Hanna Jay - English
11
Hanna Jay
Sevenoaks School
dym346 (000102 -0103)
this: when Guiderius considers Innogen dead in Act IV, Scene II, he proclaims she is
the “sweetest, fairest lily!” The white flower is used to symbolize purity and chastity, and,
simultaneously, the audience is made aware of a natural process of life and death,
which symbolically allows Innogen to continue to live on as a flower in nature.
Woolf builds on this Shakespearean tradition by exploring nature‟s regeneration
from the perspective of a woman who is past the fertile period of her life. Clarissa
Dalloway and Sally Seton both represent the post-menopausal woman in the novel‟s
age range of female characters. While Sally Seton appears fulfilled by her role in life as
the mother of five sons, Mrs Dalloway expresses an acute awareness of her ageing.
Woolf accentuates the emptiness felt by the menopausal woman, as she leaves behind
the joys of youth and is left only with thoughts of death. Virginia Woolf uses Clarissa‟s
stream of consciousness to voice the concern that women must accept the shedding of
sexuality as they leave middle age and enter their postmenopausal years. Clarissa
thinks:
“There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic
room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they
must disrobe. She pierced the pincushion and laid her
feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight
stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower
and narrower would her bed be.” (pp. 33-34)
Clarissa considers the midpoint of her life as she pauses in the attic room “at midday”
(p. 33). Her thoughts convey Woolf‟s suggestion that at this stage in the female life
cycle the woman is left empty and fruitless, all “rich apparel” discarded, leaving only
thoughts of mortality as death approaches quickly, „narrower and narrower‟ her life‟s
cycle becomes now that she no longer serves to regenerate and serve nature. The
white sheets on the bed stretched in this way create an image of a gravestone. This
passage also illustrates a clear parallel with Shakespeare. The idea of one single day
as an analogy of a whole life is strikingly similarly expressed by “the Fool” in
Shakespeare‟s King Lear in his last appearance in the play. King Lear declares: “We‟ll
go to supper i‟ the morning” (3.6.77) - echoing the confusion of the natural order in the
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