Mrs. Dalloway and Animal Crossing





The first time I played Animal Crossing was probably in middle school. I booted up dolphin emulator and I would just play as a villager among a town of wacky animals.  The game took a step back into more relaxing gameplay, unlike others I played.  I could fish, dig up fossils, catch bugs, buy furniture, decorate my house, and organize parties with loan shark raccoons.  (Sound familiar huh? New Horizons wasn't a revolutionary game either).  

Now why did I just ramble about Animal Crossing?  It was a very conservative gameplay that tried to emulate a conservative lifestyle.  But it was Addictive.  It felt like careless life.  No homework, no school, just make money from fishing and bug-catching, pay off my debt to the loan shark raccoon, buy furniture and clothes, and decorate the house.  And while I do belief to some extent that Clarissa Dalloway was socially pressured into her Conservative lifestyle, it also had an addictiveness that caused her to stay within the confines of it for so long. 

 Her life is almost that of a careless one.  It is perceived that she is "socially pressured" but at the same time she has never had more freedom.  In my view, she is almost a parasite to Richard Dalloway, almost gaining every benefit his class and position has to offer, but at the same time giving nothing in return.  She could spend her days doing anything she wanted: buying flowers, shopping, and throwing parties for the aristocrats.  It's addictive like the emulatory lifestyle offered by animal crossing to me: no responsibilities, just freedom.  

Yet there were moments, where Peter came into her life again and disrupted this certain rhythm.  For me, it's like the reminder I have an essay due the next day while immersed in playing Animal Crossing.  It stresses both myself and the assignment, just like the story.

The ending of Mrs. Dalloway was very sneaky in this way.  Sure, Clarissa said Septimus had kept his soul but lost his life.  In turn, she had kept her life but lost her soul.  We never see her perspective again, which to my belief shows that she continued her ridiculously soulless, irresponsible, and addictive lifestyle.

Comments

  1. RyanOctober 1, 2020 at 5:29 PM

    I think your comparison of Mrs. Dalloway to Animal Crossing is really interesting (and something I was not expecting to read). I do get the sense that Clarissa is kind of stuck within the confines of her life as a politician's wife, however I don't think I really agree that she is "addicted" to this role. I think it is more likely that she has lived this way for so long that she doesn't know how to add anything to her life or begin to pursue other things. Additionally, I definitely don't agree that Clarissa is a "parasite". It seems to me that, though Clarissa gets some satisfaction from throwing parties, they are ultimately a symbol for how she has had to dedicate her time and energy to upholding Richard's image and her own status as a socialite. I wouldn't say that her life is without responsibility at all.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Capitalism, Innovation, and Olives

Image
In the summer of 1994, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon, an online bookstore from his garage in Seattle.  In the first month of 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched theFacebook, an attempt to put all of college life online, from his Harvard dorm room (fun fact: I lived in Boston at the time while my father worked in the lab right next to that dorm).  Many more like Bezos and Zuckerberg started out like this and continue to use their large companies to perpetuate this system of capitalism throughout the country.  So what does that have to do with The Mezzanine ?  The detailed observances, the slight faults in life, and the mystery is all carefully dissected by Baker in this tangential novel of his. It is however, these very observations that eventually lead to such innovation and legacy.   Yes, while I believe that the author is creating this satire of a capitalistic society by creating overly illustrious descriptions of relatively meaningless commercial things, he hims...
Read more

The Hours, a Chronologically disjointed story

 Personally, I was very confused after watching The Hours for myself.  This confusion can probably be attributed to the chronological distortion of different stories merging together.  In a sense, from the first story, starring Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, I can witness a deeper background to Mrs. Dalloway and how it relates to Woolf's personality and characteristics.  The idea of suicide is abundant throughout the movie, yet in the end Woolf is the only one to actually submit to this idea.   I think there can be some connections made between the 3 different women, but I also feel it is wrong to say that they are essentially personality clones of each other in different time frames.  Woolf in a way feels a lot more like Septimus in this sense, while the others who reflected and chose lightly felt a lot closer to the character of Mrs. Dalloway.  (In this case, Clarissa Vaughan who is played by Meryl Streep is actually called "Mrs. Dalloway" by ...
Read more

Covid and The Plague

My first impression of The Plague (before reading the book of course) was that it was going to discuss an incredibly different scenario than the modern-day quarantine.  The modern knowledge of medicine, the technology we have, and the biological makeup of each disease is so different, I thought I would get a completely different perspective.  For some reason, it conveys much more similar conditions than I thought. I think this parallel phenomenon can mainly be attributed to how the governing body had handled the plague over time.  Dr. Rieux and the medical board had warned the governing body and political leaders, just like the United States had in the early stages of Covid.  Yet, most chose to ignore it, and suppress it's spread through the media.  They downplayed the disease much like the US did, and when they declared it as a social threat, it was already too late.  The disease had spread extremely quickly, resulting in disastrous effects on the town, ju...
Read more