Introduction:

Modernism, rebelling against the previous Victorian, Romantic

and realist trends in the early 20th century took the movement
a step further into a world of the unconscious mind and the
surreal generated by the psychological insights given by
Sigmund Freud’s works who changed the understanding of the
nature of the self and psyche..Another influential thinker of the
1920ies was Henry Louis Bergson and in his view intuition and
immediate experience is more significant than rational science
as the basis for understanding reality. The concepts he used
were memory, interior time, exterior time and intuition,
memory providing the link of the past to the present.
Modernism offered a new way of understanding the world,
since many people came to be disillusioned by the previous
trends, on the verge of World War One. 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 the new world.
In their book entitled Modernism 1890-1930, Bradbury and
McFarlane describe modernism as “an art of a rapidly
modernizing world, a world of rapid industrial development,
advanced technology, urbanization, secularization and mass
forms of social life” but also ”the art of a world which many
traditional certainties had departed, and a certain sort of
Victorian confidence not only in the onward progress of
mankind but in the very solidity and visibility of reality itself
has evaporated”.[1] It means that modernism implies a break
from the tradition, referring to some sort of discontinuity,
treating characters as “thinking” individuals, emphasizing the
unconscious rather the outer, visible self. The substance of a
literary work characterized as “modern” is formed by
imagination and internal thought processes and plot becomes
a collection of incidents and their effect on the individual.
As Deborah Parsons argues in her book entitled Theorists
of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson,
Virginia Woolf it is hard to refer to Modernism as a strict
period in literature “because modernism connotes a cultural
sensibility rather than a particular period in time and it is not
simply interchangeable with strictly historical references such
as “the early twentieth century” or ”the 1920s”,even though it
overlaps with them. The label ”high modernism” ,as she
further notes, refers specifically to the canonical account of
Anglo-American literary experimentation between the world
wars, characterized by a turn away from direct modes of
representation towards greater abstraction and aesthetic
impersonality and self reflexivity.[2]These characteristics are to
be found in such writers as Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, James Joyce
and Virginia Woolf who are considered to be central figures of
Modernism. Virginia Woolf is also representative for the
feature of self-reflexivity which is intrinsic to Modernism as she
was not only a novelist but also a professional literary critic in
her lifetime, writing extensively and reflecting on her own
process of writing and reading.
Mrs.Dalloway and the Features of Modernism:
In Mrs.Dalloway Virginia Woolf creates a modern novel
which has also most of the features of modernism. Created
from two short stories, Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street and the
unfinished The Prime Minister and published in 1924, this
novel describes a day in the life of its central character, Clarissa
Dalloway on a June day in post-World War I England. According
to Harold Bloom, in Clarissa Dalloway, personality is one of the
main underlying themes of Virginia Woolf’s fiction.
“Early in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, he says, Clarissa
Dalloway has a private searching moment when she examines
her image in the mirror. There she sees a face distinctively”
pointed, dartlike definite” the familiar face, composed and
tense, that her mirror reflected“many million times”. This
clearly focused image represents a unified and static self, the
person she can produce wherever she needs a recognizable
social mask.
Her social image conceals” incompatible ”aspects of her
personality which could be refracted into divergent and
contradictory images. Each of the other characters sees only
one of these incompatible aspects and takes this to be her
total personality. Thus, as the novel progresses, the early static
image in the mirror gives way to a series of shifting and
contradictory views of Mrs. Dalloway, and her identity expands
to encompass all the divergent images while remaining
unencompassed by them”.[3]
In Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations to host a party that
evening Virginia Woolf records all her thoughts, remembrances
and impressions, as well as the thoughts of other
characters. There is no actual story, no plots or sub-plots, no
action in the traditional sense, « nothing actually ”happens” in
this novel, apart from the “myriad of impressions” created
by Virginia Woolf’s new style of writing, as opposed to the
traditional one.”Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an
ordinary day”,she says in her essay, Modern Fiction.”The
mind receives a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved with the sharpest of steel. From all
sides they come, an incenssant shower of innumerable atoms,
and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of
Monday or Tueday, 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” [4]
Mrs.Dalloway depicts a rapidly changing society and its
narration reflects these changes. In Jane Marcus’s view,
expressed in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf”
Mrs.Dalloway offers a scathing indictment of the British class
system and a strong critique of the patriarchy. The work’s
social satire takes much of its force from ironic patterns of
mythic reference that allow the fusion of dramatic models
from Greek tragedy and from the Christian liturgy. Woolf
envisions an allegorical; struggle between good and evil-
between Clarissa Dalloway’s comic celebration of life and the
tragic death-dealing forces that drive Septimus Smith to
suicide”.[5]
The constant use of flashbacks and memory are the
techniques by which Virginia Woolf creates interior time. The
image of Big Ben at the beginning of a new chapter signals the
presence of external reality. The image of the city is not static
or lifeless, it is full of cars, buses and crowds of people living
their lives simultaneously.
 Identity, a constant preoccupation of modernists is cast in
a different light. In Virginia Woolf’s view the self depends on
the other but it is separated from it. Ephemeral, elusive and
intangible, true identity is impossible to capture.
Another technique which helps the novelist to merge
interior and exterior time is repetition(for example Clarissa,
Septimus and Peter Walsh all reciting lines from Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline) and her characters are united by the constant use
of
memory.The characters are presented in their search for
finding their own identities and they feel, experience and think
rather than act.It is obvious that the writer does not narrate
the story as her predecessors did and the technique she uses is
common to many Modernist writers and it is called the stream
of consciousness technique. It consists of recording the
thoughts of the characters, in a continuous flow and without
any apparent connection. But as Dorothy Parsons notes, “these
interconnections might be framed, at their simplest, by a
shared occurrence or spatial environment, such as the
aeroplane, the prime-minister’s car and the chiming of Big Ben
that momentarily draw the attention of disparate figures in the

city streets, but they are also developed through patterns of

common and recurring mental images and phrases that serve
to link even characters who never meet, such as Clarrisa and
the shell-shocked Septimus Smith.
In John R.Maze’s book entitled Virginia Woolf: Feminism,
Creativity and Unconscious the author states that in Virginia
Woolf’s novels ”there are mysterious pages that cannot be
explained rationally by anything else in the text, and about
which Orthodox literary criticism can say nothing informative.
The limitation derives from the currently fashionable principle
forbidding interpretation of anything in the text by reference
to anything not in it. Such passages can be illuminated by
reference to the author’s life history and unconscious mental
life, insofar as that can be inferred from other, independent,
evidence. Psychoanalysis, for its part, can benefit because the
mental mechanisms involved « in creativity are laid out for
inspection on the printed page, rather than glimpsed in the
analysis of confused associations to a dream”[6]
This is central to Woolf’s method of characterization, by
which a figure is illuminated by the external perceptions of
others as much as their own internal consciousness, but also to
her “conception of identity more generally”(p76).Search for
identity is emblematic for this novel, Clarissa Dalloway trying to
reconcile her public and private self and Septimus Smith failing
to do so and finally committing suicide. When Clarissa hears
about Septimus Smith’s death at her party, she identifies with
him:”She felt somehow very like him-The young man who had
killed himself. She felt glad he had done it;
thrown it away while they went on living (Virginia Woolf,
Mrs.Dalloway)Most of the novel centers around Clarissa’s
thoughts about the past, mainly when she is thinking whether
she would be with Peter or with her husband,her rejection of
Peter’s proposal of marriage influencing all his later thoughts
and actions.Stream of consciousness is also used to record
Septimus’ thoughts about death and the war.
 As narration is reflected in the mind of one character or
another, it is often dreamlike and fragmented. There is no
narrator to tell a coherent and organized story and
the narration sounds very close to the actual thought process
taking place in an individual’s head. In spite of the fact that
there are two significant events occurring in the
story(Septimus’s suicide and Peter Walsh’s return), there is no
real plot and the events can be included in the category of the
everyday or the un-extraordinary. According to Harold Bloom,
Clarissa Dalloway resembles such characters as Moll Flanders,
Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Earnshaw and Dorothea Brook.
”Like Moll and the others”, he says” Mrs.Dalloway is enmeshed
in a world determined by money and class and must struggle
for a self-definition that in part accepts and in part defies those
determinants. From Moll to Mrs.Dalloway, then, we can trace
the career of the mercantile world view; what we see is the
bourgeois mind encountering its own fatal limitations. For
Moll, an early version of the bourgeois mind’s confidence in
itself, the world seems limitless and open to conquest; she
exults in her freedom and power. For Clarissa Dalloway,
however, the world has shrunk and become brittle; she senses
confinement and impasse, and her struggle for self-definition
borders on hysteria and suicide. The history of the bourgeois
mind is then, a history of diminishment, of encounter with dark
ambiguities and dismay”[7]
Conclusions:
Instead of delineating the characters from outside,
superficially, like in the traditional novels Virginia Woolf
unfolds her characters as thinking individuals in constant
evolution. Like all the other modernist writers, Virginia Woolf
was influenced by the advancement of psychology and the
various theories it had generated and all the characters’
thoughts are vividly presented in Mrs,Dalloway. Characters are
revealed from different view-points , the technique of multiple
narrative points of view being another characteristic of
modernist literature. Finally, it is the reader who reconstructs
the final picture of these characters and he or she is involved in
this dynamic presentation instead of being a mere spectator.
The distinction between direct and indirect speech is blurred
and Virginia Woolf alternates her presentation between
omniscient description, indirect interior monologue and
soliloquy.

REFERENCES
[1]. Bradbury and McFarlane ,Modernism 1890-1930,
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, p57
[2]. Parsons ,Deborah, Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James
Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Routledge Critical
Thinkers, London and New York, 2007,p 11
[3]. Bloom, Harold, Clarissa Dalloway, Chelsea House, New
York, 1990,p 86
[4]. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol IV, ed. Andrew Mc.Neillie,
London,Hogarth Press, 1986-1994, p.160.
[5]. Marcus, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf ,University
of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE,1981, p125
[6]. R.Maze, John, Virginia Woolf: Feminism, Creativity and
Unconscious ,Greenwood Press, 1997, p IX
[7]. Bloom, Harold, Clarissa Dalloway, Chelsea House, New
York, 1990,p 87