Dalloway and Da-sein: Authenticity of Being Towards Self, Death and Others

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is a confrontation of Da-sein in the form of a novel before Heidegger even wrote Being and Time; it is a modern examination of existence in a temporal metaphysic. In 1925, Woolf published this novel about Clarissa Dalloway, the female socialite with a vivid consciousness, and her individual ontological inquiry on a singular day in June in post-WWI London. Woolfe wasn’t the only scholar to address the crisis of being in this mid-war period. Two years later, in a parallel world, philosopher Martin…