How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
She stands tall, haggard, marvelous in her housecoat, the coffee steaming in her hand. He is still, at times, astonished by her. She may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her books may be read for centuries. He believes this more ardently than does anyone else. And she is his wife. She is Virginia Stephen, pale and tall, startling as a Rembrandt or a Velázquez, appearing twenty years ago at her brother's rooms in Cambridge in a white dress, and she is Virginia Woolf, standing before him right now. (2.26)
As Michael Cunningham depicts them, Leonard and Virginia Woolf have the kind of relationship that Laura Brown can only dream about. Whereas Leonard respects, admires, and loves his wife because of her talent and intelligence, Laura feels that being a good wife to her husband, Dan, means putting her own desires and ambitions to the side so that she can do trivial, dutiful things. It's not entirely clear how much Dan himself expects her to do this, but it's clearly the role suburban American society has defined for women in Laura's position.
Quote #5
She wonders, while she pushes a cart through the supermarket or has her hair done, if the other women aren't all thinking, to some degree or other, the same thing: Here is the brilliant spirit, the woman of sorrows, the woman of transcendent joys, who would rather be elsewhere, who has consented to perform simple and essentially foolish tasks, to examine tomatoes, to sit under a hair dryer, because it is her art and her duty. (3.15)
For Laura Brown, performing her role as wife and mother feels oppressive and dull. Laura dreams of being brilliant, like Virginia Woolf, and she resents the fact that trivial, mundane tasks like shopping for groceries and getting her hair done are the only things that society asks and expects of her.
Quote #6
It seems good enough; parts seem very good indeed. She has lavish hopes, of course—she wants this to be her best book, the one that finally matches her expectations. But can a single day in the life of an ordinary woman be made into enough for a novel? (5.2)
For contemporary readers like us, this question is a no-brainer. Of course a single day in the life of an ordinary woman can fill an entire novel. James Joyce charted a single day in the life of an ordinary man in his hefty novel Ulysses, so why wouldn't an ordinary woman be just as interesting as Leopold Bloom? That said, it might not seem like such a no-brainer to us if Virginia Woolf had never written Mrs. Dalloway. Luckily for us, the novel blazed a serious trail.