“Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about almost everything. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.” Edward Mendelson concedes that any book of criticism can only address more than a few fractions of the novel, but in focusing his reading on the themes of medicine, empire, and love, he provides insight to a variety of the themes and ideas that shape Mrs. Dalloway. Mendelson frames the novel as one in which characters, particularly Clarissa Dalloway, struggle to move toward personal freedom by triumphing over the fear of being oneself and creating an intimacy with others amid personal and social barriers. Mrs. Dalloway is, among many other things, an extended protest against all authorities who say “must” and confine the individual. These authorities include a medical establishment personified by Sir William Bradshaw’s uncaring and soul-crushing treatment of Septimus Smith. In the section on “Empire,” Mendelson examines how power impresses upon the lives in characters in ways that are at once subtle and totalizing. In the final chapter, Mendelson argues that Virginia Woolf had no answer to the question of love or “the difficult business of intimacy,” but in Mrs. Dalloway she shows how different kinds of loves affect and, in some cases, liberate the characters’ fates”– Provided by publisher.
