Question

What modernist theme does the excerpt highlight?
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf (excerpt)

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

A. The rejection of tradition
B. Meaning in the absence of God
C. Skepticism about absolute truths
D. The search for self
E. The question of reality

Answer 1

The answer is D: The search for self.

Although this is not an exclusively literary modernist theme, it sure was one of the main themes that Virginia Woolf, one of the most notable modernist writers, developed. Throughout this novel, and specifically in the excerpt cited, Mrs. Dalloway, as well as many other female and male characters, continually expose their train of thoughts (“stream of consciousness” as it usually is called in literary studies) as the struggle to identify their personal subjectivity, showing a constant struggle and an intermittent quest for one´s own self.  

Answer 2

Answer:

D. the search for self

Explanation:

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