In the light of Virginia Woolf’s interest in the visual arts, in the period that she generically defines ‘Elizabethan’ and in the Mannerist and Baroque meditations on death, this essay reads the novel Mrs Dalloway from the pictorial perspective of the vanitas or memento mori genre. Considering that the two main characters of the novel, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, share a classical animism that links them to Demeter, the universal Great Mother, and to Pan-Christ respectively, the novel is here interpreted as a pagan memento mori that tends to the Arcadian world, to vegetation, to Pan, to Demeter, to ultramundane life, to the sempiternal cycle of birth-death-rebirth – or to the theme that underlies the novel, life intertwined with death.
