Mrs Dalloway

Mrs.
Dalloway as a Modern Novel

Introduction.
Modernism, a literary movement may be characterized as; A ground breaking cultural and literary
revolution of the new century; a shift away from tradition, not only in Britain but around the world.
Modernist writers such as; Virginia Woolf, David Herbert Lawrence and James Joyce, based their
works on such themes; breakdown of social norms, alienation, spiritual loneliness, disillusionment,
rejection of history, rejection of outdated social systems, objection to religious thoughts,
substitution of mythical past, the effects that Two World Wars had on humanity etc.
Modernism in Mrs. Dalloway:

The novels that Virginia Woolf wrote in the 1920s_ Jacob’s Room, Night and Day, To the
Lighthouse, and Mrs. Dalloway, placed her among the best of the modernist novelists. Mrs.
Dalloway, probably the master piece, includes many modern traits such as; Stream of
Consciousness, use of Metaphors, time, Clock to move from one character to another, and the use
of Symbolism etc. here is a slight effort in order to analyze these features within the text.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf tried to carry the stream of consciousness technique to its
highest level of achievement by making it a completely artistic way of portraying life. All the
action of the novel is centered round Clarissa, but method of presentation is different. It is not a
simple description. The reader has to move through Clarissa’s mind to the days of her early youth,
for example, a period spent at home where she met Peter Walsh.
“But with peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and
when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they
would have been destroyed”
The same investigation has to be done in the case of Peter Walsh who has come to visit Clarissa
after some years.
She’s grown older, he thought, sitting down. I shan’t tell her anything about it, he thought, for
she’s grown older.”
Sometimes, the reader stands still in time and moves from one character to another, and at other
times, the reader stands still in space, that is the mind of a particular character and moves backward
and forward in his consciousness.
In Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf escapes from the limitation of chronological order by using the
interior monologue, a form of the direct style that inserts into the text the character’s plan.
“Speaking to himself rhythmically, in time with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound
of Big Ben striking the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air). Oh these parties? He
thought.”
The author is always present in her novels as an impersonal narrator, who, as a matter of fact,
represents the central consciousness that keeps control of the story.
Such phrases as: she thought, he thought, she walked on, thinking, represent the narrator’s own
marks, a narrator who often speaks directly, but seldom in the first person.
“As a child he had walked in Regent’s park he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming
back to me- the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps;”
Another element that involves the author’s presence is when one hears a clock striking a particular
hour.
The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the
clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him.”
The use of metaphors, of different images is also a specific characteristic that belongs to Virginia
Woolf’s novels. The landscape represents the type of description that has a relative independence
to the narrative and which provides a break, a slowdown of the story.
“A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind) blew a thin black veil over the sun
and over the strand. The faces faded; the omnibuses suddenly lost their glow.”
The unconventional use of the figures of speech creates particular symbols. Some of the most
important symbols that appear in the Mrs. Dalloway are represented by the tree and the flower
images. The variety of colors and the beauty of flowers suggest emotions and feelings that make
the difference between characters.
Another important symbols in Mrs. Dalloway is represented by waves and water which almost
always suggest the possibility of extinction or death. One character’s thoughts appear, intensify
and then fade into another’s, much like waves.
“the sound of water was in the room, and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.”
Conclusion:
Hence, to sum up under the shade of above given discussion, we may conclude; Although Mrs.
Dalloway is composed as a depiction of an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary housewife, as a
modernist text it implicitly discusses the disillusionment experienced by modern individuals.
Vagueness and incompleteness are the concepts that contribute to the discussion of disillusionment
as experienced by the characters in the text in the sense that they echo fluidity and relativity rather
than traditional rigidity and certainty.

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Mrs.

Dalloway as a Modern Novel

Modernism in Mrs. Dalloway:

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