– Swayam Nath
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, divided and fragmented into three parts and sewed together with a fine thread of coherence and interconnectedness with Woolf’s
craftsmanship, tells the story of—first, Clarissa Dalloway, a socialite, and her life in a fine June day in Westminster, London, as she runs errand to prepare for her party she is to throw that evening; Second, the thoughts and memories, as it rumbles and
tumbles in the vestibule of Clarissa’s mind, of her days in Bourton chiefly with Sally Seton and Peter Walsh; third, the life and revelations of Septimus Warren Smith, a
war veteran in his thirties suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, who threatens to kill himself out of the belief that human nature has condemned him to death for his cruel deeds. Woolf sews all these fragments like a seamstress with her pen and paper, the only tool, and produces a brilliantly constructed, well woven avant-garde novel.
An anonymous narrator narrates the events in third person omniscient narrative with stream ofconsciousness, interior monologue and free indirect speech. The heavy
usage of these techniques of Stream of Consciousness and Interior monologues allows reader to understand the characters in addition to knowing them and the use of
free indirect speech offers flexibility allowing thus the jump and intrusion from the consciousness of one character to that of the other and the large area of intrusion into
more than one consciousness offers multiple and diverse perspectives and
promiscuous details contributing to the beauty and uniqueness of the novel.
Time is one aspect which tends to remain stagnant and hidden. It is draped thus with the layers of the consciousness of the characters. In this ambiguity and in this hidden
sense of chaos, the strokes of Big Ben bring about a distinctness and order. In addition to it, the vacillation between the present and the past disrupts the conventional linearity of the narration and gives it a fin-de-siècle touch with its non-linearity. One of the nobler decisions of narrating the chronicles of just one day, just one, allowed Woolf zoom into the mundane and simpler events which otherwise are often missed or omitted in a novel, subsequently allowing her to give the ordinary a
touch of extraordinary penning down spine-chilling epiphanies which she does best.
Woolf through the characters of Clarissa and Septimus attempts to draw a comparison between the sane and the insane and throughout the novel she passes interlude comments as to how the society reacted to those who had mental illnesses like that which Septimus possessed in and around 1925 (when the novel itself was published) along with other social criticisms, and the way she develops her characters giving them sentiency, their own thoughts, is a testament to her brilliant writing and
untamed imagination.
The tone in ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ changes from time to time—sometimes serious, sometimes whimsical, but overall the readers may find a touch of melancholia and the thought of death to be constantly recurring, as a frequent motif. To talk about the latter—Death—Woolf throughout the novel foreshadows that something unpleasant is going to happen. Clarissa is seen to fear death and always seems to have this feeling that how it is dangerous to live even for one day and that is the reason why she throws a party, she does it because that was what she loved; life; London; that moment of June, whereas Septimus talks of killing himself which he finally does in the end as an act of defiance. The subtle elements like Septimus reading Dante’s Inferno, the talk of death—to commit suicide, to see the dead- Evans and so forth forebodes Septimus’s death in the novel.
Mrs. Dalloway, now as we look back, is for those who find pleasure in reading difficult books, and for someone who wants to know more about modernist writing in general. To sum it all up, it is a daunting, heart touching, pulchritudinous, and a
beautifully spun novel, fresh and relevant—now more than ever—as if issued to children on a beach.
Swayam Nath blogs 