An Early Comparison of Mrs. Dalloway and The Sun Also Rises

            Although we are only five chapters into Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises I think there are already striking differences between this novel and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The most immediately obvious is the style. Woolf's voice is very properly British: her sentences are long, at times rambling, and full of descriptive words. Additionally she relies more on internal thoughts and memories to drive the narrative of her novel than actual dialogue. Hemingway’s style is extremely different. He writes in an American tone: short sentences with simple words, and uses tons of dialogue. Hemingway’s straight forward style is demonstrated in the sentences “Then there was another thing. He had been reading W. H. Hudson” where he gets right to the point he wants to make (Hemingway, 17). Both writers use elements of irony and satire through their narrators, but the delivery is not the same: Woolf is subtle, so that you might miss it but Jake Barnes, Hemingway’s narrator, directly makes fun of his world and friends.

            I would also like to compare characters in Mrs. Dalloway and The Sun Also Rises, specifically Septimus and Jake. Both men fought in, and were harmed in WWI: Septimus suffered from severe shellshock while Jake has some yet to be disclosed physical injury. However, Jake chooses to laugh his injury off while Septimus is overwhelmed by his mental state and is driven to commit suicide. While undoubtedly Septimus and Jake’s “injuries” are on totally different levels, which could make it problematic to compare them, I would like to compare the way the respective authors go about describing them. In class we talked about how Hemingway was a very “manly man” and I think that he depicts Barnes as also being very manly: he fought in the war, as men should, and yes he got injured but (at least as far as I’ve read) decides to “try to play [his injury] along”, as men should, and goes about his life (Hemingway, 39). The one time that Jake does break down and cry is in the privacy of his hotel room, like he needs to hide these “weak” feelings. On the other hand, Septimus’s mental turmoil (understandably!) begins to overwhelm him. He is surrounded by all of these model examples of men telling him to go play golf or to the music hall as if he should just shake off this serious condition. When Woolf describes these men advising Septimus, she is open in her dislike of them, so I would argue that unlike Hemingway she doesn’t believe in stereotypical measures of “masculinity”.

            The last thing I would like to discuss is the different settings and atmospheres in these two novels. Both books are set right after WWI and this fact seems to influence the stories a lot. In Mrs. Dalloway, London after the war seems to be hyper-patriotic: as seen in the motor car montage people are beyond excited at the possibility of being in the presence of some important British figure. Additionally, throughout the novel both Clarissa and Peter talk about how much they love London. For example, when Clarissa is walking around in the morning she thinks that what she loved was “life; London; this moment of June” (Woolf, 5). In comparison to this, we see Jake and his friends criticize Paris: at dinner when Jake asks Georgette “Don’t you like Paris?” she simply replies “No” and later describes the city as “expensive and dirty” (Hemingway, 22-23, 26). Perhaps because Jake is not originally from Paris he lacks the love for it that Peter and Clarissa hold for London. It will be interesting to see how this sort of disdain for Paris that the characters hold will play out later in the novel.