Mrs. Dalloway - A Modern Tragedy Mrs. Dalloway's narrative can be seen by some as a random freezing of various characters' experiences. Although it appears to be a fragmented assortment of images and thoughts, there is a psychological coherence to the deeply layered novel. Part of this consistency can be found in Mrs. Dalloway's psychological tone, which is tragic in nature. In her dispatch to Mrs. Dalloway, Maureen Howard informs us that Woolf was reading both Sophocles and Euripides for her essays in The Common Reader while writing Mrs. Dalloway (viii). According to Pamela Transue, "Woolf seems to have imagined Mrs. Dalloway as a kind of modern tragedy based on the classical Greek model" (92). Mrs. Dalloway can be conceived as a modern transformation of Aristotelian tragedy when examining the following: 1) structural unity; 2) catharsis; 3) recognition, reversal and catastrophe; 4) time management and general sense of desperation. Structural unity Woolf read the Poetics in Greek and was aware of the Aristotelian criteria for tragedy. A necessary element, according to Aristotle's definition, is structural unity. It consists of an interrelationship of events within the plot. Each event must causally follow the previous action to form a coherent whole. According to Aristotle, “a whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end” (233). The Poetics further states: “Still a living creature, and every whole composed of parts, to be beautiful, must not only present a certain order in the arrangement of the parts, but must also be of a certain size” (233). The ideal Aristotelian plot should be well constructed, without extraneous parts, and made up of a memorable length. Although on first reading, ... middle of the paper ... front and external shades. Although it seems contradictory, Woolf's use of fragmented images and thoughts crashing together almost randomly but connected beneath the surface by thin threads of coherence represents an attempt to synthesize the novel with life. Works Cited Aristotle. "Poetics". Aristotle's rhetoric and poetics. Ed. Ingram Bywater. New York: McGraw Hill, 1984. 223-66.Bazin, Nancy Topping. Virginia Woolf and the androgynous vision. New Burnswick: Rutgers UP, 1973.Curd, Patricia Kenig. "Aristotelian Visions of Moral Character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway." Notes on the English Language 33.1 (1995): 40-57.Howard, Maureen. After you. Mrs. Dalloway. By Virginal Woolf. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1981, vii-xiv.Transue, Pamela J. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style. Albany: State University of New York P, 1986.