When we were discussing the parallelism between Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus, one of the conclusions we made was that they were both “strangers” in their society. But while Septimus’ strangeness was obvious, Mrs. Dalloway’s strangeness was hidden. While on the outside she fits right into society, throwing parties, chatting with people, on the inside she has thoughts and opinions that vary from society’s expectations. Almost all of the stories we read today exhibited some disconnection between the surface and internal workings of a character.

In Illusion, Miss Bruce is the epitome of what a British woman is supposed to be. She is “utterly untouched, utterly unaffected, by anything hectic, slightly exotic or unwholesome”. The narrator even states that he/she “only knew the outside of Miss Bruce – the cool sensible, tidy English outside”. Later we find out about her dress collection and her inner passion to be beautiful. Even though she would never wear any of her dresses in public, she buys them with so much emotion and longing that is tucked away beneath a solid layer of tradition and expectations that the narrator did not notice them at all even though they had been “dining and lunching together…for two years”.

In Mixing Cocktails, the narrator desires some private time “between [her] thoughts and [her]self”, but she keeps getting interrupted. She longs to be like her aunt, who does odd things, but she is “a well-behaved little girl”. She wants to be a stranger, but she is too afraid of leaving “her shell”.

In Hunger, the narrator is struggling through hunger. She mentions having been “a mannequin” in the past, but having given that up. A mannequin could refer to the idea of living your life within expectations and basically being a carbon copy of a woman, simply a mannequin. A figure that is not human, does not have human thoughts or opinions. Having given that life up, this woman is now struggling to make money and life her life as an individual. In this case it appears this woman listened to her internal desires and shed her outer layer, but it ended up hurting her.

We see two stories of women who keep their inner desires strictly under lock and key and with the third story we understand why.