Stark as it may be, this contrast in background is by no means Woolf’s invitation to the reader to value one character over the other such is to say, she is not setting the quotidian troubles of London high-society against the grander psychological and physical impacts of WWI in an attempt to deride the former, but rather she is opposing them in a delicate effort to communicate the equality of the human experience. Given this binary, it would be easy to cast Clarissa Dalloway as the “sane” and Septimus Warren Smith as the “insane ” and indeed, such a perception is easily supported by context: Clarissa is a member of London high-society who, though plagued by regrets, has lead a relatively easy life, whereas Septimus is a WWI veteran suffering from shell-shock and its accompanying hallucinations and suicidal ideations. Dalloway has branched into a book and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side…” (Woolf, A Writer’s Diary). Several years before publishing the novel, Woolf wrote in her journal, “ Mrs. Dalloway with constant and abrupt shifts in narrative perspective whereby passing moments are elongated for pages in which a seemingly inconsequential external stimulus triggers a thought or memory in a character that then triggers another thought and so on and so forth, until she has delivered her reader a thorough exposition of that character’s mind. Dalloway, in which Woolf allots each character his or her own psychological nuances and personal histories that necessarily affect and influence his or her own perceptions of external stimuli, ultimately proffering the reader with no real reality and in so doing lionizing the anti-realism that underscores the novel at hand. Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun (749).” This emphasis on subjectivity-and its consequential inattention to objective reality-no doubt comes to fruition in Mrs. Watson in Sherlock Homes is real to him: to me, Dr. For instance, in this article he says that Dr. In her opinion, there is no one true reality, but rather infinite ones that are defined by the subjective interpretations of the individual: “A character may be real to Mr. Brown,” opposes Arnold Bennett’s belief, “that is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving,” by asking her reader to consider, “what is reality?” (Woolf, 749).

This modernist form of narration, which pays much more attention to the inner-workings of character than to the construction of a typical plot, takes into account the inherent subjectivity of audience. Dalloway takes a more subtle and psychological mode to ensnare its reader, one of course meant to depart from the strict Victorian and Edwardian novels that preceded it. In lieu of an action-packed or scandalous plot line, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.

Dalloway novel