The significance of life and death in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract EN

The course of Time in Mrs Dalloway is divided into inner time (psychological time) and clock time (mechanical one).

The first is a kind of flow (flux): the past lives in the present, in memory and even in fantasies; in its consequences it shapes the future as well.

So, the action moves backward and forward freely in a single day in the life of Mrs Dalloway in London in all its contestations, ambiguity and heterogeneity.

It is also emotionally limited to the relationships of the heroine with other people and her mind ranges without any limitations of time and discursive spaces, from London to her girlhood at Bourton and back again to London.

We move from the consciousness of Mrs Dalloway to the consciousness of Septimus, Rezia, Peter Walsh, Doris Kilman and others.

but Mrs Dalloway's character has been closely integrated with her world, with her society which is spiritually hollow, usually based on false assumptions leading to the death of the soul.

The study conveys a sense of impending disaster not only lurking beneath the outside world (London) but also in Mrs Dalloway's private and social life.

The result of her sociability with her evening party ends up with her identification with Septimus' soul.

This duality, this fluctuation, exposes much of Mrs Woolf's life and her death (suicide).Also, the study's concern is with the other characters whose fears and anxieties are interwoven with utopian fantasies and dreams, the crown of which is seemingly of that identification and that duality.