Mrs Dalloway

Modernist novel

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Street, Dresden (1908)
• Modernism was rebelling against the previous influences of
Victorianism, Romanticism and realist trends in the early 20th century.
• Modernism offered a new way of understanding the world – many
artists were disillusioned by previous beliefs and systems
• Resistance to returning to old ways following WWI
• Modernist movements, such as Cubism (art), Atonality (music) and
Symbolism (poetry) explored the new economic, social and political
experiences in the new fully industrialised world
• Simion writes “By extending the relationship between artists and the
representation of reality, modernism implied a break with the past
artistic conventions which created a literature of crisis and
dislocation, desperately trying to shape a new world.
Woolf helped develop the Modernist aesthetic. The authors in the generation before hers, the Victorian period,
wrote novels that focussed on the external details and experiences of our lives – for example, marriages, city scenes,
contracts

She developed a new form of expression that focussed our attention on the mind – how it feels, inside our
consciousness to know ourselves and others.

She was preoccupied with voices of those who ‘lived under the surface’, those who go unnoticed and who have no
voice.

She felt that doctors were quick to diagnose but had little sympathy or understanding for her experience, so she
wrote for what she called the ‘Outsiders’ Society’, for those who did not feature in literature.

Woolf saw gender as a role we play that is determined and shaped by society. As we form ourselves into our roles,
we deny or overlook parts of our fuller personalities.

A portrait of Woolf by
Roger Fry 1917
The novel
• The novel was created from two short stories – ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and ‘The
Prime Minister’(unfinished)
• A day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway – Wednesday June 13, 1923
• Working title of the ‘The Hours’
• Woolf herself grappled with the structure – she didn’t want chapters interrupting the
illusion of a spontaneous stream of consciousness.
• She considered using a Greek chorus at intervals to provide focus and summary, and also
using a 5 Act structure, similar to a play
• Finally she decided to mark off sections with a double space – in the British edition
published by Hogarth Press, there are 12 double spaces, like the hours on a clock (linked
to the striking of Big Ben)
• She grew confident in her techniques as she revised and worked on the novel writing,
‘There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin to say something in my
own voice.’
‘How Should One Read A Book?’
• ‘The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is
to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to
come to your own conclusions.’
• ‘To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our
libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place
upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath
of those sanctuaries.’
• ‘But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of
almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first
sentences, will bring you in to the presence of a human being unlike any
other.’
‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’
Discuss
Mrs Dalloway
• Clear that Virginia Woolf was preoccupied with the relationship
between time and space
• In the same year that Mrs Dalloway was published (1925) she wrote
an essay titled ‘Modern Fiction’ which challenged the traditional
Edwardian linear style of writing, describing her alternative”
“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind
receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
engraved with the sharpest of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms, as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old…Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
Sections to consider:
• P3 – ‘Mrs Dalloway said…very upright.’
• P4 – ‘For it was the middle of June…the admirable Hugh!’
• P6 – ‘Good morning to you…morning like this.’
• P8 – ‘She had reached the park gates…I am that.’
• P10 – ‘Nothing that would serve to amuse her…Mrs Richard
Dalloway.’
Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)
• Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis
• work changed our understanding of the self and the psyche
• He studied the interior space of consciousness, dreams and the
psyche (the centre of thought, feeling and motivation, consciously
and unconsciously directing the body's reactions to its social and
physical environment.)
• Woolf said that although her publishing house, Hogarth Press, was
the first to publish Freud’s work, she was wary of his ideas; ‘I have not
studied Dr Freud or any psychoanalyst – indeed I think I have never
read any of their books; my knowledge is merely from superficial talk.
Therefore any use of their methods must be instinctive.’
Henry Louis Bergson
• Influential thinker of the 1920s
• He believed that intuition and immediate experience was more
influential than rational science as a basis for understanding reality
• For Bergson, memory provided the link from the past to the present
• Constant flashbacks and memories are used by Woolf to create
interior time. Big Ben signals external time
• The city is an exciting, pulsing environment full of people living their
lives simultaneously but also with a sense of dislocation
Class and identity
• Jane Marcus believes that the novel provides a scathing critique of
the British class system and the patriarchy (as forces which limit the
self?)
• Can you think of examples where this is apparent?

• Importance of memory in forming concept of self? Unreliability of

memory
• Unfulfilled ambitions, feelings of dissatisfaction with life as one ages
Characterisation
• Early in the novel, Mrs Dalloway, has a searching private moment when she
examines herself in the mirror:
P 40 ‘…seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night
to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway herself.
How many million times she had seen that face, and always with the same
imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass.
It was to give her face point. That was her self – pointed; dartlike; definite.
That was her self when some effort, some of on her to be her self, drew the
parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and
composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one meeting
point…had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other
sides of her – faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions, like this of Lady Bruton
not asking her to lunch…’
• Clarissa, aged 52, has gone through the menopause and has
internalised the idea of her ‘sickness’ as a hopeless decline
• Youthful beauty has faded, child bearing capacity is over, lacking any
occupation, she feels the drama of her life has ended – see the
section where she goes to her attic for a nap: ‘Narrower and narrower
her bed would be.’ Clarissa believes she must adjust to her solitude,
loneliness and the narrowing of her social space and opportunities for
excitement.
• Memories are important for her but also trouble her
Septimus
• Paralleled to Clarissa – the novel deals with people’s capacity to adjust to
change
• Shell shocked young veteran:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS1dO0JC2EE

• Emotionally numbed and destroyed mentally by the war, Septimus is mad

at society to seems to accept and be instrumental in creating destruction
• Woolf drew on her own experiences of mental ill health to articulate his
experience and condemn the treatment from society and especially the
medical institution, who fail to understand his crisis
• The war seems to have left many people, especially the Establishment,
strangely untouched
• Characters are developed and formed from outsiders perceptions and
interior thoughts, so that characters ‘unfold’ and through constant
evolution
• They can be contradictory and confusing, even to the self
• Characters are revealed through different viewpoints and multiple
narrative strands
• It is the reader who reconstructs these and tries to understand them
Narrative technique
Stream of consciousness
Free indirect discourse
Distinction between indirect and direct speech is blurred
Thematic concerns
• War and loss – is there meaning in life
• Gender and the female voice
• Class consciousness as an inhibitor of self expression
• The individual – as perceived by others and the self
• Time and space
• Metafictive elements – Woolf was a writer and a critic
• Identity and authenticity
• Mental health and the treatment of mentally unwell people
Bibliography
• The School of Life – Teaching Emotional Intelligence
• Mrs Dalloway: exploring consciousness and the modern world (The
British Library)
• The External and the Internal: Modernist Depictions in Mrs Dalloway
• Modernism, time and consciousness: the influence of Henri Bergson
and Marcel Proust (The British Library)