Explore the characters of Virgina Woolf's modernist masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway through the lens of WWI (1914-1918) and its aftershocks. This display will open next week in the Hatcher Gallery Exhibit Room and will be available from September 3 to December 13.
Curators Juli McLoone and Sigrid Anderson have brought together a selection of materials inviting visitors to look at those who fought in the trenches and those who watched from afar as they appear in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, a novel recognized for its use of stream of consciousness to depict characters’ interior lives.
Anchoring the novel are the perspectives of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged political wife and society hostess, and Septimus Smith, a returning soldier suffering from shelf shock. While all of the action takes place on a single day in 1925, as preparations are made for Dalloway’s evening party, Woolf’s writing takes us in the characters’ minds all the way from English drawing rooms to colonial India to the trenches of World War I.
Content Note: This exhibit includes references to suicide and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which might be distressing for some visitors.
Mrs. Dalloway and WWI: Home Front and War Front will be on display in the Hatcher Gallery Exhibit Room (1st floor, Hatcher Graduate Library) until 13 December 2024