War! Hrugh! What is it good for? (Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf)

Member Name: SpankMarvin

Product:	Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Date:	01/12/01 (508 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Intelligent and satisfying to read

Disadvantages: Unconventional, No plot as such

I haven't written one of these opinions for a while. One of the reasons for this is that I am quite lazy, and the second is all my university work. Well, one advantage to this is that I have read something, such as Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, and aren't I glad I did? Well, yes I am.

Mrs Dalloway is Woolf's fourth novel and is fairly short. But it is dense - very, very dense, and so deserves more time than your average 150 page novel. Set during the course of one day in London in June 1923, the book traces the day of Clarissa Dalloway, her friend from early adulthood Peter Walsh, and Septimus and Rezia Warren Smith, a separate couple also living in London.

The book deals with many very important issues close to Woolf on a personal level, and the setting of London 1923 is no coincidence. Mrs Dalloway's London is a postwar city in a severe state of self-denial. There is an underlying tension throughout which obviously attributes itself to the effects of the First World War and yet defines the British attitude at the time of ignoring, rather than addressing such important issues as shell-shock and death. This is where Septimus Warren Smith becomes such an important character. Defined both as mad and as perfectly sane by two separate doctors in London, he is the representation of the effects of the War on combatants. Emasculated and ignored by the country he has fought to hold together, he is incapable of living in a society which can no longer accommodate him without admitting that he exists as a problem. Those civilians who have not experienced War are, unlike Septimus, reject the idea of death and cling to the past, so that they do not have to address the future. Neither Clarissa nor Peter Walsh have, in their years of separation, altered much at all in terms of attitude, but notably (and this perhaps explains the title of the book) Clarissa's name has changed through marriage, and so there can never be a total
escape from the change which all civilians at this time seem unwittingly to pursue.

By the time she wrote this novel, Woolf's narrative style was much more experimental than her first two works, The Voyage Out and Night and Day. Like her third novel, Jacob's Room, the text relies on the perception of others to form a picture of characters, and very subtle references which imply, rather than spell out. People's reactions to the sounds of approaching aircraft in Mrs Dalloway for example, suggest a sense of paranoia and insecurity to which Britain was not prepared to confess. Woolf does this all the way through the book to great effect, and Mrs Dalloway is certainly more of an issues novel than a plot novel. It very deeply touches the inner mental workings of someone who is mentally troubled but also tragically misunderstood by all. As with many of Woolf's novels, this is hardly a book to read before a night on the razzle, but it is beautifully written, clever and touchingly honest. I would recommend the Penguin version by the way, it's got a great introduction.

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