Mrs. Dalloway’s evening party is successful gradually. Most of her acquaintances attend the party. At the party she hears about Septimus’ death and takes a moment to contemplate his suicide. She ponders the initiative of her life and gets enlightened.

2. Literature Review

It is necessary and compulsory to learn about the prior studies about this thesis, since they are helpful to make this study more persuasive and creative.

Mrs. Dalloway, as the first major and experimental novel by Virginia Woolf, has been studied from various perspectives at home and abroad. From the papers and thesis I found, most of the themes are about stream of consciousness, hope and reality, war and women, and feminist ideologies. 

To investigate further on Woolf’s idea of feminism, Zhao Shengguo and Yu Ling (2012)’s paper The Development of Feminist Literary Theory proves to be of much help. It illustrates clearly of the feminist literary theory from vertical and horizontal perspective respectively. From the statements they present, the position of Mrs. Dalloway can be acknowledged.

Studies abroad are more inclined to elaborate the relationship between Clarissa Dalloway as a female human being and the whole society. Here are some examples. Alex Zwerdling (1971) put that Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s own way of social critic. Johanna X. K. Garvey (1991) discussed the role of Mrs. Dalloway through expressing herself and women’s voices in her work Difference and Continuity: The Voices of Mrs. Dalloway. Shannon Forbes (2005) pointed out that Clarissa tries to equate the performance of this role with her identity, but her attempts to use the role as a substitute for the fixed-essentially the Victorian-sense of self she covets result in emptiness, a lack of fulfillment, and ironically, virtually no self at all. Their papers are based on the study of inpidual and society, which are a bit complicated and obscure.

From the perspective of character focusing, same as studies abroad, most of the studies at home solely focus on the character Clarissa Dalloway alone and neglect other female characters. Some of the studies, such as papers done by Lu Man (2011) and Wang Huan (2010) took Clarissa Dalloway from Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay from To the Light House, two main protagonists in two novels, as the major subjects for comparison. The two protagonists are similar in that they are elderly, kind, graceful, virtuous and dutiful as typical reflections and representatives of feminism.