Today I want to talk about the Mrs. Dalloway. First I will give a brief introduction about the author Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.
Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway(1925), To the
Lighthouse(1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf is considered a major innovator in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream of consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters.
Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.
Then, let’s move to the excerpt of Mrs. Dalloway.
This is the beginning part of the whole story about Mrs. Dalloway walking to the street. It made her remind the past time with her previous lover Mr. Walsh. Some simple sentences about cabbages. Then she walked beside the busy street and thought that how fool people were because they never knew how to enjoy the life. Then the Big Ben strikes brings us to the present life out of her memory.
Differ from the other traditional technique of writing, Woolf began the article with the heroine’s inner feeling. Recovering from the illness, Mrs. Dalloway felt the morning was so beautiful that makes her go back to her 18-year-old generation which she had a wonderful vacation. Then the time goes back to when she fell love with Mr. Walsh. In my opinion, she said all the things had utterly vanished, in fact, they are all in her mind, never go away.
Then Woolf uses the third person’s eye to describe Mrs. Dalloway. ‘a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness’
And the next part moves again to Mrs. Dalloway’s thoughts about the feeling that even you are in the busy street or late night you still feel solemnity. But the Big Ben represent the real life. Making readers clearly differentiate the Mrs. Dalloway’s memory and the real life.
After reading this part, I think, in our whole life, we will make a lot of decision. Like Mrs. Dalloway chose Mr. Dalloway, in her later life, she, more or less regretted not choosing Peter. Because the dream didn’t defeat the reality. We should choose what we suit for, not what we like.