The Art of Being Attentive and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is one of the penultimate works of modernist literature. Given its status, many scholars have analyzed the work, typically through the lens of class, gender, sexuality, or some combination of those categories. Something that often goes overlooked when viewing Mrs. Dalloway through those various lenses is the multitude of meaningful interactions with flowers that the novel’s namesake, Clarissa Dalloway, has throughout the novel. In this essay, utilizing the multi-species theory work “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness” (Dooren, et al.), I will look at the interactions that Mrs. Dalloway has with flowers throughout the novel and discuss what interacting with flowers at specific moments does for Mrs. Dalloway.