Mrs. Dalloway Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 60 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Mrs. Dalloway.

Mrs. Dalloway Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 60 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Mrs. Dalloway.
This section contains 1,933 words
(approx. 5 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Mrs. Dalloway Study Guide

Dell'Amico teaches English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. In this essay, she examines the question of plot in Virginia Woolf's novel.

Mrs. Dalloway is a work of literature that can be classified as narrative fiction. That is, it tells a story, or a narrative, that is fictional, or made-up. Novels and short stories are narrative fictions usually structured by a plot. But Mrs. Dalloway is a novel without a plot. This essay examines what this means and why the author might have chosen to eschew this typical narrative convention.

In Aspects of the Novel, Woolf's contemporary, E. M. Forster, explains the difference between story and plot in the following way:

A plot [like a story] is also a narrative of events, the
emphasis falling on causality. "The king dies and
then the queen died," is a story. "The king died, and
then the queen...


(read more)

This section contains 1,933 words
(approx. 5 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Mrs. Dalloway Study Guide
Copyrights
Gale
Mrs. Dalloway from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.