Mrs. Dalloway: A Portrait of the Human Experience
Mrs. Dalloway : A Portrait of the Human Experience Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf may seem on the surface to be a jumble of people’s experiences in a day that are rather unrelated to one another. Full of contradictions and complicated subplots, it can be easy to view the novel this way. However, I’d like to argue that Woolf uses this novel to paint a portrait of Clarissa’s and human experiences in general. The book is not merely a story to read for pleasure, but an artistic representation of what it means to be human: to have regrets, jealousy, surface level, and deep relationships. Woolf uses different characters in the novel to represent the different aspects of a life. Nostalgia and regret are commonly repeating threads throughout Mrs. Dalloway. The two characters that Woolf uses to represent this feeling are Peter Walsh and Sally Seton. We are introduced to this past-reflection in Clarissa early on when she thinks to herself “oh if she could have lived her life over ag...