More After Death (Mrs. Dalloway Explication)

Katie Lopes-Raftery
Ms. Clapp
AP Literature and Composition
7 January 2009

More After Death

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, is often characterized by her actions and thoughts. But Woolf further characterizes her through on of her theories about life: that one must seek the things that complete a person in life to truly understand his/her complete being. In this case, Mrs. Dalloway is characterized through another character’s point of view, Peter Walsh’s, which allows for an external opinion of herself. In the end, Woolf’s complex sentence structure leads the readers into entering a wandering mind which later reveals the everlasting life people have through other people and places.

In the first part of the description of the theory, Peter’s dismissive tone suggests his little belief in Clarissa’s theory. Both of them were on top of an omnibus when Clarissa presented her theory: “to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known” (152). Even before this, Peter had said, “they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have” (152). At first thought Peter didn’t want to think about the validity of that statement, but he later had “agreed, how little one knew people” (152). Clarissa continued explaining, “she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’” (152). Her description of “everywhere” was in other people, in other places. Clarrisa’s person was not just her in her body. Parts of her whole were found in other “people who completed them,” such as her family, and Peter Walsh (153). Not only the people, but “even the places” that tell so much of Clarissa’s life, such as Bourton (153).

In the second part of the theory, Clarissa extended it to the situation when someone dies, suggesting that part of people live forever. Peter says of Clarissa, “with her horror of death…the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive” (153). Clarissa implies that the parts of people that were attached to other people and other places survive, meaning that some part of the dead person also survives. In Clarissa’s fright, or even curiosity of death, she finds some comfort in knowing that parts of her will survive, in Bourton and in the people closest to her. At the end of the “theory” discussion, Peter thinks about it and relates Clarissa to a place. He says that “he saw her most often in the country, not in London” (153). In the end, even he had accepted Clarissa’s theory to some extent, identifying her with another place.

By adding in this “theory” into her book, Woolf develops the theme of life after death in her book, which is important in figuring out the meaning and purpose of Septimus’s death. Clarissa’s theory is supported by the rest of the book. Most of the novel concerns people’s innermost thoughts rather than what’s on the surface, their visible actions. The people’s thoughts (like when Clarissa informed the readers of Bourton, her past with Peter etc.) connect people and things. Woolf’s choice of adding this theory into her book gives the three main characters, Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus, comfort in leaving life.