Mrs. Dalloway and The Delicate Balance of Dualism
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre, which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
Not merely as obedience, but as defiance, not just as a trial for severance, but as a trial for communication, Virginia Woolf’s ‘death’ in the novel; Mrs Dalloway embraces the utterly different two connotations inside of the word. When Septimus, the First World War veteran, dies by throwing himself on a fence, the death becomes not solely an end of everything but also the beginning of trial for defiance, communication. This dualistic notion flows across the entire…show more content… Not only the part of people had she never met, but also the people she knew the best comes to her all at once. Clarissa says she loves walking in London where she meets both her preexistent connections and nonexistent…show more content… What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window…” Moment, moment, Clarissa is looking at the flowers and the trees. She feels the whole moment with her entire senses. She is in the grip of time. Simultaneously, however, when Big Ben chimes, “The leaden circles dissolved in the air.” The time disappears as if it is indicating how ephemeral the time