Upper Class Mrs Dalloway example essay topic

Mrs. Dalloway (1998) presents a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class English woman. Clarissa Dalloway is the wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative Member of Parliament. The story takes place in London on a day in June 1923, a day when Clarissa is giving a dinner party. She walks to the florist shop to buy flowers for the party. Admittedly, it's no easy task to make a silly woman's foolish choices an engrossing cinematic experience. For that reason alone the people who tried to make a film of Virginia Woolf's novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway' get an 'E' for effort.

It has a sumptuous look, excellent supporting performances, and I wish I could have liked it more. The title character, Clarissa Dalloway, is played by Vanessa Redgrave while she plans a party at her impressive home. As she does, she begins to recall the choice she made years ago when pursued by two suitors who could not have been more different. Rather than reckless passion, her choice, born of cowardice, was for the security of a quiet life full of privilege.

Peter Walsh, an old and close friend of Clarissa's, has returned to England after five years in India, and comes to visit her. Peter Walsh once loved Clarissa, but she had refused to marry him. Clarissa introduces Peter to her daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth is 17 years old, and has an older friend and tutor named Doris Kilman.

Elizabeth goes to lunch with Miss Kilman. Miss Kilman is poor and physically unattractive, and resents the upper-class Mrs. Dalloway. Miss Kilman is a desperate and fanatically religious woman, who wants to take Elizabeth away from her mother, but conceals her feeling under the guise of religiosity and strident charity. Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Lucretia happen to be walking on the street.

Septimus Warren Smith never meets Mrs. Dalloway, but their lives are connected by external events, such as the sight of an airplane overhead, and by the fact that they are both sensitive people who feel empty. Septimus Warren Smith commits suicide the same day that Mrs. Dalloway is giving her dinner party. Clarissa Dalloway as a character in the novel is upper-class and conventional. She knows her life is shallow; her former lover Peter Walsh had called her the perfect hostess. She feels that her only gift in life is in knowing a person through instinct. Clarissa is unsure about her daughter's love for her.

She is also unsure about her own feelings toward her husband Richard, and toward her former fianc'e Peter Walsh. Her feelings toward Peter are ambivalent; she had loved him, but he had not offered her stability or social standing. She regards Peter as a failure, and it is because he knows this that he bursts into tears when he meets her. She kisses him, and comforts him. Clarissa had refused to marry Peter because of his self-centered unconventionality.

She had married Richard, because he was dependable and represented security and stability. Clarissa loves success, hates discomfort, and has a need to be liked. She is attracted to both men and women (she had fallen in love with her former friend Sally Seton). Clarissa has had a recent illness, and takes an hour's rest after luncheon. All she thinks about death. The film succeeds, though, in its subplots that comment on the upheaval English society endured after World War I. There are draconian plans to solve unemployment, and intolerance masquerading as Christian charity, both presented with dry wit and piquant irony.

But the emotional tug comes from a shell-shocked veteran, touchingly played by Rupert Graves, and his loving, brave wife as they desperately, fearfully seek help. Paradoxically, this is the subplot least integrated into the film as a whole, included in a tacked on fashion so that the story of what happens to them can be told at Mrs. Dalloway's party, precipitating her mid-life crisis. A theme of the novel is the conflict between conventionality and unconventionality. Clarissa chooses conventionality, rather than following her true feelings, and is left empty and unsure of herself. Peter Walsh chooses unconventionality, and is left feeling aimless and unsuccessful. Septimus Warren Smith commits suicide to escape being crushed by the forces of conventionality.

The novel is in part a critique of the shallowness and superficial conventionality of upper-class English society.