To be honest, I didn’t even know where I was or what the place was supposed to be. The place literally looked like a low lit motel from the 80’s with small rooms. After I talked to the worker there, I understood that the exhibit was just two rooms. I thought the hotel was part of the exhibit. When I saw the paintings, it reminded me of the Stream of Consciousness. “Mrs. Dalloway” was in the point of view of an omniscient narrator. Through that we were able to see each person’s inner thoughts. The exhibit also portrays people’s inner feelings in reaction to their environment. Adelson painted the people to look as if they are possessed by actual ghosts. These spirits are the ones that create the façade that other people see. In truth, the person isn’t really in control of his/her reaction to the environment. Also one of the guys in the painting, could really use a facelift. Even though he does fit the theme, but I think in this one Adelson might have gone too far. The theme of the exhibit is actually pretty interesting. It raises the question of if people are actually who they say they are. Some people pretend to be strong and confident but internally, they are intimidated by anything outside of their comfort zone. Today’s society forces individuals to take on such a façade and I think this is part of the negative environment Adelson talks about in her exhibit. We wear these masks so that it seems like we are meeting society’s norms.

A large landscape painting is painted in one of the many rooms in the Carlton Arms Hotel that expresses the artist exchange of energy with her subjects and depicts the tension between presence and absence in her portraiture and architectural landscapes. The painting is about the figure negative space and the void surrounding it. The figure in the portrait is looking back at us while expressing a person inner self, and questioning what’s behind the mask.

This oil painting on the wall shows how we look at our self, inwardly and how other perceive us. We tend to hide our true identity and look at the world through other people eyes, because we don’t want to face that negative space of criticism and the void surrounding it.  For instance, in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa hide her true identity as a person who love men; but if you look behind her mask, she truly wishes to be with a woman. This was the inner tension Clarissa was struggling with throughout the novel.

Helen Oliver Adelson has worked over 40 years long as a painter. Her painting work is mainly oil on canvas and she is known for her large scale portraits. And, she has painter over 3 rooms at the Carlton Arms Hotel since 1980. Unfortunately, I was not lucky to see her personally. But the hotel staff was very pleased to show me the gallery of painting she has done.

In Mrs.Dalloway, the characters I felt that had a connection were Clarissa and Septimus. Though the two never meet or directly have an interaction with each other, they portray one another with slight modifications in events causing them to be somewhat identical. Clarissa, a housewife, who I believed to be pretentious was actually someone who’s going through a midlife crisis. As someone who is in her early 50s, she no longer feels connected to the world and feels that the world is not connected to her. This leads her to flashbacks of her younger self when she had her whole life ahead of her. But now she feels lost without an identity of her own and the only identity she has is being labeled being her husbands wife. Lost in her mind, she comforts herself by stating she enjoys being isolated from the world. Septimus, similar to Clarissa’s feelings and thoughts, feels lost with no identity. But in his case it was due to PTSD, a health disorder no one would accept. As a veteran who suffered trauma and shock, he is told to “get over it” and “be a man.” Due to the harsh words, Septimus felt alone and struggled to express himself freely, he was isolated from the world as he cannot “be a man” or act they way society wants him to act.

Two people who have never met has their lives intertwined with the same feeling of isolation and oppression. Clarissa and Septimus both feel isolated from the world but fear the way society would react if they were to express themselves freely. With this fear, they both lack any type of relationship from the world and even with their spouses aside from the label of being married. Isolation and oppression has lead them to feel disconnected with the world, leaving them with a sense of non-existence.

Mrs. Dalloway was made during the time ager World War I, so this book has been considered as a war book. I did not realize this until we discuss this in class. Mrs. Dalloway has many interesting characters to discuss but Clarissa and Septimus similarity that caught me the most. From the chart above, I did not write exactly the same thing between Clarissa and Septimus. I wanted to highlight how I see them based on the book in a few words. I feel like Clarissa is the female version of Septimus, it may seem odd but Clarissa seeing the world in a “sane-way” while Septimus looking at it in an “insane way”

They question their life. Clarissa looking at it through the way she lives her life. She is very involved with the physical life, she cares about the society too much. She is engaged with the society, either throwing party and interacting with the high society. She seems to always concern about her physical appearance, I feel like she is also a little bit insecure about herself because she tries to find something wrong with herself that she can’t figure out. Clarissa is really aware of her surroundings and she tries to maintain her relationship with the society, no matter how she feels about it.

Septimus sees the world differently than Clarissa, we can say it is indeed the exact opposite. Septimus released himself from seeing the perspective of life through the physical life, and in fact he is not involved in the physical life anymore. Septimus went to war and had the guilt because he’s alive and his friends had died during the war. He stills value the society despite how he feels about the people, because he thinks a lot of them are lack of honesty and kindness. He struggles to keep up with the society and that is why he has mental problem.

I think both of them are trying to please the society and both of them are struggling with it. It may have seem that there aren’t any similarity between the two, but from the way they think and do something; I see it that they are very much alike. I can understand why Septimus look deeply through life outside the physical life because he had seen so many deaths around him. While Clarissa has to live the way she feels like she needs to do.

With Virginia Woolf being well known as a war novelist, it is only fitting that five major battles occur in the lives of five of the major characters. Other than World War I, Clarissa, Septimus, Peter, Richard and Sally all fight battles and obtain different results by the book’s ending. These battles sometimes intertwine and may factor into the battles of other characters.

First we have Clarissa, who is questioning her surroundings and the position she holds as Richard’s wife. She constantly questions her place in society and life’s greater meanings. Ultimately her battle ends in a draw between her external and internal struggle.

Next we have Septimus who after coming back from the battles of World War I is struggling in a battle between what is real and what he perceives as real. His psyche has been greatly affected by “shell shock” and warps his thinking and perception of life. His battle is lost when he commits suicide.

Sally’s battle is between her fight for advancing women’s rights and the patriarchy that dominates England at this time. She is forced to take solace in the small victories in life, due to the dominate force of the male focused world around her.

Paul’s battle is related to time. Past versus present collide and Paul is forced to confront his own feelings about Clarissa and how he fits into her life. He tries to overtake his emotions but in the end loses to them and can only weep.

Finally we have Richard. A man so enthralled in the idea of male dominance and female subservience that he can’t imagine any other scenario. There is a brief spark that leads the reader to believe that maybe Richard can change, but ultimately he never tells Clarissa that he loves her and surrenders to what he knows is right.

This entire book seems to surrounded by negative emotions. Each character is either pretending to be someone because of something he/she went through or is unable to move on from the past. For example, Septimus is traumatized by what he saw in the war. Everything he sees in his everyday life, he connects it back to the war. In reality, a person who has PTSD would have some kind of help to get him through the tough times. Septimus’ wife, Rezia, didn’t seem to enough love him anymore by the way she took care of him. She only seems to keep the facade of her love for her suffering husband as a front for the public. Her actions make me think they she considers Septimus a burden. Mrs. Dalloway also has a facade of a happy wife. Through the point of view of the narrator, we are able to see what is happening inside each person’s head and clearly, Mrs. Dalloway definitely has whole load of regret in her life. As she thinks back to her youth, she wonders how her life was a total waste. She didn’t end up with the man she loved, her husband wasn’t the best lover and no matter how hard she tries, in my opinion, her life doesn’t seem to have much positivity to it. The real Clarissa is trapped somewhere behind the person that is trying to meet societal expectations. All the people in London, still seemed to be horrified by the war. The boom of the car exhaust made people thing as if a bomb had just went off. Being startled is one thing, but frightened and horrified is another. The tree connects all the people’s emotions and ideas. I feel as though they are trying to look happy but are still terrified on the inside.

These phrases describe what Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is about. In this novel, time is a major aspect because the linear progression of time is altered to the reader. We are taken to the past of characters like Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, and are exposed to a world of loss, war, and death. Beside the fact that Woolf’s characters have a stream of consciousness, some also touch upon similar ideas. For example, both Clarissa and Septimus think about meaning of life and death. Clarissa wonders if she should take comfort in the fact that death ended everything while Septimus is driven to suicide because of his illness acquired from the war. The past is also a huge aspect of the novel because we see Clarissa and Peter “plunge” into old memories of when they were younger. These memories flow from one character to another, providing different perspectives. We see them remember certain characters whom they once had feelings for. For Clarissa, one person she remembers at one point is Sally for whom she might have been in love with her while Peter remembers being into Clarissa and being rejected by her, hence the loss of once upon a time love.

When reading the story it seems pretty obvious that Septimus and Mrs.Dalloway are two separate people, but after analyzing Septimus thoughts and views on life after coming back from  war one can argue that septimus is pratically a dupe for Mrs.Dalloway. Septimus is a war veteran who suffered from shell shock aka (PTSD). He is sometimes overcome with the beauty in the world, but he also fears that the people in it are dishonest and lack kindness. There’s an ironic contrast between clarissa and septimus they appear different to the world when they are one in the same , clarissa is meant to always speak the truth and be a women with class. While septimus is viewed as a week insane man who is of no value to the world. Woolf describes their features and passions exactly the same they both have long beak noses , love shakespeare , and fear oppression.Can it be that septimus is actually sane while clarissa is insane for the simple fact that septimus has the free will to spaek and act as he pleases , while clarissa has to live up to the standards of an upper class white women. Another connection between the two is the struggles they faced inorder to please the greater good of the people. while drowning in their own passions and fantasies. Septimus hoped to preserve the english society , while clarissa hoped to preserve her class although she had a deper thought inside.One may say that septimus and clarissa diffr in the fact that clarissa didnt kill her self , Can we really say shes alive? Clarissa died once she left her city she took on a different lifestyle and role on society Mrs.dalloway was born and burried clarissaalong with her fantasies.

Each of these four circles contains characteristics that I see in the novel that connect and shape the plot, how I see the characters behave and make conclusions about how they feel. The time period and events that go on in the story can also connect how the world is a work of art, seeing how the characters behave and the lack of family connection shows how theses characters have their own world as a work of art. Post-war causes the characters to live in fear; on that cloudy day that Clarissa went to buy the flowers,the explosion of the car and an airplane flying by caused the characters in the own to get scared because living through a war, they experienced many bomb explosions, many airplanes passing by dropping bombs. They continue to live in this fear that any loud noise or planes flying by could be yet another bomb or a shooting. Septimus is one character who is pretty delusional because of the war and the things he experienced and went through while fighting in the war. Although he does suffer from PTSD, his wife also gets effected by his disorder, since she is always around Septimus she gets influenced by seeing her husband suffer from this disorder. This could be very difficult for someone to live with because they don’t have a piece of normality in their life, they have to deal with someone who has this condition who possibly may never have a normal, stable life again. Observing how Clarissa and her husband Richard don’t really connect with one another, they kind of just put up with each other to full fill the title of being husband and wife. I feel like back then people got married to unite 2 different families, not because they were in love and wanted to spend the rest of their lives with each other. Being that Clarissa is of upper society, she must marry someone who is also of upper society to not cause any issues between her family members. Throughout the novel, I noticed that husband and wives don’t have a connection, parents with children don’t have a connection either, they lack that love and care that family members are supposed to give each other. This lack of family connection causes loneliness within the characters, the day that clarissa went to buy flowers, all the things she was thinking about as she walked to the flower shop was about her past, when she was 18, then her thoughts go back to her life now, she just goes very back and forth with her thinking, it seems like she has no one to talk to and open to about what she thinks and what she feels. Each character is in their own little world, but each of these individual worlds result in this one world the live in, its a unique work of art.

There are a lot of relations between the characters in Mrs. Dalloway’s one day and her reflections, though not all are as directly related. Septimus for example is connected to Mrs. Dalloway because of many psychological aspects of their personalities. While Septimus is a war veteran and because of that is paranoid, depressed, and generally what society might call crazy, Mrs Dalloway is not any of those things. But both represent in their thoughts or actions the wrongness of society’s outlook on war and the treatment of the men who came back from it alive, the lack of an attempt to understand mental illnesses. Both suffer through depression and both are misunderstood by the world. Mrs Dalloway is seen as a cold distant women when she is in fact not.

Sally is connected to Dalloway as a childhood ‘Friend’, with perhaps all of the hidden implications that the quotations may imply. They felt very personal and passionate emotions for one another, crossing nearly into a category one might reserve for lovers, a place that it seems no one else truly entered again with Clarissa Dalloway.

Richard Dalloway, or Mr. Dalloway is Clarissa’s husband… though that relationship lacks any of the same passion that Sally offered. The two of them are close but at the same time cold and off-standish, Mr. Dalloway is a conservative man who never expresses affection properly, and Clarissa is as mentioned before seen as a cold woman, who refuses sex with her husband.

Lastly Peter Walsh, an… acquaintance of Clarissa’s who is smitten for her. He come back from India and immediately goes to Clarissa to discuss with her an array of things, but mainly ends up displaying his emotions for her. He loves Clarissa and is torn by the fact that she is already married to Richard. An unrequited love.