Mrs. Dalloway is back!

Hi everybody! Let’s talk a little bit about Mrs. Dalloway—yes, again. In order to do this I want to share these lines taken from the novel. After reading them, you will notice that they were taken from the beginning of the story.

“She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.”

Why are these lines important? Clarissa during the whole novel—the day of the party—is questioning her current life and what she has achieved. She realizes that she is just a wife trying to be “perfect” for people that she really does not care about. Thus, Mrs. Dalloway starts to feel invisible because she has “wasted” her entirely life in the shadow of her husband: Richard Dalloway. Here, it is important to mention the fact that her real name—Clarissa—is not even used; the book is called “Mrs. Dalloway,” just few people call her by her real name, etc. So we can see the big importance that her husband’s last name has.

Mrs. Dalloway feels that her present life is not what it used to be; she used to be a free woman, she wanted to achieve many goals, and she wanted to marry a man that really loves her (the money was not important). But, when she made the decision of marrying Richard, everything changed since he was rich and important. In this way, the only worry that Clarissa had when she “became ‘Mrs. Dalloway’” was being a wife and a mother instead of having a life apart, a career, or a job. Mrs. Dalloway was known for giving the best parties, but during this day she realizes that her life was so empty—giving parties is not a big deal.

Even though I am not the kind of person that fights for women’s rights (I am not feminist at all), I can understand how boring Clarissa’s life was. And this is because she changed her essence; in this way, she lost her reason for living. She felt so empty because she was not doing what she wanted when she was young. I am not saying that her current life was bad since being a wife or a mother 24/7 could be beautiful—I say “could” because I am neither a wife nor a mother, so I cannot give a certain opinion—but to enjoy it, it is necessary to want to be a mother or a wife. And in this case, Clarissa did not imagine her life this way when she was a teenager.

Now, we can connect these ideas to our own stories. If we want to be presidents, wives, doctors, shoemakers, teachers, husbands, etc., we are completely free to do it, but the idea is to do what we really want to do. Do not be another Mrs. Dalloway feeling that your “moments of being” already happened and that your dreams did not come true. “Think twice, act wise,” and do not wait until the moment you are about to kill yourself to realize how beautiful your life can be.

I look forward to reading your comments :) 

Javiera Francisca Ramírez Cornejo