On The Chaos In Mrs.Dalloway From The Perspective Of Illness Narrative

As one of the most essential masterpieces of the British modernist writer Virginia Woolf(1882-1941),Mrs.Dalloway,setting the backdrop against the First World War,describes the living conditions of people from different social background with the method of stream of consciousness,and divulges numbers of problems such as the cruelty of the war,social indifference and estrangement between people.Since its publication,the novel has attracted broad attention from critics.As a typical novel of stream of consciousness,most scholars have focused on the analysis of Virginia Woolf’s writing techniques,as well as the feminist reading of her female characters.In addition,critics have done a lot of useful researches on the themes of death,war,trauma and so on.Based on Arthur Frank’s illness narrative,this thesis tries to present the chaotic elements and their features in Mrs.Dalloway from this relatively new perspective.Accordingly,this thesis is divided into three major parts.The first chapter mainly analyzes the textual chaos in Mrs.Dalloway from the perspective of illness narrative.The textual chaos is mainly reflected from the nonlinear structure of the time layout in the novel,as well as a large number of repetitive words and sentence structures in the text.Through the overlapping of past and present timelines and the interweaving of the stream of consciousness between different characters,Woolf successfully highlights the characteristics of her novel’s writing style that are different from the traditional writers,thus displaying the textual confusion of Mrs.Dalloway and conveying the inner chaos of characters under the background of war.The second chapter interprets the disorder in Mrs.Dalloway from Septimus’ physical abnormality,which is mainly based on Arthur Frank’s lack of body control,lack of other-relatedness and lack of desire.The war has brought great trauma to Septimus’ body,resulting in his embodied disorder which is very different from other ordinary people.The third chapter analyzes the disorder based on the testimony of illness.Illness is a living testimony according to Frank,and illness carries the duty of the pedagogy of suffering.This chaos can be seen in the insinuation to abnormal society,the denouncement to the cruel war,as well as the reveal of the imbalanced spiritual world.This thesis concludes that Septimus finally fell into the gap between tradition and reality,gradually alienated in confusion and pain,and finally died as he is unable to get rid of the panic brought by the war,and to coordinate the struggle between the inside and outside world.In the society’s blind pursuit of British authority and adherence to the stubbornness of tradition,his fate is doomed,which is even more thought-provoking.The frustration of facing reality forced Septimus to pursue spiritual freedom,and the contemplation of death was left in the mix.The sober pursuit of free personality is regarded as the other,while the blind search for the meaning of life is taken as the mainstream.This confusion and chaos is an authentic description of the social situation and Woolf’s inner world as well in the context of the war.