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Mrs. Dalloway: Literary Allusion as Structural Metaphor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Jean M. Wyatt
Jean M. Wyatt*
Affiliation:
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California
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Abstract

Virginia Woolf interweaves allusion and image to construct character, define theme, and structure Mrs. Dalloway. Shakespearean allusions combined with mineral and flower imagery identify Lady Bruton and Sally Seton as representatives of the dying aristocracy and the flourishing industrial class. They also embody the alternatives open to Clarissa: sterile aristocratic society or life-giving passion. An allusion to the dirge from Cymbeline sounds the theme of death and rebirth echoed in Peter's dream, the beggarwoman's song, and Septimus' and Clarissa's experiences. Quotations from the dirge and a complex of symbols originating in its heat and cold imagery link Septimus' and Clarissa's successive deaths and rebirths. A modern incarnation of the dying god archetype, Septimus ultimately gives Clarissa new life through his death.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , May 1973, pp. 440 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, 1925), p. 130. Subsequent references are to this edition.

2 The Fields of Light (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), p. 135.

3 Sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York : Macmillan, 1935), v, 233.

4 Ovid, Metamorphoses x.505–14.

5 For a brilliant exposition of the two extremes of Mrs. Dalloway's attitude toward life, see Brower, pp. 125–30; he presents an analysis of the “plunge” imagery on pp. 136–37.

6 As James Hafley says in The Glass Roof, “It is his love of life, his belief in unity, then, that Septimus affirms by casting away his physical individuality” (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1954), p. 64.

7 The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 70.

8 Josephine Schaefer, The Three-Fold Nature of Reality (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), p. 104.

9 My thanks to Richard Lanham for his generous contributions to this article and to Nancy Bryan for her insights into Mrs. Dalloway.