Mrs. Dalloway's Conflict


When I first started reading Mrs. Dalloway, I was apprehensive about what was to come. While I appreciated the insights from Mr. Mitchell and other classmates on The Mezzanine and I had come to respect the novel for what it was, I personally just couldn't get over the fact that I found the book a mind-numbingly boring slog. Fearing that Mrs. Dalloway would be similar to The Mezzanine because of the way it tracks a character's internal monologue, I didn't even want to start it and procrastinated doing the first reading until 4th hour before class. Now, 47 pages into the book, I find it hard to put down. I thought for a while about why this was the case for Mrs. Dalloway and not The Mezzanine and I concluded that the biggest reason for my interest in Mrs. Dalloway was the inner conflicts that Clarissa Dalloway has, specifically the one relating to her relationships. 
Even from reading less than 50 pages into the book, it is apparent that Clarissa Dalloway is a character that, while unassuming on the outside, has a world of conflict and contradiction going on inside her. She struggles with thoughts about what could have been and what has happened. Her actions are generally what she would consider the safer option. She chooses to marry Richard, a man who has a stable career and treats her well enough. However, she doesn't feel much, if any, passion towards Richard and is acutely aware of this.  Her thinking back on her relationship with Sally Seton in such a positive light shows that there is a side of her that craves a more dynamic relationship than she currently has. Clarissa thinks back on all the different ways that Sally expanded her horizons, like introducing her to different types of radical books and other different new experiences. With Richard, she isn't necessarily unhappy, but she certainly isn't on the same level of ecstasy as she was with Sally. In the sentence in which she describes her kiss with Sally as religious, she displays more passion for Sally than she's displayed for Richard throughout the book to that point. The way that her actions and her thought process vary so wildly shows a level of conflict that makes her a very interesting character and makes someone reading about her want to learn more about her. While on the outside she is a relatively boring upper-class woman in a stable relationship, internally there is at least part of her that wants something more than just that. The fact that Clarissa has such a disparity between what she thinks and her reality is engaging. As a reader, it makes me want to know more about her character and continue to learn more about her own thought on the subject.


Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 12, 2018 at 5:30 PM

    Nice post, i can relate to being drawn in but skeptical at first. It's particularly interesting to think about what clarissa wants now that we have finished the book. This is a great example of woolf adding nuance to clarissa, since your point is still true but now we have even more complexity. Now we know that peter's life has also been drastically affected by clarissa and perhaps she is truly happy, but her relationships at bourton have shaped her views in many ways

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  2. AngelynnSeptember 12, 2018 at 7:42 PM

    I agree with your post. Just like the Mezzanine, both authors (Woolf and Nicholson) have this ability to tell the stories of unassuming people and really draw readers in. Both are mundane looking, yet within the characters of Howie and Clarissa, it's a whole new world that is revealed. The fact that both stories are stretched out in a shorter time span, from 30 seconds on an escalator to one day in London, allows for us to really understand them beyond a superficial level.

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