Mrs. Dalloway

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Mrs Dalloway ( English original title: Mrs Dalloway ) is Virginia Woolf's fourth novel and her second " experimental " one with which she conquered new forms of representation in the novel. She published her work in 1925 in her own publishing house, the Hogarth Press , in London.

content

The novel is about the thoughts and thrifty actions of a small circle of people in London on a Wednesday in June 1923. The focus is on the one hand Clarissa Dalloway, her acquaintances and their servants, and on the other hand Septimus Warren Smith, his wife, who was emotionally frozen by his war experiences and finally a neurologist who connects the two groups of people at the end of the day.

In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars chose the work based on George Eliot's Middlemarch and Virginia Woolf's The Journey to the Lighthouse as the most important British novel .

Narrative

The novel begins with Clarissa Dalloway's morning purchase of flowers on Bond Street , a mysterious car that misfires and an airplane that writes the word toffee in the sky - that is, with external events that form the entry into the various inner worlds of the characters. The flower purchase extends over the first ten pages of the novel, but only ten brief, scattered clues allow the spatial and geographical classification of the action as a walk in Westminster - the subject is the inner, not the outer world of the characters.

The narrator moves fluently between the characters' perception of external events and the associated associations and memories. The external events are, as it were, the places where the change of perspective between the figures takes place. Along by the warning, then irrevocable chimes Big Ben's parent hours of that day (see below the section after-effect ) are, among others, walks through Westminster , patching one evening dress, a draft letter to the editor of the Times at lunch, a ride on the upper deck of a Busses or the return of a friend of Clarissa Dalloway who entered Indian colonial service five years ago and her final evening party, which the Prime Minister also attends.

The special thing about this work is the way in which the inner, psychic processes are peeled out of the outer, visible events. The narrator steps back behind the characters spinning their thoughts. Despite the different characters and social class of the figures, their streams of consciousness are equally deep, complex and linguistically similar. Through a combination of direct , indirect and experienced speech with short passages of inner monologues , an unusual intensity of analysis of psychological realities is achieved. As the characters in the temporary center point pass the baton of the narrative on to the next, the novel develops more like a web of thoughts than a plot - in some places it becomes so much a narrative of thoughts that the characters don't react to external actions first, but rather already on the consciousness contents of their counterpart that are only just being formed. The interesting thing about the novel is this stream of consciousness of the characters, which James Joyce had also used shortly before as a structural principle in his novel Ulysses . With Mrs. Dalloway , Virginia Woolf made one of her most important contributions to the development of the novel in the 20th century .

interpretation

As common as the visible external events are for the most part, the associations, questions and fears that arise from them, the mutual esteem and disregard of the characters, are fundamental. The thoughts of the marginal characters also draw a tense kaleidoscope of British society after World War I: lesbian and conjugal love, careers and their failure, the gradual emancipation of women, the delusions of a returnee from the World War II battlefields of the continent, the misery of psychiatrists , Prosperity and poverty, life in the heart and on the fringes of the British Empire, the servants' critical looks at their masters, social rigidity and emigration to a new departure to Canada ...

The thinking of the main character, Clarissa Dalloway, which always revolves around her evening parties, also encounters on its meandering paths her sister's early fatal accident, her own superficiality, her illnesses and her possible social death. On the last pages of the novel, Clarissa is shocked during her evening party by the news of the suicide of the young war returnees: “She got away. But this young man had killed himself. ” The two previously nested, but side by side narrative strands and possible fatefulness touch each other in the end: right next to one's own life runs another path of fate, into which it is impossible to slip and waste or lose one's life . The characters gathered by the author feel a new vulnerability and insecurity - England is changing: “But was that Lady Bruton? (which she had known). Was that Peter Walsh, turned gray? Lady Rosseter wondered (who had once been Sally Seton). "

The informative afterword by the editor Klaus Reichert complements the novel with V. Woolf's own comments on her literary project: she wants to present “the worldview of the healthy and the insane side by side”, “to express life and death, mental health and madness; I want to criticize the social system & show it in action where it is most intense. "

The role model

Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1902. Photography: Henry Walter Barnett

In the summer of 1909 Virginia Woolf made the acquaintance of Lady Ottoline Morrell , an aristocrat and patron of the arts. This joined the Bloomsbury circle and fascinated with its extravagant appearance. Their exotic lifestyle influenced the group, so the members gladly accepted the invitation to come to their home in Bedford Square at ten o'clock on Thursdays , where visitors such as DH Lawrence and Winston Churchill gathered in the drawing room. Later, their house at Garsington Manor near Oxford also became the meeting place for the "Bloomsberries". The author set Ottoline Morrell in her novel Mrs Dalloway , which she described as the "Garsington novel", a literary monument.

expenditure

Secondary literature

  • Willi Erzgräber : Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway. In: Horst Oppel (ed.): The modern English novel - interpretations. Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2nd revised edition, Berlin 1971, pp. 160–200.
  • Hermione Lee: Virginia Woolf. One life . Frankfurt / Main: Fischer, 2005.
  • Mark Hussey: Virginia Woolf A to Z , New York 1995.
  • Peter von Matt : The Hidden Gem - Virginia Woolf . In: Peter von Matt: Seven kisses. Happiness and unhappiness in literature. Hanser, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-446-25462-6 , pp. 25-52.

Aftermath

In 1997 the novel was made into a film by the Dutch Oscar winner Marleen Gorris under the title Mrs. Dalloway .

He also formed the basis for the novel The Hours (German The Hours ) by Michael Cunningham , of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize was awarded. Virginia Woolf's diary entries indicate that she originally thought of calling the novel The Hours . The novel by Cunningham was in turn filmed by Stephen Daldry under the title The Hours with Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, who received an Oscar for this role.

Individual evidence

  1. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway . German by Walter Boehlich. In: Klaus Reichert (ed.): Collected works prose . tape 5 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1997, ISBN 3-10-092558-0 , pp. 204 .
  2. ^ The Guardian: The best British novel of all times - have international critics found it? , accessed on January 2, 2016
  3. V. Woolf described her method as a "tunneling process", digging caves behind the figures and then telling the past in portions. (Afterword by Klaus Reichert Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway . P. 203 . )
  4. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway . S. 8 .
  5. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway . S. 124 and 145 .
  6. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway . S. 44, 123, 126, 163 .
  7. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway . S. 12, 14, 120 .
  8. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway . S. 180 .
  9. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway . S. 176 .
  10. Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway . S. 201 ff .
  11. Ursula Voss: Bertrand Russell and Ottoline Morrell. A love against philosophy , p. 166