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The Columbia History of the British NovelIn Woolf's next novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), she again presents her characters as intertwined even with people they pass in the street, but the protagonists themselves are more alive to the shifting boundaries of identity. If Jacob's uniqueness is hard to discern beneath the cast of masculine confidence that makes his «heroism» unexpectedly ordinary, if Jacob's death is oddly continuous with his life as a living statue, Mrs. Dalloway takes as its touchstone not death, but life: Clarissa's party and Septimus's suicide are converging ways of expressing and defending a precious and vital balance between connection and isolation. Jacob's shape is overdetermined by his beauty, his education, his class, and his gender; only at brief moments do suggestions of originality assert themselves, such as in his outrage against censorship or his desire for an equal partnership between the sexes. Clarissa is also to some extent shaped by her class and sex, but Woolf draws our attention to the part of her sensibility that eludes labels, that revels in the abundant sensuality of the moment, enriched by traces of the past. Mrs ...» |
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