Creative Writing GCSE English MasterClass and Analysis with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (English Tuition Bolton).

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself

Task.

Here is the opening line of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs Dalloway. Consider what you might understand about the protagonist and her situation from this sentence. Mind-map your ideas and impressions before reading and responding to, the following questions:

1. What is the effect of the writer using the formal, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ rather than ‘Clarissa’? Can titles and names act like veils to a character? Are these veils both psychological as well as social? Why?
2. Is there an implied surprise or irony in the use of the reflexive pronoun, ‘herself’? What can you infer from this qualification about Clarissa’s normal life and even her past?
3. Why are we concerned with ‘flowers’ in this sentence rather than bread or milk, for example? What is being implied about class, perhaps? Does Mrs Dalloway appear privileged, even ‘tinselly’?
4. The conditional verb ‘would buy’ suggests that Mrs Dalloway intends to go out to purchase the flowers, without assistance. Think about this economic exchange and why a writer might choose to begin a novel with such an apparently mundane event.
5. Can you detect any emotional resonance in this first sentence? If so, what is this emotion and why might you infer this?
6. Think about the apparent simplicity of the opening and yet how it opens up the novel to possibilities and change. For example, is the opening line a subtle means of introducing ideas about class and freedom? Is the novelty of the flower buying a hint at future(or past) liberations? A form of beckoning? Is any alteration to habit therefore,  a means of introducing the new?
7. Why do you think Woolf keeps her language plain in this opening? Note the absence of adverbs and adverbs. Stylistically and thematically, what options does she have available in the rest of the opening?

Task.

The narrative continues with the exploration of Clarissa Dalloway’s thoughts, as she ruminates about the impact of the past on the present and she re-engages with a recollected place, Bourton, which resonates with joy.

Woolf’s technique explored a process often referred to as a ‘stream of consciousness’. Can you see why and how effective it is in opening up the ruminations of a character’s thoughts to the reader? Do you feel ‘lost’ in this narrative or do you find it easy to follow?

Again, mind-map your impressions of Clarissa Dalloway and her experiences, before we discuss the following questions together:

1. Does the word ‘ for’ allow us to follow the mental processes of Clarissa Dalloway? Is Clarissa’s flower-buying an act of apparent altruism? Or is Clarissa escaping the hectic atmosphere of home for the sanctuary of the city? Could Clarissa’s need for privacy be revisited in the novel?
2. Look at the way the ‘hinges’ of the door,  (which are presumably giving more room or space in the house), also open out the imagination and remembrance of Clarissa.  And anticipate the second reference to ‘hinges’ which reside in the memory of Bourton. Thus, the act of doors opening becomes a sustained metaphor for the act of remembrance.
3. Does the exuberance of Mrs Dalloway as she recollects an earlier time animate her character? Does memory bring vitality to the plainness of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ in the opening line? Is that why her memories are punctuated by exclamation marks?
4. Why are Clarissa’s thoughts contradictory? Does this engender emotional authenticity?  Look at the function of the dashes in the extract. What function do these dashes possess?
5. Is there something surreal about these remembrances? Do you find some details bathetic? Why are vegetables and cauliflowers all mixed up with pen-knives and love?

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! 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, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it? —“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages.