“She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising! –in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her!”
An obvious theme throughout Mrs. Dalloway is that of death and time. The clocks ringing the hour throughout the book are reminders that time is passing, but when the Bradshaws bring news of a young man who had killed himself to Mrs. Dalloway’s party, the idea of death imposes itself on Mrs. Dalloway’s mind. She doesn’t pitty him for she sees it as his way to communicate. She didn’t consider it a bad thing for a young man to have freed himself from time by confronting death.
These themes, time and death, seem to play two roles in Mrs. Dalloway’s life. For one, they scare her. “…there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving in to one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.” The challenge of living life and facing down time and death every day is almost overwhelming to Mrs. Dalloway. Yet, on the other hand, it steadies her. She measures and keeps grasp of reality by measuring time, by watching her husband read the Times every day, by planning parties. The patterns in her life measure time.
This idea of time and death is made tangible to Clarissa in her habit of watching the old woman across the street as she goes to bed. It is something she does often, the old lady never noticing her. Yet near the end of the novel, Clarissa takes time away from her party to watch the old lady across the street. This time, she is looking back. This acknowledgement from the unknown woman across the street acts (at least for the reader) as a mirror with which to examine Clarissa’s own ideas of death and time.
While Clarissa could hear her party guests laughing and talking, she was more fascinated with the woman across the street. Clarissa lived for the parties she threw, yet at that moment, she was more fulfilled watching as the woman drew her blinds and turned off her light at the clock struck. The clock strikes right as the woman goes to sleep, creating an image of death and time that causes Clarissa to remind herself to “fear no more the heat of the sun.” In gaining familiarity with the woman across the street, she has gained familiarity with the idea of death. While she spends her time seeking life and truly living by planning parties and making connections with people, she comes to feel that death is not such a bad thing. It is freedom from the clock sounding the hour and from watching yourself grow old.
