Hanna Jay - English
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Hanna Jay
Sevenoaks School
dym346 (000102 -0103)
Clarissa Dalloway‟s decision as equally uplifting for the characters in the novel, and for
the reader.
Regeneration - “Fear no more”
I will now look at how Virginia Woolf - like Shakespeare - sets her tragedy of life against
a backdrop of a comforting regeneration in nature. Shakespeare‟s plays often use
flower imagery in the portrayal of female characters, explicitly linking them to nature,
fertility and reproduction. Similarly, Mrs Dalloway focuses on one June day in 1923 - a
time span relating to one cycle around the earth‟s axis - and the female characters span
seven ages of women. Elizabeth, Clarissa Dalloway‟s daughter, is just beginning to
mature sexually; Lucrezia Smith is emotionally and physically ready for reproduction,
longing to bear children; Clarissa and Sally are about to leave their reproductive years
behind; Milly Brush and Doris Kilman both past forty, Millicent Bruton, sixty two, Miss
Helena Parry, past eighty and the old woman Clarissa sees in the room across the
street is at the very end of her life, in physical and mental decline and approaching
death. Woolf makes the parallel with the reproductive cycle clear by making repeated
references to nature: Clarissa wears a different green dress during the day and in the
evening, evoking thoughts of nature‟s fertility and regeneration. She describes individual
moments of happiness as “buds on the tree of life” (pp. 31) and notices that the “earth
seemed green and flowery” (p. 89). Elizabeth is literally and figuratively her mother‟s
seed for the future: first described as “very serious; like a hyacinth sheathed in glossy
green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has had no sun.” (p. 134) Woolf‟s
description of Elizabeth as a hyacinth is used to portray her as approaching the peak of
her fertility; this flower has often been used in literature as a phallic, sexual, symbol. 11
Septimus also describes his wife as a “flowering tree” (p. 162), alluding to her readiness
for reproduction and childbirth. This type of nature symbolism is clearly inspired by
Shakespeare - many of his plays often substitute plants for humans creating an
underlying connection between individuals and nature. Cymbeline is a good example of
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In T.S Elliot‟s “The Wasteland” the first section “Burial of the Dead” includes a dialogue with a young
woman who says: “They called me the hyacinth girl.” (T.S Eliot Selected Poems, p.42) It is possible to
suggest that T.S Eliot was inspired by the tale by Ovid of a young boy named Hyacinthus who is hit by the
God Phoebus‟ discus and dies. Phoebus transforms Hyacinthus into a flower “the shape of a lily: but it
was purple in colour, where lilies are silvery white.” (Ovid‟s Metamorphoses, p. 230)
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