Mrs. Dalloway is primarily not a comic novel, dealing as it does with suicide, loss, compromise, failure, aging, the inability of the medical system to treat mental illness, and the repercussions of World War I. Further, Woolf has no authoritative narrator in this novel, leaving it to the reader to interpret tone and meaning.
Nevertheless, Woolf uses dark comedy to poke fun at (satirize) patriarchal illusions. For instance, she makes fun of the pomposity and self-importance of Hugh Whitbread, who attends Clarissa's party:
Hugh [Whitbread], intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court).
Using words like "manly," "extremely handsome," and "perfectly upholstered," Woolf ridicules Hugh's strutting, inflated self-image and his superficiality: he derives his sense of worth from external qualities, such as his body and his clothes. She also punctures him by referring to his job at Court, of which he is very proud and which makes him feel important, as "little."
Woolf also comically skewers the inflated, patriarchal delusions of grandeur in Peter Walsh's thoughts about himself:
He was an adventurer, reckless, he thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties. . . . He was a buccaneer.
Peter Walsh is no buccaneer, regardless of how much he wants to harbor this fantasy (and, to his credit, he does realize this).
There is a dark humor in Peter spending half an hour following a girl in the streets. Peter rationalizes this by making up a fantasy about her, noting that "one makes up the better part of life."
Ultimately, it is these male fantasies, comic in themselves, that lead to tragedies like World War I. The inflated egos of patriarchal men, if silly and comic, take a heavy toll on society.
There is also a comic element in all the flurry and fuss over Mrs. Dalloway's party. She is an admirable person, but is a party what she should be using her energies and gifts to produce?
Monday, December 30, 2013
What are some comic elements in Mrs. Dalloway?
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