'The Importance of Time in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway\r'

'Modern English new(a) Theme: â€Å"The immenseness of condemnation in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. D tout ensembleoway” As forgiving cosmoss, we ar unique in our certifiedness of death. â€Å"We retire that we will die, and that knowledge invades our sentience…it will not let us breathe until we realize found ways, with rituals and stories, theologies and philosophies, either to discharge instinct of death, or, failing that, to illuminate sense of ourselves in the face of death. ” Attaching significance to invigoration even outts is a military populace reaction to the sense of â€Å"meaninglessness” in the realism.Fea reflect our net annihilation, we form belief systems to reassure us in the face of death. Religion provides us with elaborate rituals at clippings of death and faith assists belialwayss in tribulation and coping with the loss of loved anes. So with come in a religious foundation, where does adept remember solace in the face of so much pain? This is the contend for Virginia Woolf, a self-proclaimed atheist whose life was bumed by death from an early old age. In the age in the midst of 18953 (when she was thirteen) and 1904 she lost her m separate, her sister, and her father.Less than a decade later, Europe was consumed by war, and public wail became a procedure of her life. â€Å" sorrow started very early in Virginia’s life, which big business composition be one reason why her makeup offers us such a forceful retrovert that it should, or could, be brought to an end. ” Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories deep changed the way we think or so the mind and its subconscious mind workings. His work greatly influenced the way lot mum mental illness and other sociable deviations. This is oddly true during the clipping that Virginia Woolf was writing these freshs, when his books were widely read.In refinement and Its Discontents, Freud lay outs the struggle b etween Eros (the twit for go overling love) and Thanatos (the appetite for death) as the forces that dominate human decision-making and action. He feargond that without healthy outlets for our own sexual appetites, domain would fall to war and violence, as Thanatos wins the mesh. Virginia Woolf is a perfect example of how this struggle exists in the human psyche. Her early sexual invasions damaged her sexual drive later in life. She was often cold towards her husband, futile to feel any passion for him.Her desire for death, then, cleanthorn have been stronger, which would explain her preoccupation with it. Attempting self-destruction twice, and eventually succeeding in 1941, Woolf was a slenderizeely aw be of the shadow in her life. She, similar Septimus the poet in Mrs. Dalloway, condemned herself to death. Responses to death are an grand theme in Woolf’s literature. sorrow is a natural and necessary reaction to loss. In our minds, we must put the all of a sudden to rest, even if they serene exist in our memories. Freud had much to say just about this subject in Mourning and Melancholia.He wrote that it king be a solution to losing a loved one, as experienced by the parts in these novels. It may to a fault be a response to a jeopardize ideal (country, freedom, family) that may be experienced in sentence of war. We must, on that read/write headfore, take into account that Woolf, at the prison term of writing these two novels, had lived finished with(predicate) one introduction War. After globe War I at that place was much sorrow in Europe. Public mourning, as mentioned, is done on a larger scale, and includes despair, overall uncertainty, and confusion.The Great War had shaken the ball, leaving the survivors abrupt and uncertain as to how to heal the wounds and mourn for so many losses. Writing in the 1920s, Woolf was keenly aware of the mood in Europe, sequence for public mourning had now passed, and life continued, tho ugh radically and eternally altered. The war had great impact on her writing, and on her vision of the reality. â€Å"The war had taught him [Smith]. It was sublime. He had at peace(p) by dint of the whole show, friendship, European War, death…” Death was an ever present shadow in Woolf’s life, retributive now insight could illuminate aspects of life that would have distinguishablely been overlooked.Without religious security, the author (like the rest of us) struggled to deal with loss. briny pause With the publication of Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf, 1996) in 1925, the trendrnist writer and dilettante Virginia Woolf released one of her most celebrated novels upon the literary world. Examining ‘an run-of-the-mine mind on an ordinary solar solar day’ (Woolf, 1948, p 189) Woolf explores the fragmentary self through and through ‘streams of consciousness’, whereby home(a) monologues are applyd to tell the story through the mi nds of the principal characters. Told through the medium of mniscient narration, this story about two community who never extend to has no resolution and the characters remain where they started, locked in their own heads, in a unending state of flux. As a contemporary study of post-war Britain, however, Mrs Dalloway mirrors the fragmentation that was taking military position at bottom her own culture and society, and provides a â€Å" finespun displacement of those aspects of consciousness in which she mat that the equity of human experience really lay. ” A get of themes and motifs are explored, provided this essay will tip over the nominateation of snip within the novel.For Woolf, clock is a device with which she not moreover restricts the pace of the novel, but with which she as well as controls her characters, setting and plot. It is also wasting diseased to misgiving ‘ worldly c at a epochrn’ and the effect of that on the indivi du al characters within the story as they journey through their day. As these different modes are uncovered, psychological cartridge holder will be revealed and its impact on the main characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus rabbit warren Smith will be examined. Although Woolf has rejected the elongate narrative favoured by her precursors, in what she described as a queer yet masterful design, she does execute a certain linearity.The thoughts and memories of Clarissa Dalloway, condescension darting tail endwards and frontward through time, move towards a definite point in the future †her party. Septimus Warren Smith, on the other hand, is stuck in a time loop, living in a past that he cannot escape until the endorsement of his death. Mrs Dalloway bears the hallmarks of a modernist text with its striking and experimental use of form and language. Woolf accelerates and decelerates time by way of the thoughts and emotions of her characters.The animate at which individua l paragraphs move convey the horny response of the character to the smirch; when time slows, the sentences are long and languorous, but when the mood changes the sentences shrink to con declarative ones. The kinetic mode is the tempo or speed at which the character experiences a situation and the centripetaling of Mrs Dalloway demonstrates how Woolf accelerates time to a fever budge to convey the energy and restless vitality of the two Clarissa’s: Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were flood tide. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning †sassy as if issued to children on a beach. What a run around! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could pick up now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.How fresh, how calm, still er than this of couse, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; deject and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she was then) solemn, aspect as she did, standing at that place at the open window, that something awful was about to devolve…” Mrs Dalloway is set on a single day in the meat of June, 1923, in London’s West End. The time and place are dis connected by Woolf repeatedly plunging her heroine back in time to the summer at Bourton when she was a girl of 18. Hermione lee(prenominal) contends that â€Å"the past is not in contrast with the present but involved with it”.This passage sets the scene for the dual themes of liberation and loss which are outworked through Clarissa’s rites of passage. Woolf cleverly parallels two important times of Clarissa’s life †her entry into cleaning womanhood and her descent into meat age †and establishes a link between chronological time and t ime of life: In the length of half a page, Woolf sets the scene for her two landscapes †a country house in late prim England, and a town house in Georgian Westminster. The late 1880s, when Clarissa was a girl of 18, was â€Å"a time of serenity and security, the age of house parties and long weekends in the country”.The Indus running game Revolution had, by this time, change the social landscape, and capitalists and manufacturers had amassed great fortunes, shifting money and actor to the middle classes. Social class no eternal depended upon heritage; indeed Clarissa’s own social heritage is never clearly defined. Born into an age of reform †Gladstone had passed the Married Woman’s Property Act and Engels had just published the help volume of Marx’s Das Kapital â€ at 18, Clarissa has an enquiring mind, and despite her apparent naivety, she is questioning and absorbs the different thoughts and ideas that mark the age.Despite her na ivety, the eighteen-year-old Clarissa is a vibrant young woman who is full moon of fun. She loves verse line and has aspirations of move in love with a man who will value her for the opinions imbued in her by fling Seton. Her bursting open the French windows and plunging at Bourton is a metaphor for her rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood, and she embraces the change, despite â€Å" olfactory property…that something awful was about to happen. ”  Life at Bourton was supply and Clarissa was protected from the decay of Victorian values; the boundaries set by her father and aging aunt, far from be restricting, allowed her a sense of freedom.Bourton and her youth therefore represent a time of liberation for Clarissa. The present mode of time is one of uncertainty, where Clarissa’s understanding of ’reality’ has been fragmentize by the first world war, and where prime minister of religion Stanley Baldwin †under whom her husband, R ichard, serves †has been in power for just three weeks; the third British Prime Minister in a year. At 52 years old, Clarissa’s plunge into middle age is an ironic affair and the subscriber is given a sense that it is not the lark that she declares it to be but is or else a time for reflecting on the past.Although she still has a questioning mind, she has lost her voice, and this is symbolised by Woolf’s use of inside monologue. Her home in Westminster, where her bed is fix and â€Å"the sheets…tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side” therefore represents a time of loss. As a young woman Clarissa had been avidly pursued by nib Walsh whose wedlock proposals she rejected on account of his stifling her. jointure to Richard was meant to have given her some license, yet the middle-aged Clarissa is like a caged bird, repeatedly depicted as having â€Å"a stain of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green. This day is significant t o her in that it represents her breaking out of that cage, her ‘coming of age’, and by buying the flowers herself she is asserting her independence and re-gaining control of her life. Despite the ordinariness of her day, Clarissa (in contrast to the intuitive feeling she experienced as she plunged through the windows at Bourton) feels that something important is about to happen to her and she receives the morning â€Å"fresh as if issued to children on a beach. ” The ripe(p) Clarissa has become obedient and her spirit and idealism have been tamed, her passion for life and love quenched.This attitude reflects the spirit of the modernist age where there is a national lack of confidence in God, in government and in authority adjacent the slaughter at the Somme. Clarissa’s party is her prospect to unmask her real self to the world. However, she wastes the luck by indulging in superficial conversition with nation who do not matter to her. This suggests tha t the real Clarissa has been left over(p) behind at Bourton; that the young woman plunging through the squeaky French windows, filled with burgeoning hopes for the future, is the real Clarissa Dalloway.The provided time we glimpse her as a mature woman is when she briefly speaks with Peter and Sally at her party. The most obvious representation of time in Mrs Dalloway is ‘ measure time’. Various measures are present throughout the novel, including life-sized Ben, St Margaret’s and an nameless ‘other’ who is always late. How the character experiences time time…is rendered by Virginia Woolf as a sensory stimulation which may divert the stream of thought, summon memory, or change an emotional mood, as do the chimes of Big Ben and St Margaret’s throughout Mrs Dalloway.Thus clock time is metamorphosed into feeling and enters consciousness as one more aspect of duration. Accurate to within one second per day, its importance in the novel can be in no doubt. It makes its first appearance early on in the novel as Clarissa blocks her Westminster home. Jill Morris asserts that: When Big Ben strikes, those who hear are lifted out of their absorption in daily living to be reminded of this moment out of all the rest. This is demonstrated by Clarissa who, in the middle of ruminating about her life as she waits to cross the road, becomes abruptly aware of: â€Å"a particular hush, or ceremony; an indescribable pause; a suspense… in front Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the minute of arc, irrevocable. The sluggish circulates dissolved in the air. ” Not only do we anticipate the decease of Big Ben, but when â€Å"we hear the pass away…we have a visual picture of it in our imaginations as well”.The musical warning is the ‘Westminster chime’ †sooner the ‘Cambridge chime’ †that plays out before the hour ‘irrev ocably’ strikes. Composed in 1859 by William Crotch, it is based on a phrase from Handel’s aria â€Å"I know that my Redeemer Liveth”. The irrevocability of the hour refers to the passing of time and its ephemerality. formerly an hour has been spent there is no reclaiming it. This is link with Clarissa’s obsession with death †that each tick of the clock brings her closer to her eventual demise †and foreshadows her family relationship with her double, Septimus.Just as Big Ben strikes at significant moments in the book, so St Margaret’s languishes: Ah, said St Margaret’s, like a hostess who comes into her drawing-room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I am not late. No, it is on the dot half-past eleven, she says. Yet, though she is perfectly effective, her voice, being the voice of the hostess, is averse to inflict its individuality. Some grief for the past holds it back; some concern for the present.It is half-past eleven, she says, and the sound of St Margaret’s glides into the recesses of the kernel and buries itself in ring afterward ring of sound, like something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a dread of delight, at rest †like Clarissa herself…It is Clarissa herself, he thought, with a deep emotion, and an extraordinarily clear, yet puzzling, recollection of her, as if this bell had come into the room years ago, where they sat at some moment of great intimacy, and had gone from one to the other and had left, like a bee with honey, tight with the moment.The bells of St Margaret’s †the parish church of the House of Commons †symbolise, to Peter Walsh, Clarissa. At Bourton he had condescendingly prophesied that â€Å"she had the makings of the perfect hostess”, and, indeed, Clarissa spends the entire novel preparing for her party. That evening he observes her â€Å"at her worse †eff usive, insincere” as she welcomes her guests. The gulf of time has brought out the worst in Peter and he is still bitter about Clarissa’s rejection of him, hate her life with Richard.These feelings are forgotten, however, once St Margaret’s begins to strike, and he is filled with deep emotion for her. The other clock is unidentifiable, a shambolic stranger following on the heels of the eminent Big Ben and elegant St Margaret’s: …The clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends, which it dumped implement as if Big Ben were all very well with his majesty laying experience the law, so solemn, so just….Woolf wrote of Mrs Dalloway that â€Å"the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face using up the next weeks at it”. One way that she deals with this trial is in her treatment of the late clock. It sounds â€Å"volubly, troublouslyâ⠂¬Â¦beaten up” reflecting the state of mind of the neurasthenic Septimus who â€Å"talks aloud, respond people, arguing, laughing, crying, getting very excited…” The ‘otherness’ of this clock defines its strangeness, with its perpetual lateness and shuffling eccentricities being used as a metaphor for insanity, and therefore, for Septimus.Just as Clarissa and Septimus never meet neither do Big Ben and the ‘other’ clock †they are out of synch and their relationship is notable only for the difference between them. As Clarissa Dalloway spends the day preparing for her party, so Septimus Warren Smith spends it preparing to die. There are allusions to his be suicide and time of his death throughout the novel, and even his name †which means ‘ 7th’ or ‘seventh time’ †implies that the prophetic relationship between the man and his death is controlled by time.This was now revealed to Septimus; the put ac ross surreptitious in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next…Dante the same… In his insanity, Septimus likens himself to Dante who travelled through the three areas of the dead during devoted Week in the spring of 1300. The seventh (Septimus) circle of ‘the violent’ is divided into three rings, the middle ring being for suicides who have been turned into rough and knot trees on which the harpies build their nests.His affinity with trees throughout the novel suggests that they have become anthropomorphic to Septimus and he looks foregoing to the time when he will become one himself. Cutting one down is, he considers, tantamount(predicate) to committing murder, an action that will be judged by God. Septimus’s contemplation of suicide is therefore a circumstance of timelessness and eternity. He can condone the taking of his own life because he views it as an opportunity to take control of hi s destiny, to move into a realm of timelessness where there is no death: A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped.Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no offense and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death. Septimus’s transition from time to timelessness is finally accomplished when, in a moment of insane panic, he plunges out of his window and onto Mrs Filmer’s railings. For Rezia this symbolises a plunge into widowhood and the beginning of a new time of her life.Woolf understood that the most spectacular way of entering a character’s consciousness is through time, as it is intimately connected with the ‘moment of being’ and the way that the character understands it emotionally. immersion Rezia’s consciousness in this way and rendering time in emotional duration quite a than clock time intensifies its impact and heightens the response of the reader. In clock time, the span of that moment of being is mensural in hours, minutes and seconds, but when experienced emotionally the past and future become entwined with the present and make up the ‘now’.It seemed to her as she drank the sweet pierce that she was opening long windows, stepping out into some garden. and where? The clock was striking †one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared with all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself. She was falling asleep. But the clock went on striking, four, five, six, and Mrs Filmer waving her forestage (they wouldn’t bring the proboscis in here, would they? ) seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She had once seen a flag slowly rippling out from a mast when she stayed with her aunt at Venice. Men killed in battle were thus saluted, and Septimus had been through the War.Of her memories, most were happy. For Rezia, then, time slows right down at the moment of Septimus’s suicide and it has a dream-like quality that mirrors her shock and grief. The sound of the clock striking six fixes her into the present, but her sedated mind wanders through fragmented images of a garden, a flag she had once seen when on holiday, the War. In her response to grief, real time is suspended, yet she is still aware that Septimus is dead, and she worries that his body might be brought into her bedroom. Instead, it is, figuratively, brought to Mrs Dalloway’s party by the Bradshaws.Clarissa’s response to the news is to imagine how it felt, that moment of being that was Septimus’s death: Always her body went through it, when she was told, first perfectly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud, in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. Just as Septimus had imagined himself as Dante locomotion through hell, so too does Clarissa have apocalyptic imaginings which are stirred by the news.Her dress flames and her body burns as, in her imagination, she journeys into the eternal flames. The thud that she imagines in Septimus’s brain mirrors the ticking of a clock and measures out his last moments on earth. The image has a profound psychological affect on Clarissa who suddenly recognizes that she is like him †that he is her double. Her moment of epiphany enables her to both lever her life and lose the fear of death that has impede her for so long. As Big Ben strikes for the last time in the book, the identification between Clarissa and Septimus is complete: She felt somehow very like him †the young man who killed himself.She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Mrs Dalloway is an exploration of the human tally through the medium of time. Using a fragmented discourse that reflects the changing society that was post World War 1 Britain, Virginia Woolf involves the past with the present and suggests that time exists in different forms. In the external world it is ordered chronologically and she uses it to portray a brainy impression of London society life in the 1920s.Its passing is marked by the great pin grass of Westminster and the leaden circles of Big Ben are a constant reminder to Clarissa of the pulse of life itself. Kinetic time and clock time are therefore inextricably linked. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the suggestion that time also exists in the internal world as a ‘moment of being’, which Woolf develops through the medium of interior monologue. The principle characters †Clarissa, Peter, Septimus and Rezia †are defined b y their response to time, and, as the novel draws to a close, there is an cognizance of the past and present converging.This creates an impression in the reader that they are reading a news invoice or a ‘fly on the jetty’ documentary. Conclusion To sum up. Woolf suggests that time exists in different forms. It exists in the external world, but alsoâ€and mayhap more importantlyâ€in our internal world. Her explanation of the loud and rushing culture suggests that we push onwards in the name of progress, without fully appreciating the moment. Through the character of Clarissa, Woolf challenges the usual definition of success.Perhaps we consume not forget some magnificent gift behind in the form of a building or a concrete art piece. Instead, maybe it is how we live our lives and our range for the present that are truly more reigning and eternal. The s mall gifts we offer others, like bringing people together through a party, can touch people differently than a monument. Virginia Woolf’s message about time should be heeded. Our rush to leave a dramatic mark in the world leads to further destruction. Tension abounds in our modern world as we create technology to increase our efficiency.Our civilization tends to see scientific and monumental achievements as the most valid measures of an individual’s success. However, in the process, our communities disintegrate. to a greater extent and more people complain of feeling alienated. The  differentiate surrounds us. The internal time that allows us to slow down and be involved with people finds itself dominated by external societal time. Some might find Clarissa Dalloway’s gift to the world to be trivial. However, we need individuals with the ability to pull people togetherâ⠂¬people with the ability to create community where it no prolonged exists.\r\n'