Mrs. Dalloway: A Modern Hamlet

With its many direct and subtextual references to William Shakespeare’s work, Virgina Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, not only contributes to Shakespeare’s survival but also gives a different, enriching perspective upon his subjects, especially Hamlet’s dilemmas. I plan to bring together Shakespeare and Woolf through a parallel analysis of Hamlet and Mrs. Dalloway, focusing on how the novel manages not only to tell Hamlet’s story but also to live it. Thus, both works reveal the characters’ struggle to understand and identify themselves as individuals and also in relation to those with whom they bond; both capture the characters’ inner thoughts, transform “nothing” into something or even everything; both present ghosts that trigger not only action but also questions on every aspect of life; both introduce death to shed light upon life; both value language as a means of creating reality. In the pursuit of discussing these aspects they have in common, I plan to follow a number of antinomies, to blend close reading with elements of quantitative research and to present Mrs. Dalloway as a recreation of Hamlet with a modified contextual scenery and with partly different, partly similar resolutions.