Ostensibly, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is about Clarissa Dalloway’s quest to plan a party at her home and her attendance at that party that evening.  Ostensibly, you all have read Mrs. Dalloway.  But have you really read Mrs. Dalloway? The book includes modernist themes of alienation, the ending of beliefs in heaven and ambivalence about immortality, among other things.  So you should probably read it again and think about how Woolf describes Dalloway, who is at once very old and very young, and her description’s connection to the possibility of immortality.

Think about these three symbols:

• The Queen. Clarissa passes the Queen of England on the street, or thinks she did, but she can’t see too much of the hugely famous woman. Woolf presents the idea of the Queen as some whose memory is supposed to be immortal, but she may instead be forgotten. Nothing about the Queen as a person will be remembered; she will only be remembered as a figurehead and a symbol of England. This idea is presented in that the Queen’s subjects only saw a glimpse of her from her carriage, and they didn’t even know if who they saw was the Queen. Still, the narrator says, the “pale light of an immortal presence fell upon them as it had fallen on Clarissa Dalloway.” This statement states that the memory of the Queen will most definitely be immortalized, and her subjects know it. This sureness is soon contradicted, however, when her citizens loose interest in her when the airplane comes, “(and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it).” This juxtaposition implies that nobody is ensured immortalization in popular memory because there is always something or someone new to remember.
• Airplane in the sky.The next idea is presented through the symbol of the airplane which writes messages in the sky. Nobody on the ground can decipher the message—“But what letters? A C was it? An E, then an L?” —and each person on the ground reads something different. The symbol of the airplane in the sky represents the idea of eternity and the writing in the sky represents each individual’s different interpretation of why or why not eternity exists. The indecipherable messages call into question anyone’s ability to make sense of the signs (or Biblical writings, etc…) that they are supposed to use to determine the possiblity of eternity. It also leaves open the possibility that there are no signs to interpret--everything potentially otherworldly really is only an advertisement for toffee.
• Clarissa’s youth and age. Finally, the narrator repeatedly says that “she [Clarissa] felt very young; [and] at the same time unspeakably aged.” This statement presents the idea of immortality in each individual and, at the same time, the shortness of life. The aged still have youth in them, but the young have age in them. This paradox retains the ambivalence about immortality Woolf keeps throughout the novel. However, this idea also leaves room for a possible idea about reincarnation. By employing the paradox of youthfulness and agedness in one’s soul, Woolf could imply that even if individual is old, his soul is young, or vice versa.  

Virginia Woolf never comes right and says that she believes that God is dead and immortality is impossible, but she wasn’t that blunt.  Like her fellow modernists, she seems to imply that without these grand narratives so popular in Victorian culture, all people, including Clarissa, were unmoored in true reality.