![]() ![]() The separate story Happiness establishes Stuart Elton as vain, rude, and emotionally costive. Mr Carslake saw him standing alone lifting a paper knife up in his hands and looking at it in a very strange way … For underneath, though people seeing him casually would never believe it, Stuart was the gentlest, simplest of creatures, content to ramble all day with quite undistinguished people, like himself … Yet George Carslake sees him quite differently: Similarly, he spots Stuart Elton, the protagonist of Happiness, another character who is self-absorbed, disatends to the people around him, and is alienated by his own egoism. We know from that story that Mabel Waring feels her new yellow dress is a fashion choice disaster which has resulted in her social humiliation, yet Carslake thinks of it as ‘pretty’, which confirms that her agitation is a self-induced sense of insecurity. She looked agitated, with a strained expression and fixed unhappy eyes for all she tried to look animated. Just as he was thinking this, he saw Mabel Waring going away, in her pretty yellow dress. Prickett Ellis, the middle-aged solicitor from The Man who Loved his Kind, appears as ‘that angry looking chap with the toothbrush moustache’, and as he glances round the room, George Carslake sees Mabel Waring, the central figure from The New Dress: One of the most interesting secondary aspects of the story is that it features cameo appearances of characters from the other short sketches in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence. ![]() He is searching for over-simplified explanations of social phenomena which he finds threatening. ![]() He doesn’t engage with any of the other guests at all – except in his imagination.Īnd even though he comes close to serious topics for reflection, such as the nature of religious belief, his musings are on the whole completely banal, escapist, and trivial. Certainly, like all the other guests who feature in these Mrs Dalloway’s Party sketches, he is locked into his own thoughts in an entirely solipsistic manner. The narrative is presented almost entirely from George Carslake’s point of view, with no authorial comment to cast any interpretive light on how his character might be viewed. Tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web linksĪ Simple Melody was probably written around 1925 and is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). ![]()
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