Around the cricket clubs and racing tracks of London “wrap the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day on, unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies … the whirling young men, and laughing girls” (4). When Mrs Dalloway walks to buy flowers early in the morning, London comes into existence around her as she sees it with the dawn, the city does not wake up from slumber, but returns from the oblivion of an interactionless night. Throughout Mrs Dalloway, the physical and social world of London is described as mesh, mist, or water these figures place an emphatic importance on social interaction as the requisite foundation of existence. Pulling together different parts of herself at different times, Mrs Dalloway synthesizes as she performs herself, but not around an inner core of hidden ‘truth’ difficult though it is to exist in and through a network of social interaction, it is the only manner of existence available in Mrs Dalloway. The public Mrs Dalloway and the private Clarissa are, in the end, the same person. Mrs Dalloway struggles throughout the novel with the anxiety produced by the fact that she has no core of truthful identity, formed as she is by all of her past experiences and by her relationships with other characters. Mrs Dalloway deals with the network of societal and human experience, which creates the world of the novel and all its characters, including but not limited to the novel’s title character. Her public persona is performative, but not false her interactions with other people are intrinsic parts of her identity and self. Mrs Dalloway herself is not a dichotomous character who presents a public persona while hiding her ‘real’ self away in private.

In a narrative that takes place over the course of one day in the summer of 1923, Woolf depicts life as collaborative and collective individual personalities and interpersonal relationships are formed out of many composite parts. In Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, identity and existence are not unified or quantifiable.

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