Hanna Jay - English
12
Hanna Jay
Sevenoaks School
dym346 (000102 -0103)
play, and the Fool replies, “And I‟ll go to bed at noon” (3.6.78). The Fool‟s words and
Clarissa‟s thoughts both convey the idea that life is over once midlife - and potential
reproduction - are left behind. After “noon”, the middle of his life, one must accept the
redundancy of life and “go to bed” or, embrace death.
By letting Clarissa remember her time at Bourton, where she was enjoying the
vitalities of life at the peak of her youth, Virginia Woolf provides a comfort for Clarissa
and the reader. This comfort may be compared to the feelings of those characters in
Shakespeare‟s plays who experience the effect of the “Green World”, as critic Northrop
Frye called it. This green space, found in plays such as A Midsummer Night‟s Dream,
Twelfth Night and As You Like It, acts as a healing environment for the characters who
enter it. As Gary Ettari says:
“It is a familiar pattern in Shakespearean comedy to place
characters from a more “civilized” world into a forest or other
green space in order that they might gain a new perspective
and return to civilized society changed for the better.” 12 (p
147.)
Once he has placed his characters into a green space, isolated and removed from their
normal environment, Shakespeare reveals a transformation in all those who are
dislocated, before he returns them to their society, changed for the better. The sense of
a „Green World‟ is very much at the heart of Mrs Dalloway. It is at Bourton that Clarissa
is liberated; she begins to understand her sexuality and recognize her affections for
Sally Seton. We may distinguish it by its green environment so different from the streets
of London where Mrs Dalloway walks as a middle-aged woman. The colour green is
itself a motif of the novel, used to allude to fertility and regeneration. Septimus
remembers Miss Pole in a green dress and Miss Kilman wears a green mackintosh
coat. The colour more specifically provides a subtle sexual undertone to the scene
where Peter is questioningly “tilting his pen-knife towards her green dress”. (p. 44) At
Bourton, Clarissa is confronted with her feelings for a woman and finds solace as she
12
As Gary Ettari points out in “Rebirth and Renewal in Shakespeare‟s King Lear” Shakespeare‟s Green
World is not just evident in his comedies. The theme of nature is central to the tragedy of King Lear, the
wilderness which many of the characters enter has a clear effect on them. Lear himself reaches an
understanding of his mistakes as he welcomes a storm rather than seek shelter with his Fool.
154