Exploring Connections Between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith
Enjoy this beautiful photograph of Big Ben! Mrs. Dalloway, while primarily focusing on its namesake main character, Clarissa Dalloway, makes the seemingly questionable decision to also focus on Septimus Smith’s tragic story. The reader gets a look inside Septimus’ troubled mind, receiving a unqiue persepctive that we otherwise would be deprived of. The lives of these two individuals seem as different as they could possibly get, with Clarissa constantly hosting elaborate house parties to satisfy her hunger for social interaction (the climax of the book, in fact, takes place during one of these parties). Whereas Septimus seems to be constantly brooding about his life during the war, a shell of the person he once was. However much these two characters seem to differ from each other, I believe that Virginia Woolf very purposefully placed these two storylines so closely together, sprinkling key similarities to interweave their character arcs and generate this idea of a co...
