Mrs. Dalloway: Body and Room as Box of Flowers and Health Maja Groff

Somewhere within the narrative of Mrs. Dalloway, there seems to lie what could be understood as a restatement - or, perhaps, a working out of - the essentially simple, key theme or motif found in Woolf's famous feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Mrs. Dalloway does in fact possess "a room of her own - " and enjoys an income (or the use of an income) that is at least "five hundred a year - " (Room: 164). But most importantly, Clarissa Dalloway also deals with ways of working out female economic necessity, personal space, and the manifestation of an "artistic" self-conception. That this perceived "room" of her famous essay can also serve as a psychological model becomes clearer in Mrs. Dalloway, and the novel reveals another face to this classical essay's main motif. A personal room is, more profoundly, a certain conception of the "soul" or psyche's journey through life, as Sally states in the novel's climax: "Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life - one scratched on the wall" (293). Mrs. Dalloway is a more nuanced mediation of the imagination...