Clarissa Dalloway and the Tragedy of Appreciation

Abstract There is a tragedy at the heart of human relationships. Each of us merits a demanding form of appreciation, but this appreciation is, both individually and in aggregate, impossible to pay. The existence of this tragedy is, in a certain sense, obvious, but there is a powerful temptation to avoid any recognition of it. What we need is not so much an argument for the existence of the tragedy but something that might help us acknowledge it. Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway offers us exactly this. Through the novel, we come to experience the tragedy of appreciation as an inescapable practical conflict.