Mrs. Dalloway

It is exceptionally difficult for me to pick out something to talk about in a story that literally begs to be analyzed in every sentence! I could spend an hour analyzing the first line “MRS. DALLOWAY said she would buy the flowers herself”. Never before did I first line grab me so much.

“Like a faint scent, or a violin next door (so strange is the power of sounds as certain moments), she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world some closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores!”

The way this whole book is written makes me feel intimately exposed. I can feel so well that feline of a smell or a sound bringing on a feeling that changes you for that moment, sills you with memories or even something more immediate like just an overwhelming emotion. The way that the character experiences her bisexuality is so interesting. It is an unanalyzed feeling that she isn’t exactly in denial about but that doesn’t take any place in the forefront of her mind, only in those moments when she can’t escape a smell or a sound. How she talks about rushing, swollen, rapture, splitting skin and gushing alleviation over cracks and sours. What an incredible description. To take a moment, a momentary lust and feel it so intensely over the coarse of a moment, that is what it is to be human. It is something seldom written about but so very true.

It continues to say, “She had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew. The hard softened. It was over—the moment.

Mrs. Dalloway is such a sensual and artistic soul. The way she feels something so overwhelming and then the hard softens and the moment is over. Too feel that way gives you this beautiful perspective on life, but with it comes the acute pain of fully feeling sadness, regret despair. I feel like everything is 100 times more intense for her and other people like her.