Introduction:-

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925,

was a bestseller both in Britain and the United
States despite its departure from typical novelistic
style. Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf's subsequent book,
To the Lighthouse, have generated the most
critical attention and are the most widely studied
of Woolf's novels.

The action of Mrs. Dalloway takes place during a

single day in June 1923 in London, England. This
unusual organizational strategy creates a special
problem for the novelist: how to craft characters
deep enough to be realistic while treating only one
day in their lives. Woolf solved this problem with
what she called a "tunneling" technique, referring
to the way her characters remember their pasts. In
experiencing these characters' recollections,
readers derive for themselves a sense of
background and history to characters that,
otherwise, a narrator would have had to provide.

Mrs. Dalloway has been called a flâneur novel,

which means it depicts people walking about a
city. (Flâneur is the French word for a person who
enjoys walking around a city often with no other
purpose than to see the sights.) The book, as is
typical of the Flâneur novel, makes the city, its
parks, and its streets as interesting as the
characters who inhabit them.

The book's major competing themes are isolation

and community,or the possibilities and limits of
communicativeness, as evidenced by Clarissa's
abiding sense of being alone and by her social
skills, which bring people together at her parties.
Mrs. Dalloway Summary
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day
in June 1923, as lived by a few London citizens.
There is calm in the air; people are enjoying a
sense of peace and remembering their lives
from before the long and bitter World War I.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about people’s inner lives.

It does not possess a vivid plot; the actual events
are secondary to what people spend much of their
time pondering: memories, regrets, and hopes.
Almost all of the main characters wonder about
what might have been. The novel is told from the
viewpoint of an omniscient and invisible narrator.

In keeping with Woolf’s interest in psychology,

sexuality is a theme in the novel. Several of the
characters are divided in their feelings towards
love, and this contributes to their ambivalence.

The actions of the novel are simple: Clarissa

Dalloway is hosting a formal party. She sees Peter
Walsh, who has returned from India, and drops in
for a visit. This meeting, and many other moments
in the day, make Clarissa think about the past and
the choices she has made. Clarissa’s husband,
Richard, has meetings and lunches, and their
daughter Elizabeth has similar plans herself.
Another Londoner, Septimus Warren Smith, is
having a bad day, and so is his wife Lucrezia.
Septimus is obsessed with his memories of Evans,
a friend who was killed in the war. He is also
convinced that unseen forces are sending him
messages. Lucrezia is taking Septimus to two
doctors, neither of whom can do much to cure him.
Septimus kills himself later in the day, to escape
his doctors, and because he feels he has no other
alternative.

Clarissa’s party is a success. The Prime Minister

arrives, and this is considered a great honor. In the
midst of her success as a hostess, she hears of
Septimus’ suicide. He and Clarissa Dalloway never
meet, but their lives are connected by external
events and news of his death is casually
mentioned by a guest at Clarissa's party. It
provokes in her thoughts her own isolation and
loneliness:
"Death was an attempt to communicate,
people feeling the impossibility of reaching
the centre which, mystically, evaded them;
closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one
was alone."

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Stream of consciousness is a style of writing which
is introduced by some great authors in the early of
20th century. It reflects the flow of characters
thought and feeling. In literary criticism, stream of
consciousness is a literary technique which seeks
to portray an individual's point of view by giving
the written equivalent of the character's thought
processes. Moreover, this literary technique of
writing often connected with modernist movement
by some authors like James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf herself.

The Stream of Consciousness in

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia
Woolf…
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the "
flowers herself. For Lucy had her work
cut out for her. The doors would be taken
off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men
were coming. And then, thought Clarissa
Dalloway, what a morning - fresh as if
".issued to children on a beach

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it "

had always seemed to her when, with a
little squeak of the hinges, which she
could hear now, she had burst open the
French windows and plunged at Burton
into the open air. 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 a 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;
looking at the flowers, at the trees with
the smoke winding off them and the
rooks rising, falling, standing and looking
until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among
the vegetables?" - was that it? - "I prefer
men to cauliflowers" - was that it? He
must have said it at breakfast one
morning when she had gone out on to
the terrace - Peter Walsh. He would be
back from India one of these days, June
or July, she forgot which, for his letters
were awfully dull; it was his sayings one
remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife,
his smile, his grumpiness and, when
millions of things had utterly vanished -
how strange it west - a few sayings like
."this about cabbages

(VIRGINIA WOOLF Mrs Dalloway (1925

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS" was a phrase coined by "

William James, psychologist brother of the novelist,
Henry, to characterize the continuous flow of
thought and sensation in the human mind. Later it
was borrowed by literary critics to describe a
particular kind of modern fiction which tried to
imitate this process, exemplified by, among others,
James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia
.Woolf
The novel always was, of course, notable for its
interiorised rendering of experience. Cogito, ergo
sum ("I think, therefore I am") could be its
motto, though the novelist's cogito includes not
only reasoning but also emotions, sensations,
memories and fantasies. Defoe's auto biographers,
and Richardson's letter-writers, at the beginning of
the novel's development as a- literary form, were
obsessively introspective. The classic nineteenth-
century novel, from Jane Austen to George Eliot,
combined the presentation of its characters as
social beings with a subtle and _sensitive analysis
of their moral and emotional inner lives. Towards
the turn of the century, however' (you~ can see it
ring in Henry James), reality was increasingly
located in the private, subjective consciousness of
individual selves, unable to communicate the
fullness of their experience to others. It has been
said that the stream-of-consciousness novel is the
literary expression of solipsism, the philosophical
doctrine that nothing is certainly real except one's
own existence; but we could equally well argue
that it offers us some relief from that daunting
hypothesis by offering us imaginative access to the
inner lives of other human beings, even if they are
.fictions
Undoubtedly this kind of novel tends to generate
sympathy for the characters whose inner selves
are exposed to view, however vain, selfish or
ignoble their thoughts may occasionally be; or, to
put it another way, continuous immersion in the
mind of a wholly unsympathetic character would
be intolerable for both writer and reader. Mrs
Dalloway is a particularly interesting case in point,
because its heroine also appeared as a minor
character in Virginia Woolf's first novel, The
Voyage Out (1915). There a more traditional
authorial narrative method is used to give a very
satirical and prejudicial portrait of Clarissa
Dalloway and her husband, as snobbish and
.reactionary members of the British upper class
Here, for instance, is Mrs Dalloway in her earlier
incarnation preparing to be introduced to a scholar
:called Ambrose and his wife

"Mrs Dalloway, with her head a little

on one side, did her best to recollect
Ambrose - was it a surname? - but
failed. She was made slightly uneasy
by what she had heard. She knew
that scholars married anyone - girls
they met in farms on reading parties;
or little suburban women who said
disagreeably, "Of course I know it's
my husband you want, not me. "But
Helen came in at that point, and Mrs
Dalloway saw with relief that though
slightly eccentric in appearance, she
was not untidy, held herself well,
 and_ her voice had restraint in it,
which she held to be the sign of a
lady."

We are shown what Mrs Dalloway is thinking, but

the style in which her thoughts are reported puts
them and her at an ironic distance, and passes
silent judgment on them. There is evidence that
when Virginia Woolf began writing about this
character again, it was originally with the same
quasi-satirical intention; but by that time she had
become committed to the stream-of-consciousness
novel, and the method inevitably led her into a
much more sympathetic portrait of Clarissa
.Dalloway
There are two staple techniques for representing
consciousness in prose fiction. One is interior
monologue, to which the grammatical subject of
the discourse is a "I", and we, as it were, overhear
the character verbalizing his or her thoughts as
they occur. I shall discuss this method in the next
section. The other method, called free indirect
style, goes back at least as far as Jane Austen, but
was employed with ever-increasing scope and
virtuosity by modem novelists like Woolf. It renders
thought as reported speech (in the third person,
past tense) but keeps to the kind of vocabulary
that is appropriate to the character, and deletes
some of the tags, like "she thought," "she
wondered," "she asked herself" etc. that a
more formal narrative style would require. This
gives the illusion of intimate access to a
character's mind, but without totally surrendering
.authorial participation in the discourse
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the "
flowers herself," is the first sentence of the
novel: the statement of an authorial narrator, but
an impersonal and inscrutable one, who does not
explain who Mrs Dalloway is or why she needed to
buy flowers. This abrupt plunging of the reader
into the middle of an ongoing life (we gradually
piece together the heroine's biography by a
process of inference) typifies the presentation of
consciousness as a "stream". The next sentence,
"For Lucy had her work cut out for her,"
moves the focus of the narrative into the
character's mind by adopting free indirect style,
omitting an intrusive authorial tag, such as "Mrs
Dalloway reflected"; referring to the maid
familiarly by her first name, as Mrs Dalloway
herself would, not by her function; and using a
casual, colloquial expression, "cut out for her",
that belongs to Mrs Dalloway's own style of
speech. Tlie third sentence has the same form. The
fourth moves back slightly towards an authorial
manner to inform us of the heroine's full name, as
well as her pleasure in the fine summer morning:
"And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a
morning - fresh as if issued to children on a
( ".beach
The ejaculations, "What a lark! What a plunge!"
that follow look superficially like interior
monologue, but they are not the mature heroine's
responses to the morning in Westminster as she
goes out to buy flowers. She is remembering
herself at the age of eighteen remembering herself
as a child. Or, to put it another way, the image
"fresh as if issued to children on a beach",
evoked by the Westminster morning, reminds her
of how similar metaphors, of children larking in the
sea, would come to mind as she "plunged" into
the fresh, calm air of a summer morning, "like the
flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave," at Bourton
(some country house, we presume), where she
would meet someone called Peter Walsh (the first
hint of anything like a story). The actual and the
metaphorical, time present and times past,
interweave and interact in the long, meandering
sentences, each thought or memory triggering the
next. Realistically, Clarissa Dalloway cannot always
trust her memory: "`Musing among the
vegetables?' -was that it? -'I prefer men to
"?cauliflowers' - was that it
Meandering the sentences may be, but they are,
apart from the licence of free indirect style, well-
formed and elegantly cadenced. Virginia Woolf has
smuggled some of her own lyrical eloquence into
Mrs Dalloway's stream of consciousness without its
being obvious. Transpose these sentences into the
first person, and they would sound far too literary
and considered to pass for a transcription of
someone's random thoughts. They would sound
indeed like writing, in a rather precious style of
:autobiographical reminiscence

"What a lark! What a plunge! For so

it always seemed to me when, with a
little squeak of the hinges, which I
can hear now, I burst open the
French windows and plunged at
Bourton into the open air. 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 a
girl of eighteen as I then was)
solemn, feeling as I did, standing
there at the open window, that
something awful was about to
happen ..."
The interior monologue of Virginia Woolf's later
novel, The Waves, suffers from such artificiality, to
my mind. James Joyce was a more resourceful
exponent of that way of rendering the stream of
consciousness
.
CONCLUSION
Mrs. Dalloway is a complex and compelling
modernist novel by Virginia Woolf. It is a wonderful
study of its principal characters. The novel enters
into the consciousness of the people it takes as it
subjects, creating a powerful, psychologically
authentic effect. Although quite rightly numbered
amongst the most famed modernist writers--such
as Proust, Joyce and Lawrence--Woolf is often
considered to be a much gentler artist, lacking the
darkness of the male contingent of the movement.
As a conclusion, many experimentalist and
outstanding literary techniques can be found in
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, especially stream
of consciousness style and the novel point of view.
The novel use third person omniscient, the
narrator is a voice of a person who knows
everything about all characters. This narrator
sometimes becomes the subjective thought of the
characters. However, the point of view sometimes
shifting from one character’s stream of
consciousness to another character’s stream of
consciousness- within a single paragraph. The style
of writing is stream of consciousness- which can be
said that she is one of many who introduce this
style of writing in early 20th century. It reflects the
flow of characters interior thought and feeling,
which give the reader impression as if they are in
the character’s head-with their thought, feeling,
emotion and feel like they experienced everything
that the character experienced. The novel enters
into the consciousness of the people, it takes as it
subjects.

-:References
www.upf.edu
classiclit.about.com/od/mrsdalloway/fr/aa_mr
sdalloway.htm
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/dalloway/cont
ext.html
Text book of Mrs. Dalloway by "Virginia
"Woolf