Author(s)

Yangfen Huang ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Foreign Languages, Guangzhou College of Applied Science and Technology, Zhaoqing, Guangdong, 526072, China

Corresponding Author

Yangfen Huang

ABSTRACT

First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf charts a single day in the life of two main characters whose paths never cross, namely Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of an upper-middle-class politician, and Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked First World War veteran. Within the twenty-four hours in the text, Mrs. Dalloway encompasses years of fragmentary memory and interior turmoil. As a trailblazing modernist novel, its organic and acrobatic narrative mechanism of time and space has influenced many other equally prominent contemporary novelists, such as Gabriel García Márquez. Based on the thoughts of deconstruction, this paper will seek to crystallize the aesthetic traces of cubism and subsequently the iterability of spatiotemporal symbols in Mrs. Dalloway, which are both conducive to the dissemination of binary themes in the novel, be they past and present, sanity and insanity, being and nothingness, life and death, echoing the universal and philosophical struggles that go beyond time and space.

KEYWORDS

Mrs. Dalloway; Deconstruction; Spatiotemporal Symbols; Binary Themes

CITE THIS PAPER

Yangfen Huang, Deconstructive Time and Space in Mrs. Dalloway. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2025) Vol. 8: 75-80. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2025.080412.

REFERENCES

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