1914- The Modern applies to British literature written since the beginning of

1945: Period World War I in 1914. The authors of the Modern Period
have experimented with subject matter, form, and style
and have produced achievements in all literary genres.
Poets of the period include Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Dylan
Thomas, and Seamus Heaney. Novelists include James
Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Dramatists
include Noel Coward and Samuel Beckett.

full title ·  Mrs. Dalloway

author ·  Virginia Woolf

type of work ·  Novel

genre · Modernist; formalist; feminist

language ·  English

time and place written · Woolf began Mrs. Dalloway in Sussex in 1922 and completed the novel in
London in 1924.

date of first publication ·  May 14, 1925

publisher · Hogarth Press, the publishing house created by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917

narrator · Anonymous. The omniscient narrator is a commenting voice who knows everything about the
characters. This voice appears occasionally among the subjective thoughts of characters. The critique of Sir
William Bradshaw’s reverence of proportion and conversion is the narrator’s most sustained appearance.

point of view · Point of view changes constantly, often shifting from one character’s stream of
consciousness (subjective interior thoughts) to another’s within a single paragraph. Woolf most often uses
free indirect discourse, a literary technique that describes the interior thoughts of characters using third-
person singular pronouns (he and she). This technique ensures that transitions between the thoughts of a
large number of characters are subtle and smooth.

tone · The narrator is against the oppression of the human soul and for the celebration of diversity, as are
the book’s major characters. Sometimes the mood is humorous, but an underlying sadness is always present.

tense · Though mainly in the immediate past, Peter’s dream of the solitary traveler is in the present tense.

setting (time) ·  A day in mid-June, 1923. There are many flashbacks to a summer at Bourton in the early
1890s, when Clarissa was eighteen.

setting (place) · London, England. The novel takes place largely in the affluent neighborhood of
Westminster, where the Dalloways live.
protagonist ·  Clarissa Dalloway

major conflict · Clarissa and other characters try to preserve their souls and communicate in an oppressive
and fragmentary post–World War I England.

rising action · Clarissa spends the day organizing a party that will bring people together, while her double,
Septimus Warren Smith, eventually commits suicide due to the social pressures that oppress his soul.

climax · At her party, Clarissa goes to a small room to contemplate Septimus’s suicide. She identifies with
him and is glad he did it, believing that he preserved his soul.

falling action · Clarissa returns to her party and is viewed from the outside. We do not know whether she
will change due to her moment of clarity, but we do know that she will endure.

themes · Communication vs. privacy; disillusionment with the British Empire; the fear of death; the threat
of oppression

motifs · Time; Shakespeare; trees and flowers; waves and water

symbols · The prime minister; Peter Walsh’s pocketknife and other weapons; the old woman in the window;
the old woman singing an ancient song

foreshadowing

 · At the opening of the novel, Clarissa recalls having a premonition one June day at Bourton that
“something awful was about to happen.” This sensation anticipates Septimus’s suicide.
 · Peter thinks of Clarissa when he wakes up from his nap in Regent’s Park and considers how she has the
gift of making the world her own and standing out among a crowd. Peter states simply, “there she was,” a
line he will repeat as the last line of the novel, when Clarissa appears again at her party.

Virginia Woolf, the English novelist, critic, and essayist, was born on January 25, 1882, to Leslie Stephen, a
literary critic, and Julia Duckworth Stephen. Woolf grew up in an upper-middle-class, socially active,
literary family in Victorian London. She had three full siblings, two half-brothers, and two half-sisters. She
was educated at home, becoming a voracious reader of the books in her father’s extensive library. Tragedy
first afflicted the family when Woolf’s mother died in 1895, then hit again two years later, when her half-
sister, Stella, the caregiver in the Stephen family, died. Woolf experienced her first bout of mental illness
after her mother’s death, and she suffered from mania and severe depression for the rest of her life.

Patriarchal, repressive Victorian society did not encourage women to attend universities or to participate in
intellectual debate. Nonetheless, Woolf began publishing her first essays and reviews after 1904, the year
her father died and she and her siblings moved to the Bloomsbury area of London. Young students and
artists, drawn to the vitality and intellectual curiosity of the Stephen clan, congregated on Thursday
evenings to share their views about the world. The Bloomsbury group, as Woolf and her friends came to
be called, disregarded the constricting taboos of the Victorian era, and such topics as religion, sex,
and art fueled the talk at their weekly salons. They even discussed homosexuality, a subject that
shocked many of the group’s contemporaries. For Woolf, the group served as the undergraduate
education that society had denied her.

The Voyage Out, Woolf’s first novel, was published in 1915, three years after her marriage to Leonard
Woolf, a member of the Bloomsbury group. Their partnership furthered the group’s intellectual ideals. With
Leonard, Woolf founded Hogarth Press, which published Sigmund Freud, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot,
and other notable authors. She determinedly pursued her own writing as well: During the next few years,
Woolf kept a diary and wrote several novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous essays. She
struggled, as she wrote, to both deal with her bouts of bipolarity and to find her true voice as a writer.
Before World War I, Woolf viewed the realistic Victorian novel, with its neat and linear plots, as an
inadequate form of expression. Her opinion intensified after the war, and in the 1920s she began
searching for the form that would reflect the violent contrasts and disjointed impressions of the world
around her.

In Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, Woolf discovered a new literary form capable of expressing the
new realities of postwar England. The novel depicts the subjective experiences and memories of its
central characters over a single day in post–World War I London. Divided into parts, rather than
chapters, the novel's structure highlights the finely interwoven texture of the characters' thoughts.
Critics tend to agree that Woolf found her writer’s voice with this novel. At forty-three, she knew her
experimental style was unlikely to be a popular success but no longer felt compelled to seek critical
praise. The novel did, however, gain a measure of commercial and critical success. This book, which
focuses on commonplace tasks, such as shopping, throwing a party, and eating dinner, showed that no
act was too small or too ordinary for a writer’s attention. Ultimately, Mrs. Dalloway transformed the
novel as an art form.

Woolf develops the book’s protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, and myriad other characters by chronicling their
interior thoughts with little pause or explanation, a style referred to as stream of consciousness. Several
central characters and more than one hundred minor characters appear in the text, and their thoughts spin out
like spider webs. Sometimes the threads of thought cross—and people succeed in communicating. More
often, however, the threads do not cross, leaving the characters isolated and alone. Woolf believed that
behind the “cotton wool” of life, as she terms it in her autobiographical collection of essays Moments of
Being (1941), and under the downpour of impressions saturating a mind during each moment, a pattern
exists.

Characters in Mrs. Dalloway occasionally perceive life’s pattern through a sudden shock, or what Woolf
called a “moment of being.” Suddenly the cotton wool parts, and a person sees reality, and his or her place
in it, clearly. “In the vast catastrophe of the European war,” wrote Woolf, “our emotions had to be broken
up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.”
These words appear in her essay collection, The Common Reader, which was published just one month
before Mrs. Dalloway. Her novel attempts to uncover fragmented emotions, such as desperation or love, in
order to find, through “moments of being,” a way to endure.

While writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf reread the Greek classics along with two new modernist writers,
Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Woolf shared these writers' interest in time and psychology, and she
incorporated these issues into her novel. She wanted to show characters in flux, rather than static, characters
who think and emote as they move through space, who react to their surroundings in ways that mirrored
actual human experience. Rapid political and social change marked the period between the two world
wars: the British Empire, for which so many people had sacrificed their lives to protect and preserve,
was in decline. Countries like India were beginning to question Britain’s colonial rule. At home, the
Labour Party, with its plans for economic reform, was beginning to challenge the Conservative Party,
with its emphasis on imperial business interests. Women, who had flooded the workforce to replace
the men who had gone to war, were demanding equal rights. Men, who had seen unspeakable
atrocities in the first modern war, were questioning the usefulness of class-based sociopolitical
institutions. Woolf lent her support to the feminist movement in her nonfiction book A Room of One’s Own
(1929), as well as in numerous essays, and she was briefly involved in the women’s suffrage movement.
Although Mrs. Dalloway portrays the shifting political atmosphere through the characters Peter Walsh,
Richard Dalloway, and Hugh Whitbread, it focuses more deeply on the charged social mood through the
characters Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf delves into the consciousness of
Clarissa, a woman who exists largely in the domestic sphere, to ensure that readers take her character
seriously, rather than simply dismiss her as a vain and uneducated upper-class wife. In spite of her
heroic and imperfect effort in life, Clarissa, like every human being and even the old social order
itself, must face death.

Woolf’s struggles with mental illness gave her an opportunity to witness firsthand how insensitive
medical professionals could be, and she critiques their tactlessness in Mrs. Dalloway. One of Woolf’s
doctors suggested that plenty of rest and rich food would lead to a full recovery, a cure prescribed in the
novel, and another removed several of her teeth. In the early twentieth century, mental health problems were
too often considered imaginary, an embarrassment, or the product of moral weakness. During one bout of
illness, Woolf heard birds sing like Greek choruses and King Edward use foul language among some
azaleas. In 1941, as England entered a second world war, and at the onset of another breakdown she feared
would be permanent, Woolf placed a large stone in her pocket to weigh herself down and drowned herself in
the River Ouse.

Plot Overview

Mrs. Dalloway covers one day from morning to night in one woman’s life. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-
class housewife, walks through her London neighborhood to prepare for the party she will host that evening.
When she returns from flower shopping, an old suitor and friend, Peter Walsh, drops by her house
unexpectedly. The two have always judged each other harshly, and their meeting in the present intertwines
with their thoughts of the past. Years earlier, Clarissa refused Peter’s marriage proposal, and Peter has never
quite gotten over it. Peter asks Clarissa if she is happy with her husband, Richard, but before she can
answer, her daughter, Elizabeth, enters the room. Peter leaves and goes to Regent’s Park. He thinks about
Clarissa’s refusal, which still obsesses him.

The point of view then shifts to Septimus, a veteran of World War I who was injured in trench warfare and
now suffers from shell shock. Septimus and his Italian wife, Lucrezia, pass time in Regent’s Park. They are
waiting for Septimus’s appointment with Sir William Bradshaw, a celebrated psychiatrist. Before the war,
Septimus was a budding young poet and lover of Shakespeare; when the war broke out, he enlisted
immediately for romantic patriotic reasons. He became numb to the horrors of war and its aftermath: when
his friend Evans died, he felt little sadness. Now Septimus sees nothing of worth in the England he fought
for, and he has lost the desire to preserve either his society or himself. Suicidal, he believes his lack of
feeling is a crime. Clearly Septimus’s experiences in the war have permanently scarred him, and he has
serious mental problems. However, Sir William does not listen to what Septimus says and diagnoses “a lack
of proportion.” Sir William plans to separate Septimus from Lucrezia and send him to a mental institution in
the country.

Richard Dalloway eats lunch with Hugh Whitbread and Lady Bruton, members of high society. The men
help Lady Bruton write a letter to the Times, London's largest newspaper. After lunch, Richard returns home
to Clarissa with a large bunch of roses. He intends to tell her that he loves her but finds that he cannot,
because it has been so long since he last said it. Clarissa considers the void that exists between people, even
between husband and wife. Even though she values the privacy she is able to maintain in her marriage,
considering it vital to the success of the relationship, at the same time she finds slightly disturbing the fact
that Richard doesn’t know everything about her. Clarissa sees off Elizabeth and her history teacher, Miss
Kilman, who are going shopping. The two older women despise one another passionately, each believing
the other to be an oppressive force over Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Septimus and Lucrezia are in their
apartment, enjoying a moment of happiness together before the men come to take Septimus to the asylum.
One of Septimus’s doctors, Dr. Holmes, arrives, and Septimus fears the doctor will destroy his soul. In order
to avoid this fate, he jumps from a window to his death.

Peter hears the ambulance go by to pick up Septimus’s body and marvels ironically at the level of London’s
civilization. He goes to Clarissa’s party, where most of the novel’s major characters are assembled. Clarissa
works hard to make her party a success but feels dissatisfied by her own role and acutely conscious of
Peter’s critical eye. All the partygoers, but especially Peter and Sally Seton, have, to some degree, failed to
accomplish the dreams of their youth. Though the social order is undoubtedly changing, Elizabeth and the
members of her generation will probably repeat the errors of Clarissa’s generation. Sir William Bradshaw
arrives late, and his wife explains that one of his patients, the young veteran (Septimus), has committed
suicide. Clarissa retreats to the privacy of a small room to consider Septimus’s death. She understands that
he was overwhelmed by life and that men like Sir William make life intolerable. She identifies with
Septimus, admiring him for having taken the plunge and for not compromising his soul. She feels, with her
comfortable position as a society hostess, responsible for his death. The party nears its close as guests begin
to leave. Clarissa enters the room, and her presence fills Peter with a great excitement.

Themes

Communication vs. Privacy

Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa, Septimus, Peter, and others struggle to find outlets for
communication as well as adequate privacy, and the balance between the two is difficult for all to
attain. Clarissa in particular struggles to open the pathway for communication and throws parties in
an attempt to draw people together. At the same time, she feels shrouded within her own reflective
soul and thinks the ultimate human mystery is how she can exist in one room while the old woman in
the house across from hers exists in another. Even as Clarissa celebrates the old woman’s
independence, she knows it comes with an inevitable loneliness. Peter tries to explain the
contradictory human impulses toward privacy and communication by comparing the soul to a fish
that swims along in murky water, then rises quickly to the surface to frolic on the waves. The war has
changed people’s ideas of what English society should be, and understanding is difficult between those
who support traditional English society and those who hope for continued change. Meaningful
connections in this disjointed postwar world are not easy to make, no matter what efforts the
characters put forth. Ultimately, Clarissa sees Septimus’s death as a desperate, but legitimate, act of
communication.

Disillusionment with the British Empire

Throughout the nineteenth century, the British Empire seemed invincible. It expanded into many
other countries, such as India, Nigeria, and South Africa, becoming the largest empire the world had
ever seen. World War I was a violent reality check. For the first time in nearly a century, the English
were vulnerable on their own land. The Allies technically won the war, but the extent of devastation
England suffered made it a victory in name only. Entire communities of young men were injured and
killed. In 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, England suffered 60,000 casualties—the largest slaughter
in England’s history. Not surprisingly, English citizens lost much of their faith in the empire after the
war. No longer could England claim to be invulnerable and all-powerful. Citizens were less inclined to
willingly adhere to the rigid constraints imposed by England’s class system, which benefited only a
small margin of society but which all classes had fought to preserve.

In 1923, when Mrs. Dalloway takes place, the old establishment and its oppressive values are nearing their
end. English citizens, including Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, feel the failure of the empire as strongly
as they feel their own personal failures. Those citizens who still champion English tradition, such as
Aunt Helena and Lady Bruton, are old. Aunt Helena, with her glass eye (perhaps a symbol of her
inability or unwillingness to see the empire's disintegration), is turning into an artifact. Anticipating
the end of the Conservative Party’s reign, Richard plans to write the history of the great British military
family, the Brutons, who are already part of the past. The old empire faces an imminent demise, and the
loss of the traditional and familiar social order leaves the English at loose ends.

The Fear of Death

Thoughts of death lurk constantly beneath the surface of everyday life in Mrs. Dalloway, especially for
Clarissa, Septimus, and Peter, and this awareness makes even mundane events and interactions
meaningful, sometimes even threatening. At the very start of her day, when she goes out to buy flowers
for her party, Clarissa remembers a moment in her youth when she suspected a terrible event would occur.
Big Ben tolls out the hour, and Clarissa repeats a line from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline over and over as the
day goes on: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages.” The line is from a funeral
song that celebrates death as a comfort after a difficult life. Middle-aged Clarissa has experienced the
deaths of her father, mother, and sister and has lived through the calamity of war, and she has grown
to believe that living even one day is dangerous. Death is very natural in her thoughts, and the line
from Cymbeline, along with Septimus’s suicidal embrace of death, ultimately helps her to be at peace
with her own mortality. Peter Walsh, so insecure in his identity, grows frantic at the idea of death and
follows an anonymous young woman through London to forget about it. Septimus faces death most
directly. Though he fears it, he finally chooses it over what seems to him a direr alternative—living
another day.

The Threat of Oppression

Oppression is a constant threat for Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, and Septimus dies in
order to escape what he perceives to be an oppressive social pressure to conform. It comes in many
guises, including religion, science, or social convention. Miss Kilman and Sir William Bradshaw are two
of the major oppressors in the novel: Miss Kilman dreams of felling Clarissa in the name of religion, and
Sir William would like to subdue all those who challenge his conception of the world. Both wish to
convert the world to their belief systems in order to gain power and dominate others, and their rigidity
oppresses all who come into contact with them. More subtle oppressors, even those who do not intend to, do
harm by supporting the repressive English social system. Though Clarissa herself lives under the weight
of that system and often feels oppressed by it, her acceptance of patriarchal English society makes
her, in part, responsible for Septimus’s death. Thus she too is an oppressor of sorts. At the end of the
novel, she reflects on his suicide: “Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace.” She accepts responsibility,
though other characters are equally or more fully to blame, which suggests that everyone is in some way
complicit in the oppression of others.

Motifs

Time

Time imparts order to the fluid thoughts, memories, and encounters that make up Mrs. Dalloway. Big
Ben, a symbol of England and its might, sounds out the hour relentlessly, ensuring that the passage of
time, and the awareness of eventual death, is always palpable . Clarissa, Septimus, Peter, and other
characters are in the grip of time, and as they age they evaluate how they have spent their lives. Clarissa, in
particular, senses the passage of time, and the appearance of Sally and Peter, friends from the past,
emphasizes how much time has gone by since Clarissa was young. Once the hour chimes, however, the
sound disappears—its “leaden circles dissolved in the air.” This expression recurs many times
throughout the novel, indicating how ephemeral time is, despite the pomp of Big Ben and despite
people’s wary obsession with it. “It is time,” Rezia says to Septimus as they sit in the park waiting for the
doctor's appointment on Harley Street. The ancient woman at the Regent’s Park Tube station suggests
that the human condition knows no boundaries of time, since she continues to sing the same song for
what seems like eternity. She understands that life is circular, not merely linear, which is the only sort
of time that Big Ben tracks. Time is so important to the themes, structure, and characters of this novel
that Woolf almost named her book The Hours.

Shakespeare

The many appearances of Shakespeare specifically and poetry in general suggest hopefulness, the
possibility of finding comfort in art, and the survival of the soul in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa quotes
Shakespeare’s plays many times throughout the day. When she shops for flowers at the beginning of the
novel, she reads a few lines from a Shakespeare play, Cymbeline, in a book displayed in a shop window.
The lines come from a funeral hymn in the play that suggests death should be embraced as a release from
the constraints of life. Since Clarissa fears death for much of the novel, these lines suggest that an
alternative, hopeful way of addressing the prospect of death exists. Clarissa also identifies with the title
character in Othello, who loves his wife but kills her out of jealousy, then kills himself when he learns his
jealousy was unwarranted. Clarissa shares with Othello the sense of having lost a love, especially when
she thinks about Sally Seton. Before the war, Septimus appreciated Shakespeare as well, going so far as
aspiring to be a poet. He no longer finds comfort in poetry after he returns.

The presence of an appreciation for poetry reveals much about Clarissa and Septimus, just as the absence of
such appreciation reveals much about the characters who differ from them, such as Richard Dalloway and
Lady Bruton. Richard finds Shakespeare’s sonnets indecent, and he compares reading them to listening in at
a keyhole. Not surprisingly, Richard himself has a difficult time voicing his emotions. Lady Bruton never
reads poetry either, and her demeanor is so rigid and impersonal that she has a reputation of caring more for
politics than for people. Traditional English society promotes a suppression of visible emotion, and
since Shakespeare and poetry promote a discussion of feeling and emotion, they belong to sensitive
people like Clarissa, who are in many ways antiestablishment.

Trees and Flowers

Tree and flower images abound in Mrs. Dalloway. The color, variety, and beauty of flowers suggest
feeling and emotion, and those characters who are comfortable with flowers, such as Clarissa, have
distinctly different personalities than those characters who are not, such as Richard and Lady Bruton.
The first time we see Clarissa, a deep thinker, she is on her way to the flower shop, where she will revel in
the flowers she sees. Richard and Hugh, more emotionally repressed representatives of the English
establishment, offer traditional roses and carnations to Clarissa and Lady Bruton, respectively.
Richard handles the bouquet of roses awkwardly, like a weapon. Lady Bruton accepts the flowers
with a “grim smile” and lays them stiffly by her plate, also unsure of how to handle them. When she
eventually stuffs them into her dress, the femininity and grace of the gesture are rare and unexpected.
Trees, with their extensive root systems, suggest the vast reach of the human soul, and Clarissa and
Septimus, who both struggle to protect their souls, revere them. Clarissa believes souls survive in trees
after death, and Septimus, who has turned his back on patriarchal society, feels that cutting down a
tree is the equivalent of committing murder.

Waves and Water

Waves and water regularly wash over events and thoughts in Mrs. Dalloway and nearly always
suggest the possibility of extinction or death. While Clarissa mends her party dress, she thinks about the
peaceful cycle of waves collecting and falling on a summer day, when the world itself seems to say “that is
all.” Time sometimes takes on waterlike qualities for Clarissa, such as when the chime from Big Ben
“flood[s]” her room, marking another passing hour. Rezia, in a rare moment of happiness with Septimus
after he has helped her construct a hat, lets her words trail off “like a contented tap left running.” Even then,
she knows that stream of contentedness will dry up eventually. The narrative structure of the novel itself
also suggests fluidity. One character’s thoughts appear, intensify, then fade into another’s, much like
waves that collect then fall.

Traditional English society itself is a kind of tide, pulling under those people not strong enough to
stand on their own. Lady Bradshaw, for example, eventually succumbs to Sir William’s bullying,
overbearing presence. The narrator says “she had gone under,” that her will became “water-logged” and
eventually sank into his. Septimus is also sucked under society’s pressures. Earlier in the day, before he kills
himself, he looks out the window and sees everything as though it is underwater. Trees drag their branches
through the air as though dragging them through water, the light outside is “watery gold,” and his hand on
the sofa reminds him of floating in seawater. While Septimus ultimately cannot accept or function in
society, Clarissa manages to navigate it successfully. Peter sees Clarissa in a “silver-green mermaid’s dress”
at her party, “[l]olloping on the waves.” Between her mermaid’s dress and her ease in bobbing through her
party guests, Clarissa succeeds in staying afloat. However, she identifies with Septimus’s wish to fight
the cycle and go under, even if she will not succumb to the temptation herself.

Symbols
The Prime Minister

The prime minister in Mrs. Dalloway embodies England’s old values and hierarchical social system,
which are in decline. When Peter Walsh wants to insult Clarissa and suggest she will sell out and become a
society hostess, he says she will marry a prime minister. When Lady Bruton, a champion of English
tradition, wants to compliment Hugh, she calls him “My Prime Minister.” The prime minister is a figure
from the old establishment, which Clarissa and Septimus are struggling against. Mrs. Dalloway takes
place after World War I, a time when the English looked desperately for meaning in the old symbols
but found the symbols hollow . When the conservative prime minister finally arrives at Clarissa’s party, his
appearance is unimpressive. The old pyramidal social system that benefited the very rich before the
war is now decaying, and the symbols of its greatness have become pathetic.

Peter Walsh’s Pocketknife and Other Weapons

Peter Walsh plays constantly with his pocketknife, and the opening, closing, and fiddling with the
knife suggest his flightiness and inability to make decisions. He cannot decide what he feels and doesn’t
know whether he abhors English tradition and wants to fight it, or whether he accepts English civilization
just as it is. The pocketknife reveals Peter’s defensiveness. He is armed with the knife, in a sense, when he
pays an unexpected visit to Clarissa, while she herself is armed with her sewing scissors. Their weapons
make them equal competitors. Knives and weapons are also phallic symbols, hinting at sexuality and
power. Peter cannot define his own identity, and his constant fidgeting with the knife suggests how
uncomfortable he is with his masculinity. Characters fall into two groups: those who are armed and
those who are not. Ellie Henderson, for example, is “weaponless,” because she is poor and has not been
trained for any career. Her ambiguous relationship with her friend Edith also puts her at a disadvantage in
society, leaving her even less able to defend herself. Septimus, psychologically crippled by the literal
weapons of war, commits suicide by impaling himself on a metal fence, showing the danger lurking
behind man-made boundaries.

The Old Woman in the Window

The old woman in the window across from Clarissa’s house represents the privacy of the soul and the
loneliness that goes with it, both of which will increase as Clarissa grows older. Clarissa sees the
future in the old woman: She herself will grow old and become more and more alone, since that is the
nature of life. As Clarissa grows older, she reflects more but communicates less. Instead, she keeps
her feelings locked inside the private rooms of her own soul, just as the old woman rattles alone
around the rooms of her house. Nevertheless, the old woman also represents serenity and the purity of
the soul. Clarissa respects the woman’s private reflections and thinks beauty lies in this act of preserving
one’s interior life and independence. Before Septimus jumps out the window, he sees an old man
descending the staircase outside, and this old man is a parallel figure to the old woman. Though Clarissa and
Septimus ultimately choose to preserve their private lives in opposite ways, their view of loneliness,
privacy, and communication resonates within these similar images.

The Old Woman Singing an Ancient Song

Opposite the Regent’s Park Tube station, an old woman sings an ancient song that celebrates life,
endurance, and continuity. She is oblivious to everyone around her as she sings, beyond caring what
the world thinks. The narrator explains that no matter what happens in the world, the old woman will
still be there, even in “ten million years,” and that the song has soaked “through the knotted roots of
infinite ages.” Roots, intertwined and hidden beneath the earth, suggest the deepest parts of people’s
souls, and this woman’s song touches everyone who hears it in some way. Peter hears the song first and
compares the old woman to a rusty pump. He doesn’t catch her triumphant message and feels only pity for
her, giving her a coin before stepping into a taxi. Rezia, however, finds strength in the old woman’s words,
and the song makes her feel as though all will be okay in her life. Women in the novel, who have to view
patriarchal English society from the outside, are generally more attuned to nature and the messages
of voices outside the mainstream. Rezia, therefore, is able to see the old woman for the life force she is,
instead of simply a nuisance or a tragic figure to be dealt with, ignored, or pitied.