Life
Virginia Woolf born in 1882 in London. She was the daughter of the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Woolf didn’t have the possibility to go to the university. During her life, she wrote some work, but the most famous was Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Like Joyce, Woolf used the technique of the stream of consciousness. In her novel, this technique was as a mental voyage that were focused on the contrast between inner life and external reality.
In 1904, Woolf moved to Bloomsbury and in 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and founded the publishing company Hogarth Press. She committed a suicide in 1941.
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Septimus and Clarissa
The title of this novel derives by the name of the protagonist, Mrs. Dalloway. She is complex and frustrated woman, who lives her being a wife and mother like a prison and she self-imposes a lot of restriction on her liberty. Thanks to the technique of the stream of consciousness we can see the past memories that pervade Clarissa’s mind. Clarissa’s self is slip between the desire to celebrate life and a morbid attraction towards death. At the end of the novel, she decides to live after arrived of the notice of Septimus’ death, that start a moment of epiphany in Clarissa. Septimus is male protagonist and he is a war veteran. Both these characters live the same fear, preoccupations and morbid attractions.
An experimental novel
We can consider this novel as experimental, because while in Victorian’s novel all the actions are logically and rationally connected, in Woolf’s novel the action is fragmented and disconnected. Moreover, unlike Victorian novel, Woolf decides to focus on one single character on one single day in one single place. Virginia Woolf uses also an experimental narrative technique, represents by the technique of the stream of consciousness. Unlike Joyce, she prefers to show characters’ thought in a more controlled and organized way. Indeed, she uses a third-person narrator, impersonal and omniscient. Moreover, she uses an elegant e logical style.
The contrast between subjective and object time
In Mrs. Dalloway, is very important the contrast between subjective and objective time, that represent the time of the mind and the chronological time. Moreover, Mrs. Dalloway is characterized by an obsession of the time and in the novel the time is represent by the chime of Big Ben.