Post Regret

The events in Mrs. Dalloway take place over the course of a single day. It's about as slice of life as anything can be. The day is not terribly important: Mrs. Dalloway seems more or less accustomed to hosting parties and the various meetings with those around her are only slightly more than mundane, nothing life re-defining (as of yet, anyway). In exploration of why Virginia Woolf wrote this novel and why it has the acclaim it has, perhaps we must look at why and how the book was written rather than what it was written about.

Settling on the fact that stream of conciousness reflects reality, why is Mrs. Dalloway depicted as realistically as possible? Many conclusions can be drawn from this: to warn of regret, to show how time changes people, to understand how a person goes about a day. All of these go hand in hand. A human mind can think of potentially thousands of different thoughts every day and they will often linger in the sections for memory. Having even broached the topic of regrets is going to occupy the conciousness of any person for a while, no matter how much he or she wants to stop thinking about it and forget about it (this is even happening to me as I write this). 

However, I ponder if Woolf's message is not to warn about regret but rather to assuage any fears of them. Mrs. Dalloway, with her fair share of regrets, lives her life more or less comfortably, an outcome she would not have had had she'd chosen a different path along the journey of her life. She's not terribly happy but she's not sad about her life either. The only path we know is the path we take. It is natural to have regrets that we dwell on far too much, but be sure to realize you don't regret the life you're living now.