For my essay I decided to analyze clarissas theory(pg. 8 & 9) by bringing out how she sees everything as connected. The fat lady in the cab, Bond Street, death ending absolutely. Clarissa ties everything together. "Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton—such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park." The houses are lit up together, the hosts of people dancing together, the wagons plodding past to market. She can't seem to grasp how she can die, or cease to be, yet still be tied to everything.
At one point, near the end of the second paragraph of her theory, she says, "...on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was..." Yet, in the first paragraph, she says, "She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone..." If she is so connected with everything why is she still so alone? This theory seems to contradict itself. The first paragraph states how she is alone and will never say something is this or that. But in the second paragraph she says that she, Peter, and everyone/everything else is connected.
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Yes, this contradiction seems to be at the heart of the modernist dilemma (I know we talked about this already). I'm glad that you're lining the "theory" to the earlier passage in which "she cut like a knife through everything). These two passages should work well together. Don't get too hung up on resolving the contradiction (it may have no resolution). Your argument ultimately can be that this contradiction is what ultimately drives characters like Septimus (and writers like Woolf?) mad.
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