Are we allowed to judge Mrs. Dalloway?

One of the questions that was brought up in class last week was, should we be allowed to judge Clarissa based on her thoughts recorded in Mrs. Dalloway? I know that sometimes the things that Clarissa thinks might misrepresent her personality, but I think that it is fair to form an opinion about her as a character solely based on her thoughts. I think that knowing her most private thoughts gives a more honest picture of her than seeing her just on the surface would have. I'm sure that no one wants all of their thoughts to be public, but I think that if you're judging a person based on what they want you to see, you aren't going to get anything close to an accurate picture of them. I actually really like how Virginia Woolf doesn't censor anything, I think that it makes Clarissa seem more real than she would if Mrs. Dalloway had been written in a different style.

First Impressions of Mrs. Dalloway

The first night that I spent reading (although, "attempting to read" seems to be a more appropriate description of my venture into Virginia Woolf) Mrs. Dalloway, I had a lot of trouble figuring out what was going on. The way that the narrative uses free indirect discourse with Clarissa made it hard for me to follow, then when it began flitting from person to person, it took me several readings of each paragraph to be sure of what was happening.

However, once I got more familiar with Woolf's writing style, I started to enjoy the various perspectives that melted together to form a complete picture of each scene. It actually reminds me a little of the household deer from the novel, Girl in Landscape, that I read last year in English. In that book, there were small creatures that ran all over the place and could be inhabited by different peoples' consciousnesses. The mental image that I began forming after connecting Girl in Landscape with Mrs. Dalloway was rather strange, although Woolf's narrative does seem to me a little like it could be the account of one of those quasi-invisible creatures running around London. Now, my analogy doesn't work perfectly because in Girl in Landscape, the creatures can't actually hear the thoughts of the people that they follow or observe. But, the quick transitions and the lack of censorship or privacy of thoughts and actions, feels very similar to me in the two different novels.

The Mezzanine - Class Prompt

As I was reading it, it came as no surprise to me that Howie was angered at Marcus Aurelius' opinion on the "transient and trivial" nature of life. All 135 pages of The Mezzanine argue the point that the triviality of life is one of the greatest and most meaningful things about it, strange as it may seem to someone who has not read The Mezzanine. Howie seems to not care about the deep or profound ideas proclaimed by Aurelius, he seems content in marveling at the beauty of everyday life and people.

However,while reading this section, something highly ironic occurred to me. Howie decided to buy the novel, Meditations, after reading a single sentence and assuming that the rest of the novel would have the same poetic flow of words. Unfortunately for him, shortly after beginning to read the novel, Howie realized that it was not at all what he was hoping for. Now, I almost feel as though Marcus Aurelius would have the exact same experience with The Mezzanine, if through some bizarre and far-fetched series of circumstances he happened to wander into a Barnes and Noble, pick up a novel by Nicholson Baker, and read a single sentence. While the subjects and the actions in The Mezzanine are rather mundane, they're presented with an elegance that I feel Aurelius would appreciate.