Compare Virginia Woolf"s novels Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves as the representatives of her early and late work.

Authors Avatar

        In this paper, we would like to compare Virginia Woolf”s novels Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves as the representatives of her early and late work. We tried to point out the similarities as well as the differences not only in theme, main characters and language. Firstly, we would like to center on the novels separately and then we will point out important facts connected with these two novels of Virginia Woolf.

        Her work on Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf finished in 1924. It is her fourth novel, considered by many to be her great one. The novel centers on the separate worlds and interior thought processes of two characters: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, young ex-soldier. These two main characters do not know each other and never meet, but their minds have parallels. Septimus Smith suffers mental illness triggered by a friend’s death in battle during World War I. He is considered to be mentally ill by society. Clarissa is considered to be mentally sane. However, we are able to find so many similarities between these two characters that it is necessary to think about them as about the two sides of one coin, the two sides of human’s personality. The story takes place on the June day in London after the war. It explores the idea of time by including past memories and future hopes of the characters. The novel ends with a party given by Clarissa, where Septimus’s doctor tells her about his suicide and he brings a death into the party. We would consider thos scene to be the best one of this book. The author precisely describes terror of Clarissa, her feelings and views.  

        The novel The Waves was written in 1931. It can be considered the Woolf’s most experimental novel and difficult work. It is organized into nine units, each of which records a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues given entirely in the present tense by six characters, one after another. The monologues reveal the personalities of each character in their inner experiences of external events. Each of these nine units is introduced by an italicized passage describing the sea, the sky, a garden, hills and a house during some imaginary day. There is very narrow connection between the passing lives of the six characters and the day described in these passages in the beginning of the units, e.g. youth of children an dawn.

Join now!

        As in other novels, Woolf is primarily concerned with rendering the quality of inner life, but in each novel the inner life is presented in different way. In Mrs. Dalloway we know all the attitudes, thoughts, memories, hopes and fears of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. However, the character of Clarissa is not given to us as a whole. The portrait of hers is shown very slowly, through little touches created by her memories, speeches, feelings etc. Other characters of this book are introduced to the reader through many social interactions and chance meetings. In the novel The Waves the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay