Virginia Woolf and Life Itself

Virginia Woolf represents life itself by representing it as it is lived. One of the key things is that life is lived in our consciousness and in our faults and we can see that in her works. Modernists weren't anti-realists, but they were trying to create a new kind of realism, — psychological realism, seen from inside, and Woolf does that, as well. Rather than being interested in how a character looks, like Arnould Bennett did, she's interested in how one thinks, since life itself, in a sense, is how we actually live and think.

Woolf tries to be more realistic, because she thinks old realists Like Arnold Bennett, H.G Wells didn't really represent people as they were, and how they thought. We're all human beings, doesn't matter what age we live in, we always think.

In Mrs. Dalloway, we see that sometimes the sentences are really long, they shift around and they're complicated. She tries to represent how we think — we don't think in short sentences, in a logical way. She tries to mirror the way Mrs. Dalloway thinks and she does that so well.

For example, we see that Mrs. Dalloway shares empathy with Hugh's wife who's ill, but at the same time, she's thinking about her hat, as we, humans can hold these things—serious and trivial—at the same time in our minds. Another thing is that Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts show complexity, in the way we all think. We see that she thinks Peter Walsh was an overcritical, serious man, but at the same time, she kind of misses him.

Mrs. Dalloway is an ordinary woman who feels like she has no function anymore since she's just her husband's wife, she's just "Mrs. Dalloway," and she feels like she has lost the role of being a wife and a mother. By letting us get into Mrs. Dalloway's head, Woolf shows us no matter how ordinary someone thinks they are, we all have this kind of complex way of thinking, not only clever people. For example, one thing leads to another and we see her moving from trivial to serious matters like death.

In the "I am this, I am that" part, we see that Mrs. Dalloway doesn't want to define things in an exact way. She likes to live in the moment. She's very sensual and visual.

The part where she looks at the glove shop which stimulates her thoughts is a flawless example of how we think. She sees the gloves, thinks about her uncle, then she comes back to the gloves again and links that to her daughter. That shows the way we associate one thing with another all the way through.

Even just in a couple of pages, we see her getting excited about walking down the street, we see her thinking about her hat, about her past lover, death and life—all kind of mixed up together which Woolf would say: "is life itself".