In both the play "A Streetcar Named Desire" and the novel "Mrs. Dalloway", the protagonists are mainly isolated within society because of the consequences of their past. While Williams and Woolf use the past to evoke in their characters both nostalgia for a better time and regret for the tragic elements of the past, and both of these interpretations of the past isolate the characters in the present, Woolf juxtaposes the fates of Clarissa and Septimus ( one captured in the memories of a happy youth in Bourton, the other in the trauma of war) to criticize the divisions of post-war British society. For his part, Williams focuses on portraying Blanche as the bastion of upper-class Southern behavior defeated by the violent new world order represented by Stanley Kowalksi. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Events from the past intrude on the present lives of the main characters of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Mrs. Dalloway" in various ways, both metaphorical and literal, and in the case of "Streetcar" Williams uses the elements performance literals such as music and costume to convey this fact. The Varsouviana polka tune used by Williams is a connection to the past that the audience and Blanche can hear, but no other character can, which demonstrates how she has been transported to the past, away from the people around her, and how the past isolates her. This music is heard whenever Blanche feels remorse or panic over Allen's death, such as when Stanley asks about her husband in scene 1 or her confessions to Mitch in scene six. Williams invokes the motif more and more often towards the end, and the epilogue in scene eleven of his complete isolation from society is accompanied by the Varsouviana, "filtered in a strange distortion, accompanied by the screams and noises of the jungle". This association with jungle animals may portray his memories as a source of danger rather than comfort, or as distorted by current circumstances (although the memory already carries with it danger, as it culminates in a gunshot). The costume Blanche wears in scene ten, a "slightly dirty and wrinkled white satin evening dress" is another literal example of her delirious return to the past, as in this scene she seems to completely lose connection with reality, speaking to "a group of ghostly admirers". Her choice of an evening dress similar to her first appearance in the play expresses her reluctance to realize her impoverished circumstances or to fit in (since the color white, often associated with virginity, also conveys the pretense of purity that she maintains) . On the other hand, the description of the costume as "dirty and wrinkled" serves as a visual metaphor for how its facade has been dismantled or defiled at this point in the play. An evening gown would also have seemed quite old-fashioned for 1940s everyday wear, as the war had necessitated more practical designs requiring less fabric, and would have been particularly incongruous in a less affluent area such as New Orleans. Williams positions the characters of Stanley and Stella in opposition to Blanche in their relationship with time. Stanley seems to reject his past in some ways: Blanche calls him Polack throughout the play as a method of reminding him of his socially inferior position as an immigrant, and in scene eight he warns her not to call him that and declares himself to be "one hundred percent American hundred,” as if denying any connection to his family heritage. Stella seems to be toomore interested in the future than in the past; her marriage is described by Stanley as he pulls her down from those pillars evoking the glamor of grand antebellum mansions, as Williams implicitly juxtaposes that glamor with his colloquial use of "they" for "those" demonstrating his diverse background, and she doesn't seem to lack life style (the description of "tight" may sound violent, but Williams portrays violence as an integral part of their relationship which Stella is sometimes "thrilled" about). As a result, Stella and Stanley end the show together, if unhappy, and Blanche leaves alone. Blanche's contrast with Stella and Stanley conveys Williams' vision of America's future in the 1940s, when class was becoming increasingly irrelevant as the GI Bill allowed working-class veterans like Stanley education or financial freedom . Blanche's identifying elements - her Southern Belle persona, her fired teaching position, her marriage to a dead husband - are all rooted in the past and so her entire character must become obsolete as well. Williams presupposes Stanley, and the uncivilized "animal joy" of his life, as the symbolic future of America by virtue of his success in ousting Blanche in the end. The concept of time haunts the characters in "Mrs Dalloway" and the chimes of Big Ben (described as "first a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable" to underline the irrecoverable nature of time itself) serves as a temporal motif to structure the novel. Woolf uses the phrase "The lead circles dissolved in the air" to describe the chimes four times, and these heavy, tangible symbols often interrupt Clarissa's stream-of-consciousness narrative and serve to remind the reader of the passage of time within of the novel. . At one point, when Clarissa speaks to her old lover, Peter, Woolf personifies Big Ben by writing that he "struck between them," as if time itself was separating them with its irreversible transformations. This appears even more dramatic within the framework of events that happen over the course of a single day, as a microcosm of life in London for these characters: one of Woolf's frequent techniques was to focus on "moments of being" and elevate the everyday through writing about it, examining what she called "an ordinary mind on an ordinary day" in the essay "Modern Fiction". This use of time may be a modernist literary technique in deliberate contrast to Victorian linear narrative, which attempts to find emotion or meaning in a day of mundane events. On the other hand Woolf could have used this immediate and microcosmic approach to contrast the years of memory that the characters go through in their minds, and this conflict between internal and external time (external time is also represented by Big Ben) would thus emphasize the power of memory in the novel. In "Streetcar", Blanche's fear of the passage of time is expressed through her attempts to appear younger than she actually is, as demonstrated by her avoidance of harsh lights or "merciless glares" – the anthropomorphism of " ruthless" implies a cruel reaction to his age on the part of society. It is also conveyed through her interest in younger men. She remembers her husband, her first love, as a "boy", so the fact that she almost sabotages her new relationship with Mitch by kissing the Daily Star's "young, young, young" boy demonstrates how her compulsion to cling to the past isolates her from the reality of her present. Alternatively, his vanity and self-sabotage may be inherent to his personality: his talk about "weak people" having to "court the favor of tough ones" impliesthat she is somehow more vulnerable than Stella, and perhaps less capable of doing so. face the harsh realities of the world, such as the death of her husband. Isolation, or association with younger, more vulnerable men, may in such a case become more of a necessity to protect herself - and Williams describes this as necessary in this context through Stanley's danger and immoral activity such as gambling gambling or violence that goes unchecked. in New Orleans. The isolation of the characters in 'Mrs Dalloway' is represented both in the structure and in the descriptions of the characters themselves. The stream-of-consciousness form of "Mrs Dalloway" is characteristic of the isolated society it represents (as well as an example of Woolf's modernism, a style of writing that challenged previous conventions in the same way that "Mrs Dalloway" suggests that society post-war era was changing): the characters consider every aspect of their day in depth through their inner thoughts, but the actual dialogue between these characters covers only a fraction of this. Richard brings Clarissa flowers, for example, after considering internally how much he loved her, but "couldn't say it" externally (the phrase conveys his unchanging nature). Woolf could, however, criticize the British upper class for precisely this, and for how what Clarissa calls an "abyss" in marriages also applies to their separation from the rest of society; in structuring the novel primarily around Clarissa and Septimus, Woolf draws a comparison that Clarissa sees in the final chapter (saying that she "felt somehow very much like him, the young man who had killed himself") but not before, as the divisions social norms imposed by the upper class of the 1920s would have prevented them from speaking. However, there are moments in both "Streetcar" and "Mrs Dalloway" where unexpressed connections with strangers are more meaningful than moments with the most important people in the characters' lives. The shared moments of "Mrs Dalloway," in which narratives overlap, are equally emblematic of the changing world: everyone in the crowd notices the writing in the sky of a plane or a car backfiring, and this new technology unites them all. This serves as a connecting device in this novel - Clarissa and Septimus both hear the car and their narratives converge - and as a harbinger of the changing times, to which both Clarissa and Septimus react with fear (think that the car's backfire car is a "gun"). fired initially, and freezes in the street thinking that the world has "raised its whip where will it come down?" - his mindless image of the world's whip conveys both his instability and his paranoia about being punished). Woolf may have connected these characters through new technology to demonstrate this shared fear of modernism in post-war British society, or alternatively to portray how isolated they are from the people around them, whilst connecting more naturally in their thoughts to a stranger on site. street.In "Streetcar", the last line of Blanche's work is "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers." On the surface this may seem like a celebration of human connection and empathy, as even a stranger can be kind, but in the context of the last scene of the play it reminds the audience that she has no one left to rely on except strangers ( or in fact never has (the use of "always" implies that her isolation may have stemmed from her inherently self-destructive personality.) Blanche's past experiences almost help her connect with Mitch as she tells him about her dead husband in the scene six – in which he encapsulates their shared loneliness;'.