Kiran's 20th Century English Novel Blog

 The relationships in Mrs. Dalloway  are the focus of the novel with most of the novel we have read so far focussing on Mrs. Dalloway herself and her relationships. So far we have mostly seen the relationships between Mrs. Dalloway and Sally, Mrs. Dalloway and Peter, and a little between Mrs. Dalloway and Richard Dalloway through the eyes of Peter. Mrs. Dallowa and Sally's relationship seems to be one of mutual love or close friendship. Sally is a kind of free spirit that is feeding Mrs. Dalloway's own adventurous and rebellious spirit. This causes them to have probably one of the closest relationships we've seen in the book so far  Mrs. Dalloway and Peter's relationship has many things it could be from the views we've seen it from. It could either be one of mutual love, or Mrs. Dalloway just enjoyed Peter's company very much, and the love was one-sided. I think it could be either, but I am personally of the belief that they had a short mutual love, but Mrs. Dal...

  One of the most interesting things that Howie talks about in The Mezzanine is what he calls the "Clean background trick". This is a trick, in which one can place anything against a clean white background, and then it will seem to be beautiful. Howie describes this technique on page 38 of The Mezzanine , "Right when I suddenly had more blue sky in front of me than green truck, I remembered that when I was little I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth. or any kind of clean background . . . . This clean-background trick, which I had come upon when I was eight or so, applied not only to things I owned, such as a group of fossil brachiopods I set against a white shirt cardboard, but also to things in museums: curators arranged geodes, early American eyeglasses, and boot scrapers against black or gray velvet backgrounds because anyt...