Read, track, and reflect across a structured canon.
Read this after you’ve finished the book - in-depth exploration of themes, symbols, and meanings
The fundamental question of Mrs Dalloway is: How can a person maintain the integrity of their private inner world while participating in the public social world?
Clarissa and Septimus are two sides of the same coin. Clarissa manages to survive by creating a social “façade” (her parties), though she feels a profound sense of isolation. Septimus, unable to maintain that façade after the trauma of war, is destroyed. His suicide is his final act of “preserving” the soul that society and the doctors tried to dominate.
What it means: The difference between “clock time” (objective, social, rigid) and “mind time” (subjective, fluid, emotional).
How it’s shown:
What it means: The feeling that the “old world” of the British Empire is dying, and the “new world” is haunted by trauma.
How it’s shown:
What it means: A critique of how society treats those who are “different” or traumatized, often through forced conformity rather than empathy.
How it’s shown:
What it means: The struggle to truly “know” another person.
How it’s shown:
| Symbol | Meaning | Key Moment |
|---|---|---|
| Big Ben | The relentless passage of time; the pressure of social duty and mortality. | Striking throughout the day; “the leaden circles dissolved in the air.” |
| Flowers | Life, vitality, and the beauty/utility of social performance. | ”Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” |
| The Old Woman across the way | The ultimate privacy and solitude of the individual soul. | Clarissa watching her go to bed during the party. |
| Peter’s Pocket Knife | Fidgety intellectualism; a defense mechanism against emotion. | Peter opening it whenever he feels vulnerable. |
| Waves / Water | The fluid, rhythmic, and sometimes overwhelming nature of consciousness. | ”A fan played on her cheek… like the pressure of a wave.” |
| The Airplane | The fragmented, modern world and the shared (yet disconnected) experience of it. | The crowd looking up at the sky in Section 1. |
Woolf rarely stays with one person for long. She uses “external hooks” (a sound, a sight) to jump from the mind of a socialite to the mind of a beggar to the mind of a soldier. This creates a “network” of consciousness, suggesting that while we are all isolated, we are all part of the same “moment.”
Septimus is what Woolf called Clarissa’s “foil.”
Significance: Establishes Clarissa’s agency and her role as a provider of beauty. It also signals the beginning of her “plunge” into the day.
Significance: A quote from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Both Clarissa and Septimus repeat this. It links them through a shared comfort in the idea of death as a final peace.
Significance: Describes the striking of Big Ben. It suggests that even the most “solid” social structures are temporary and eventually vanish into the “air” of the mind.
Significance: Clarissa’s response to Septimus’s suicide. She doesn’t see it as a tragedy, but as a victory. He kept the “soul” that people like Bradshaw wanted to steal.
Focuses on the title: she is “Mrs. Dalloway,” defined by her husband’s name. It explores her “repressed” feelings for Sally Seton and how she has traded her radical youth for the safety of a high-society marriage.
Analyzes Septimus as a case study in PTSD. It looks at Woolf’s own biography and see the novel as her protest against the “rest cure” treatment she herself underwent.
Approaches the novel as a “city novel.” It’s about how the modern city (London) forces people back into their own minds because there is too much sensory data to process.
Use this space to write your overall response to Woolf’s “tunneling” into her characters and which “cave” you found most interesting.
Mrs Dalloway is the peak of Interiority. It takes the external “honesty” of The Stranger and turns it inward. It shows that the “heroic” struggle isn’t always on a beach or in a war—it can happen in an afternoon while crossing the street.
Next book: Notes from Underground — the “underground” counterpart to Clarissa’s “upper-class” consciousness. A man who rejects society entirely.
Post-Reading Analysis created: 2025-12-25
For Great Literature 101 - Book 6 of 10