Fiche de lecture : Mrs. Dalloway-Virginia Woolf.
The author:
Virginia Woolf is an English Novelist who was born in 1882 in an upper-middle-class family in London. she was educated at home and read books from her father’s library. But after her mother’s death, she suffered from severe depression for the rest of her life. Her first novel, The voyage out, was published in 1915. During the next few years, Woolf wrote several novels, a collection of short stories and essays. Woolf criticizes the realistic Victorian novel which is founded on a linear plot and which is inadequate to express subjective reality and character’s feelings. In Woolf Opinion, the world changed and the traditional Victorian novel can’t describe the present world. That’s why, in the 1920’s she began searching for the form that would reflect the genuine world around her. Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925. In this novel, Woolf discovered a new literary form capable of expressing the new realities of postwar England. The story is based on the steam consciousness of the character. It depicts the inner feelings, the subjective experience and memories of its central character over a single day in the after WWI London. The stream consciousness is one of the main characteristics of Woolf’s literature.
The plot:
There is not a genuine plot in the novel like traditional novel: beginning, development, hardships, conclusion. In Mrs. Dalloway , it’s just the point of view which changes over the story. Mrs. Dalloway covers one day from morning to night in one woman’s life, Clarissa Dalloway in London. She has to prepare a party and met an old friend, Peter Walsh who still obsessed by the refusal of Clarissa about his marriage proposal. Then, the point of view changed to Septimus, a veteran of world war I Who was morally shattered and has serious mental problem. The psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw wants to send him in an asylum. At the same time, Clarissa thinks about her relationship with Richard,