For my final paper, I am looking at intertextuality within Mrs. Dalloway, specifically the way in which Woolf interacts with Shakespeare. Because I see this connection most strongly in the character of Septimus Smith, I looked for work that specifically dealt with Smith and his role within the novel, his reading of Shakespeare, and some that looked more generally at Mrs. Dalloway and the way it deals with tragedy, both thematically and as a genre. I searched for work, as well, that looked at Woolf’s creation, Judith Shakespeare, to help me draw a connection between Judith and Septimus that I want to flesh out further in my final paper.

Hite, Molly. “Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway.” Narrative, vol. 18 no. 3, 2010, p. 249-275. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nar.2010.0003.

Hite, in this article, discusses the function of third person narration of obscuring ethical cues within a narrative. Rather than being able to take ethical cues from narration, texts like Mrs. Dalloway, with their presentation of an almost flat account of the actions and thoughts of its characters, create a troubled affective response for readers. Hite reads this as part of what she sees as the larger modernist project to reject social classification and codification that serve as shortcuts to moral judgement amongst readers.

Mauck, Courtney A. “The Tragedy of Septimus Smith: Woolf’s Recreation of Shakespeare.” CEA Critic, vol. 78 no. 3, 2016, p. 340-348. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cea.2016.0031.

Mauck reads Shakespeare as a point of connection between Mrs. Dalloway’s two central characters, Clarissa and Septimus Smith, and further sees Septimus as the character more entrenched in Shakespeare’s work, specifically because of his connection to the text Antony and Cleopatra. Mauck reads Septimus, through his connection with Antony in particular through this reckoning with war trauma, as the tragic figure within the novel and considers the instrumental quality her serves within Clarissa’s story.

Schwartz, Beth C. “Thinking Back Through Our Mothers: Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare.” ELH, vol. 58, no. 3, 1991, pp. 721–746. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2873462. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.

Pushing back a traditional “Anxiety of Influence” reading of the writer and their muse, Schwartz looks at Woolf’s assertion that female writers look back through their mothers to mine inspiration for their work. She talks about Woolf’s construction and canonization of female characters, like Judith Shakespeare, in this search for an inspiration, and finds Shakespeare himself to function as maternal, or at least androgynous, figure in Woolf’s writing.

Webb, Caroline. “Life After Death: The Allegorical Progress of Mrs. Dalloway.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 40 no. 2, 1994, p. 279-298. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0199.

In this article, Webb reads the progression of Clarissa Dalloway, over the course of the novel, moving from dwelling in the past to a commitment to the present, as running parallel to the experience of the novel’s reader trying to discern a particular allegorical underpinning to the text before moving to read Mrs. Dalloway on its own terms. Like Hite, Webb reads Mrs. Dalloway as actively discouraging generalization and categorization, instead encouraging readers to live in the details of the text, to look at the particulars as they try to draw their conclusions about what the novel “means” to say.

White, Siân. “The Dramatic Modern Novel: Mimesis and The Poetics of Tragedy in Mrs. Dalloway.” Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 24, 2018, pp. 101–134. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26475576. Accessed 22 Apr. 2021.

White looks at the ways in which Woolf draws on the structure of classical tragedy in her construction of Mrs. Dalloway. The novel takes place within a single day and more or less moves smoothly from one location to the next. White reads this engagement with Aristotle’s original prescriptive definition of tragedy as Woolf returning to this old text with the goal of imagining how it might be adapted for a more modern novel and the kind of storytelling she was trying to achieve.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3^rd ed. Edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 857-859.

Virginia Woolf, in this section of A Room of One’s Own, imagines Judith Shakespeare into existence, a sister for William. Judith is equally as gifted her as brother, but Woolf illustrates her vastly different trajectory in life because she is a woman. She is denied the comprehensive education afforded to her brother, expected to marry young. Woolf imagines that the confines, the lack of opportunity afforded to Judith, would ultimately result in her taking her own life. For my purposes, I’m interested in exploring the link between Judith Shakespeare and Septimus Smith, two characters who find themselves ultimately unable to navigate a world that is trying to impose rigid structure upon them.