Clarissa's Party in the House of the Sleeping Beauties A Study of Memory and Time in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Kawabata's The House of the Sleeping Beauties

Abstract

On the verge of death and in the Autumn of their lives, Clarissa Dalloway, in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Eguchi Yoshio, in Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping ­Beauties, find themselves facing the existential realization that life has been stripped out of them. The past is all that is left for them, but the present is all they have. They are haunted by the ticking of the cosmic clock, so they resort to their memories to shun death. The apparition of death, nevertheless, reveals itself for both protagonists at the zenith of their celebration of life, and this existential realization is carried out within a Modernist framework in which the narrative style gives meaning to the content of both works.