MRS DALLOWAY BY VIRGINIA WOOLF - CLARISSA AND SEPTIMUS

THE STORY

Mrs. Dalloway covers one day from morning to night in one woman's life. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class housewife, walks through her London neighborhood to prepare for the party she will host that evening. When she returns from flower shopping, an old suitor and friend, Peter Walsh, drops by her house unexpectedly. The two have always judged each other harshly, and their meeting in the present intertwines with their thoughts of the past. Years earlier, Clarissa refused Peter's marriage proposal, and Peter has never quite gotten over it. Peter asks Clarissa if she is happy with her husband, Richard, but before she can answer, her daughter, Elizabeth, enters the room. Peter leaves and goes to Regent's Park. He thinks about Clarissa's refusal, which still obsesses him.

THE THEME OF THE DOUBLE: CALVINO AND STEVENSON

To find links and connections between different literatures can be interesting as well as useful while preparing the interdisciplinary Esame di Stato.

The double is one of those themes which have aroused the interest of all literatures in all ages : Hoffmann, Dostoevskij, Gogol, Gautier, Maupassant, Poe, Calvino, Conrad and Kafka, to name only a few, have all, like Stevenson, probed the notion of duality.

The double, or doppelganger, is a second self, or alter ego, which appears as a distinct and separate being perceived by the physical senses, but existing in a dependent relation to the original. "Dependent" does not mean "subordinate"; in fact often the double comes to dominate, control and usurp the functions of the subject. It became also a device of psychological penetration for many writers.

Calvino's humorous short story "Il visconte dimezzato" deals with the same

FRANKENSTEIN VS JEKYLL

"Jekyll and Hyde" (1886) and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus" (1818) share numerous features, as a matter of fact.

1. THE FIGURE OF THE OVERREACHER - The two protagonists are scientists who, led by their great ambition, fulfill their achievement but, thus doing, they overcome the limits and borders imposed to them by ethics, nature or God. Their punishment is death by exhaustion in one case, by self-destruction in the other. Both are OVERREACHERS, rebels who go beyond the limits imposed to Mankind by God or Nature, who have their prototype in Prometheus, the mythical Titan who defied Zeus stealing the fire from the Olympus.