissa Dalloway and the hunched, "hawk-like" form of Septimus, Virginia Woolf has dealt with the universal theme of Time, and thus broadened the sympathies of all her readers. But most importantly, she has stressed there is a Septimus or Clarissa in each of us - that in their search for "a joy of life," a "sense of proportion" she is

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self to her with its "leaden circles" dissolving in the air. Her heart had no fear; it did not collect all "sorrows, renew, collect and let fall." She did not hear the "wave breaking, the dog barking, far away barking and barking." She did not view life, then, as a procession "the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds, a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on." In her youth, life was walking on the terrace at Bourton or "musing among the vegetables." She wonders what to do, where one is to choose, and she realizes the older one gets, there comes a day when one knows there is a dividing line and life has brought her there without her knowing. She is still the young Mrs. Dallo-way, yet the older she gets the closer she draws toward those Bourton days. The clock brings her very close to the end of her life. It makes her look at herself and she realizes she is more than the casual party-giver. The old neighbor woman she sees across the yard, moving in her cap, forces her to think about love and religion: "here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?" The picture created is important because it shows that their two lives, their rooms, have their own boundaries and though tangent,

Category: Literature - V