Hanna Jay
Sevenoaks School
dym346 (000102 -0103)
Hanna Jay - English
Introduction
Virginia Woolf‟s Mrs Dalloway (1925) is often referred to as a seminal modernist novel.
Thematically, it deals with life in the modern city; with art; post-war trauma; and the
incipient decline of the British Empire. Formally, it experiments with new literary
techniques and ways of evoking a modern reality: multi-viewpoint perspective; stream of
consciousness; symbolism and - not least - new ways of building on the literary
tradition.
In 1919, T.S Eliot published an article entitled “Tradition and the Individual
Talent”. Virginia Woolf was undoubtedly familiar with its argument as she worked on her
novel about the London socialite Clarissa Dalloway. 1 For Eliot, awareness of past
literature was crucial for any writer. He argues: “(n)o poet, no artist of any art, has his
complete meaning alone”. 2 This knowledge of the literary tradition must be combined
with an individual talent, however, allowing the poet to create new works of art, relevant
to its own time and circumstances.
Virginia Woolf was extremely well read in the English literary canon. Her diaries
reveal how she daily revisited the works of Bunyan, Chaucer, Milton and, most
importantly, the works of William Shakespeare. Woolf was also an avid literary critic and
one of the most prominent figures in what is often referred to as “first wave feminism”.
Also here, her affinity with Shakespeare is evident. Her essay “A Room of One‟s Own”
(1929) includes a passage on “Shakespeare‟s sister”, a female potential writer, as
talented as the famous playwright but with a set of very different circumstances
influencing her ability to become acknowledged and respected for her art.
In this essay I will provide an answer to the question “How does Virginia
Woolf’s understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare combine with her
individual talent in Mrs Dalloway?” I will demonstrate how Virginia Woolf uses her
individual talent to develop the themes and techniques evident in Shakespeare‟s own
work. I will argue that Woolf in Mrs Dalloway endeavors to pass on a certain comfort
that she finds in Shakespeare‟s “Green World”. The importance given to nature and the
1
Virginia Woolf recalls a meeting with T.S Eliot in her diary on Monday 20 September, 1920 saying:
“There is much to be said about Eliot from different aspects-for instance, the difficulty of getting into touch
with clever people.-& so forth-anaemia, self-consciousness; but also, his mind is not yet blunted or
blurred”
2
The Norton Anthology, Theory and Criticism, page 1092
146
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