Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway.

Literatures on British Isles – final essay

winter semester 2012/2013

Colin Clark, M.A.

David Semler

1. 2. 2013

Disruption and Unity

In her novel Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf constantly disrupts the chronology of her narrative. What is more, her narrative lacks unity, as Robert Humphrey says in his study Stream of consciousness in the modern novel. According to him in Woolf’s novel “motive and external action” which form conventional plot are replaced by “psychic being and functioning”^[1] . In order to understand why the chronology is disrupted it is necessary to analyse Woolf’s method of writing, by some called “the stream of consciousness”, and find out how Woolf’s fiction is unified. The unifying devices in Mrs Dalloway are place, time and characters, however the extensive use of motifs, symbols and metaphors also help to create unity in Woolf’s fiction.

Nicolas Marsh in his analysing text Virginia Woolf: The Novel suggests that Woolf’s desire to attempt to describe the inside of her characters’ mind was influenced by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud: “The traditional structure for human activity, of motive-decesion-action-result was wiped out by Freud’s theory of the unconscious.”^[2]  This theory explains why Virginia Woolf had no intention to satisfy her readers with classical method of storytelling.

There have been many disputes between critics over how to classify Virginia Woolf’s method of treating the inner lives of her characters.  James Naremore in his study The World Without a Self analyses these disputes and mentions three main approaches. First one implies that “stream of consciousness should designate a literary genre which subsumes interior monologue”^[3], other states that “stream of consciousness is a rare technique, different from interior monologue”^[4] and both of these approaches are supported by critics who agree that Woolf either used a stream of consciousness or interior monologue. However, there is also a third approach implying she used none of them.^[5] For the use of this essay it would therefore be the best to stick with the term “Woolf’s method”.

This method builds on the traditional tendency to mention the thoughts of the characters, but goes even further and shows the whole mind processes including the subconscious. Humphrey defines it as a type of soliloquy in which the omniscient narrator presents the thoughts as coming from the mind of the character, but the narrator completes them with his own explanatory commentary which might help the reader understand. This is the main difference from the direct interior monologue as used for example in Joyce’s Ulysses, where the thoughts of the characters are recorded directly. The mind processes of Woolf’s method according to Humphrey are told from the third person perspective, indirectly.^[6] 

Professor Martin Hilský in his book of essays Modernisté stresses another aspect of Woolf’s method and that consists of two types of usage of time and space. The first one is when the narrator is showing that the mind of the characters travels through time and reveals their past, the other, which is less frequent but equally important, is when the time is stopped and the narrator describes different points of view on one situation.^[7]

The first type of usage of time is crucial for Mrs Dalloway because it describes one day of a woman, who is living her present life and at the same time in her head reconsidering and living over the life she has lived until now. The contrast between the world of reality and the world of mind is visible right from the first three paragraphs, when the narrator introduces Mrs Dalloway in the early morning thinking about her plans for the day: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”^[8] At the same time she feels her present moment: “what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach,”^[9] which on the basis of association gradually draws her to the realm of her memories:

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning, like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for the girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen…^[10]

 These are the main levels of time as used in the novel: present through senses, future through thoughts and the past through association.

The second type of usage of time is to stop it in order to rejoice the moment and grasp it from as many angles as possible. The most typical example for this technique is also right from the beginning when Mrs Dalloway goes to London above which an aeroplane writes mysterious letters of smoke in the sky. The narrator now stops the time and glides through the mind of the spectators and through their eyes paints the atmosphere of London morning in almost a cinematographic sequence. The different “shots of the camera” change according to the personality and present mood of the characters. Mrs Bletchley exclaims “That’s an E”^[11] which follows her more naïve unpronounced vision “or a dancer.”^[12] For her husband the scene is not a chance to express his excitement but to put his wife down by a dry remark “It’s toffee,”^[13] Totally different emotions are raised in mind of Lucrezia, whose husband told her he would kill himself. For her the plane is a symbol of something that could stop her husband from doing the terrible deed. ““Look, look, Septimus!” she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told her to make her husband […] take an interest in things outside himself.”^[14] The narrator in all these instances describes an event undoubtedly seen by Mrs. Dalloway but not even one mentions her perspective. This technique of stopping, or rewinding, time is very successful for stressing a moment which might be regarded, if told linearly, as unimportant by the reader and even by Mrs Dalloway herself.

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