Mrs. Dalloway's Party
This is a comic adaptation of the party scene in Virginia Woolf's starkly modernist Mrs Dalloway. To fit the story into 12 pages I had to radically cut down the plot, add tension, and introduce an omnipresent narrator.
Mrs Dalloway follows various characters on one fine day in London: among them Clarissa Dalloway, an upperclass, happily married woman with a radical past, and Septimus Warren Smith, a WW II veteran who, suffering from PTSD, would take his own life. In this final scene, Clarissa is throwing a party in which she is constantly trying to meet with dear friends and lovers from her past, Peter and Sally. She is interrupted, however, in the pivotal moment where her and Septimus's paths entertwine, when she is informed of Septimus's death (page 8). Here, Clarissa's stream-of-consciousness reaction in Woolf's meticulous prose can never really be translated to comic form. I have, however, attempted to record the impression pictorially, faithfully, without words (double spread 10-11).
Mrs Dalloway follows various characters on one fine day in London: among them Clarissa Dalloway, an upperclass, happily married woman with a radical past, and Septimus Warren Smith, a WW II veteran who, suffering from PTSD, would take his own life. In this final scene, Clarissa is throwing a party in which she is constantly trying to meet with dear friends and lovers from her past, Peter and Sally. She is interrupted, however, in the pivotal moment where her and Septimus's paths entertwine, when she is informed of Septimus's death (page 8). Here, Clarissa's stream-of-consciousness reaction in Woolf's meticulous prose can never really be translated to comic form. I have, however, attempted to record the impression pictorially, faithfully, without words (double spread 10-11).