Mrs. Dalloway: the Anti Miss Bennet

Yesterday I finished reading one of Virgina Woolf's most acclaimed novels, Mrs. Dalloway. I'm still not sure if I really like it or if it's just "eh". The language is very beautiful, and the perspectives flow into one another really nicely, but it was very difficult to focus sometimes and to find a place to pause. I blame that on the whole stream-of-consciousness fad that was modernism. She, like Joyce and Faulkner, just loves her long-winded sentences way too much. And it was jarring to have so many characters be so abruptly introduced.

However, Mrs. Dalloway was certainly superior to the snorefest that was Pride and Prejudice, the only Jane Austen novel I have read. There were a lot of similarities between these two novels though they were written about a century apart: they both take place in England and center around the activities of high society. Mrs. Dalloway's backstory even resembled Pride and Prejudice somewhat, with two suitors vying for her heart. But Woolf's novel has such a dark outlook on it: all of the characters suffer from some sort of inner pain or regret that they seem to dwell on constantly but cannot change, whether it be a lost opportunity or thoughts of how things might have been of of selling out. Pride and Prejudice may feature a strong heroine and good writing, but everyone's happy at the end. Plus, it's all about a romance: hardly any grand existential musings can be found here!

Perhaps it's just my bias against romance novels. I've never really considered them to be particularly important or interesting. To be fair, I find the likes of Charles Dickens equally dull. I also much prefer the more "literary" work that's been published in the last century. Aside from Shakespeare and Homer (and other exceptions), I haven't liked very much of what literature has had to offer before the 1900s.

Woolf was certainly not anti-Austen: as a self-described feminist, how could she be? And Austen is certainly a valuable example of 19th century fiction, just as Woolf is of 20th century literature. All women's voices are important when examining history. But Woolf definitely broke more rules than Austen and really challenged our idea of what is literature: I mean, Mrs. Dalloway takes place in the space of a day, and most of it's spent in the nostalgic characters' heads! But would Austen have done the same if she lived in the same era? Perhaps Woolf is not the Anti-Austen, but Austen incarnate...

And this, my friends, is why we can't compare people who lived in completely different eras.