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On Woolf’s Ingenious Use of Doubling in Mrs. Dalloway

Author: LiJing
Tutor: WangLiLi；ZhaoXiuFu
School: Shandong University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: dark double the prevalence of shell shock bisexuality death as defiance
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Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2008
Downloads: 243
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Abstract

Woolf’s writing, imbued with her persistent pursuit of the essence of life as well as capturing moments of being, thoroughly explores the concepts of time, memory, and consciousness through the shift of the focus from the narrator to the minds of the characters in contrast to the majority of literature written before the early 1900s, which emphasized plot and detailed descriptions of characters and settings.Mrs. Dalloway, one of Woolf’s most loved and the most frequently commented novels, is her first successful attempt to revolt against the traditional realistic novels and helped plunge the traditional realistic novel writing into a new era—modernism. Critics of this novel, both within and outside China, approach the novel from many different perspectives. Literature on Mrs. Dalloway includes language and genre studies, feminist and gender studies, historical and cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and other studies such as influence and intertextuality. Generally speaking, these studies, though sometimes overlapping, fall into three categories, namely, stylistic, socio-psychological and feminist studies.In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf sliced the darker part of Mrs. Dalloway’s personality from her, personified it into a real person named Septimus. Actually, Woolf’s creating of Septimus as Clarissa’s dark double is a pivotal touch in that it helps depict the dark side of its title character Clarissa, structure the otherwise seemingly disconnected fragmentations and fulfill the author’s thematic intentions. What’s more, inspection on the subtle relationship between Septimus and Clarissa also may shed light on our understanding of the title character Clarissa, who is always accused of having not a stable but contradictory and conflicting nature.My thesis is intended to elaborate on the complex double relationship between Clarissa and Septimus. Three chapters will be devoted to this purpose.Chapter One is mainly concerned with the genre of ’double’ literature and Woolf’s ingenious design of using Septimus as Clarissa’s dark double. Besides, the role Septimus plays both in the characterization of Clarissa and in structuring the novel will be made manifest in this chapter.Chapter Two shall be devoted to digging out the author’s intention of showing the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side, with Clarissa seeing the sane truth while Septimus seeing the insane truth. The prevalence of shell-shock and bisexuality will be given focal attention to show Woolf’s strong accusation of war and her intention of undermining the hegemonic order of British society through destabilizing the heterosexual binaries that support it.In Chapter Three, this thesis will concentrate on the author’s idea of transcending the boundary between life and death, especially her idea of death as defiance and an attempt to communicate, as reflected in the subject of my current study—Mrs. Dalloway, which is mainly realized through her creation of Septimus as Clarissa’s double.

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