Mrs Dalloway

Analysis of Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, is a romantic drama with deep psychological approaching in to the world of urban English society in the summer of 1923, five years after the end of World War I.

The book begins in the morning with the arrangements for a party Clarissa Dalloway will give and it ends late in the evening when the guests are all leaving. There are many flashbacks to tell us the past of each character, but it does not leave the range of those few hours. It presents several stream-of-consciousness devices: indirect interior monologue, time and space montage, flashbacks and psychological free association based mainly on memory, with the support of imagination and the senses (mainly sight).

We can compare the book to a tapestry where there are two strings being weaved together, separated from the narrative:

- Clarissa's party and all day long of arrangements;

- The craziness and finally Septimus' suicide.

To abolish the distinction between dream and reality; the writer effects this by mixing images with gestures, thoughts with impressions, visions with pure sensations. The language is short and dense, she writes in a flow of consciousness, floating from the mind of one character to the next.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf used the non-linear time. One can compare this with surfing on the Internet where we can jump from place to place in a non-linear pattern. Despite its apparent discontinuity, Mrs. Dalloway has a pattern provided by several factors: unity of character, unity of time (everything takes place in one day and is centered on Clarissa's party) and the leitmotif: the sound image of Big Ben followed by the sentence "the leaden circles dissolved in the air" and also a sentence from Cymbeline by Shakespeare, recurs into Clarissa's mind and into Septimus'. The repetition of the statement emphasizes its significance to the thematic progression of the novel.

The lines from Cymbeline besides constituting a leitmotif also serve as a powerful indication of Clarissa and Septimus relationship as doubles. Septimus' sensibility is the same as Clarissa's, but he does not control it as she does. She retains her awareness of reality while she responds to it. Septimus, by contrast, is not always able to distinguish between his personal response and the external reality in his madness, he feels that if the birds sing they must be speaking to him; if the aero plane writes in the sky it must be signaling to him. Even though the two never meet, these two correspond in that they attempt to maintain possession of themselves, of their souls.

Almost all the "action" occurs in the thoughts of characters, and, the reader must piece together the story from random pieces of information that Woolf provides. The point of view changes from one character to the other so naturally that the reader only realizes it much later. Woolf's characters reveal their depths gradually and slowly; fragments of thought and memory emerge as they respond to and interact with their environment and other characters', and from these fragments we piece together each character's past. While most conventional 3rd person narratives stick close to one character, this narrative gets close to many.

The characters in this type of narrative, especially Mrs. Dalloway are round, this is, are complex, they have been through a process of transformation throughout the novel being able to in a convincing way surprise us, as they are built based on various ideas and qualities leaving apart the idea of the character mind.

Every human is a mixture of his/her concepts, memories, emotions; still, that same human being leaves behind as many different impressions as there are people who associate with that person. Each character presents his own point of view, and the reader is left with his own choice. This way, the au¬thor avoided dogmatism and applied a belief her characters con¬vey explicitly.

We also notice that the writer used time-montage and flash¬backs, as a direct result of her belief in the difference between clock-time and internal time. The use of the psychological free association reveals the importance she attributed to the past as a component of one's present: the association is generally stimulated by memory and the senses, mainly sight as said before.

Another stream-of-consciousness device used in the book is the epiphany, which being a private experience, which remains unexplained and open to the reader's interpretation. According to Virginia it is impossible to know or judge anyone this way she used the multiple selective omniscience and epiphany ex¬perienced by her characters.

Her main concern was man in his relationship with others; her characters' basic concern is to keep one's individuality and at the same time establish a good relationship with people, all situations that may imply an interaction between human relationships. She also exploited not only man's interior but also man's deepest