Mrs. Dalloway
examines ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ (Woolf, 1948, p 189)
Woolf explores the fragmentary self through ‘streams of consciousness’,
whereby interior monologues are used to tell the story through the minds
of the principal characters. Told through the medium of omniscient
narration, this story about two people who never meet has no resolution
and the characters remain where they started, locked in their own heads,
in a constant state of flux. Woolf’s technique is revolutionary in that
it opposes the linear texts and marked narrator’s voice beloved of her
Victorian precursors, in an attempt:
…to
bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery
and uncertainty, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of
Victorian fiction (Briggs, 2005, p 130).
She
also deliberately rejects the ‘materialism’ of HG Wells, Arnold Bennett
and John Galsworthy (Woolf, 1948, p 185). As a contemporary study of
post-war Britain, however, Mrs Dalloway mirrors the fragmentation
that was taking place within her own culture and society, and provides a
“delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt
that the truth of human experience really lay.” (Abrams et al, 2000, p
2142).
This
work will consider the representation of Modernism within the novel.
For Woolf, time is a device with which she not only sets the pace of the
novel, but with which she also controls her characters, setting and
plot. It is also used to question ‘reality’ and the effect of that on
the individual characters within the story as they journey through their
day. The most dramatic way of entering the character’s consciousness is
by the modes of time – those modes intimately connected with the moment
of being and the way the character apprehends it emotionally.
As
these different modes are uncovered, psychological time will be
revealed and its impact on the main characters of Clarissa Dalloway and
Septimus Warren Smith will be examined.The movement through the book is
produced by the author’s handling of time (Morris, 1977, p 41). Although
Woolf has rejected the linear narrative favoured by her precursors, in
what she described as a queer yet masterful design (Woolf, 1969, p 58),
she does achieve a certain linearity. The thoughts and memories of
Clarissa Dalloway, despite darting backwards and forwards through time,
move towards a definite point in the future – her party. Septimus Warren
Smith, on the other hand, is stuck in a time loop, living in a past
that he cannot escape until the moment of his death.Mrs Dalloway bears the hallmarks of a modernist text with its striking and experimental use of form and language.
Woolf
accelerates and decelerates time by way of the thoughts and emotions of
her characters. The speed at which individual paragraphs move convey
the emotional response of the character to the situation (Richter, 1970,
pp 150-151); when time slows, the sentences are long and languorous,
but when the mood changes the sentences shrink to short declarative
ones. The kinetic mode is the tempo or speed at which the character
experiences a situation (ibid, p 35) and the opening of Mrs Dalloway demonstrates how Woolf accelerates time to a fever pitch to convey the energy and restless vitality of the two Clarissas:Mrs Dalloway is
set on a single day in the middle of June, 1923, in London’s West End.
The time and place are fragmented by Woolf repeatedly plunging her
heroine back in time to the summer at Bourton when she was a girl of 18.
Hermione Lee contends that “the past is not in contrast with the
present but involved with it” (Lee, 1977, p 99). This passage sets the
scene for the dual themes of liberation and loss which are outworked
through Clarissa’s rites of passage. Woolf cleverly parallels two
important times of Clarissa’s life – her entry into womanhood and her
descent into middle age – and establishes a link between chronological
time and time of life:
Woolf
sets the scene for her two landscapes – a country house in late
Victorian England, and a town house in Georgian Westminster. The late
1880s, when Clarissa was a girl of 18, was “a time of serenity and
security, the age of house parties and long weekends in the country”
(Abrams et al, p 1052). The Industrial Revolution had, by this time,
transformed the social landscape, and capitalists and manufacturers had
amassed great fortunes, shifting money and power to the middle classes.
Social class no longer depended upon heritage; indeed Clarissa’s own
social heritage is never clearly defined. Born into an age of reform –
Gladstone had passed the Married Woman’s Property Act and Engels had
just published the second volume of Marx’s Das Kapital (ibid, p
1053) – at 18, Clarissa has an enquiring mind, and despite her apparent
naivety, she is questioning and absorbs the different thoughts and ideas
that mark the age (p38). Despite her naivety, the eighteen-year-old
Clarissa is a vibrant young woman who is full of fun. She loves poetry
and has aspirations of falling in love with a man who will value her for
the opinions imbued in her by Sally Seton. Her bursting open the French
windows and plunging at Bourton is a metaphor for her rite of passage
from girlhood to womanhood, and she embraces the change, despite
“feeling…that something awful was about to happen.” Life at Bourton was
sheltered (p 38) and Clarissa was protected from the decay of Victorian
values; the boundaries set by her father and aging aunt, far from being
restricting, allowed her a sense of freedom. Bourton and her youth
therefore represent a time of liberation for Clarissa.
The
present mode of time is one of uncertainty, where Clarissa’s
understanding of ’reality’ has been fragmented by the first world war,
and where Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin – under whom her husband,
Richard, serves – has been in power for just three weeks; the third
British Prime Minister in a year..
As
a young woman Clarissa had been avidly pursued by Peter Walsh whose
marriage proposals she rejected on account of his stifling her. Marriage
to Richard was meant to have given her some independence, yet the
middle-aged Clarissa is like a caged bird, repeatedly depicted as having
“a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green.” (p 6) This day
is significant to her in that it represents her breaking out of that
cage, her ‘coming of age’, and by buying the flowers herself she is
asserting her independence and re-gaining control of her life.
The
mature Clarissa has become compliant and her spirit and idealism have
been tamed, her passion for life and love quenched. This attitude
reflects the spirit of the modernist age where there is a national lack
of confidence in God, in government and in authority following the
slaughter at the Somme. Clarissa’s party is her opportunity to unmask
her real self to the world. However, she wastes the opportunity by
indulging in superficial conversation with people who do not matter to
her (p188). This suggests that the real Clarissa has been left behind at
Bourton; that the young woman plunging through the squeaky French
windows, filled with burgeoning hopes for the future, is the real
Clarissa Dalloway. The only time we glimpse her as a mature woman is
when she briefly speaks with Peter and Sally at her party.
The most obvious representation of time in Mrs Dalloway is
‘clock time’. Various clocks are present throughout the novel,
including Big Ben, St Margaret’s and an unnamed ‘other’ who is always
late.
How
the character experiences clock time…is rendered by Virginia Woolf as a
sensory stimulus which may divert the stream of thought, summon memory,
or change an emotional mood, as do the chimes of Big Ben and St
Margaret’s throughout Mrs Dalloway. Thus clock time is metamorphosed
into feeling and enters consciousness as one more aspect of duration
(Richter, p 40).
This
is demonstrated by Clarissa who, in the middle of ruminating about her
life as she waits to cross the road, becomes suddenly aware of:
“a
particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a
suspense…before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning,
musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the
air.” (p 6)
Not
only do we anticipate the sound of Big Ben, but when “we hear the
sound…we have a visual picture of it in our imaginations as well”
(Morris, p 42). The musical warning is the ‘Westminster chime’ –
originally the ‘Cambridge chime’ – that plays out before the hour
‘irrevocably’ strikes. Composed in 1859 by William Crotch, it is based
on a phrase from Handel’s aria “I know that my Redeemer Liveth”. (BBC –
Online). The irrevocability of the hour refers to the passing of time
and its ephemerality. Once an hour has been spent there is no reclaiming
it. This is linked with Clarissa’s obsession with death – that each
tick of the clock brings her closer to her eventual demise – and
foreshadows her relationship with her double, Septimus.
Just as Big Ben strikes at significant moments in the book (Morris, p 39), so St Margaret’s languishes:
Ah,
said St Margaret’s, like a hostess who comes into her drawing-room on
the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I am not
late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says. Yet, though she
is perfectly right, her voice, being the voice of the hostess, is
reluctant to inflict its individuality. (pp 55-56).
The
bells of St Margaret’s – the parish church of the House of Commons
Westminster symbolise, to Peter Walsh, Clarissa. At Bourton he had
condescendingly prophesied that “she had the makings of the perfect
hostess” (p 10), and, indeed, Clarissa spends the entire novel preparing
for her party. That evening he observes her “at her worse – effusive,
insincere” (p 184) as she welcomes her guests. The gulf of time has
brought out the worst in Peter and he is still bitter about Clarissa’s
rejection of him, despising her life with Richard. These feelings are
forgotten, however, once St Margaret’s begins to strike, and he is
filled with deep emotion for her.
Woolf wrote of Mrs Dalloway that
“the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I
can hardly face spending the next weeks at it” (Woolf, 1953, p 57). One
way that she deals with this trial is in her treatment of the late
clock. It sounds “volubly, troublously…beaten up” reflecting the state
of mind of the neurasthenic Septimus who “talk(s) aloud, answering
people, arguing, laughing, crying, getting very excited…” (p75)
The
‘otherness’ of this clock defines its strangeness, with its perpetual
lateness and shuffling eccentricities being used as a metaphor for
insanity, and therefore, for Septimus. Just as Clarissa and Septimus
never meet neither do Big Ben and the ‘other’ clock – they are out of
synch and their relationship is notable only for the difference between
them.As Clarissa Dalloway spends the day preparing for her party, so
Septimus Warren Smith spends it preparing to die. There are allusions to
his impending suicide and time of his death throughout the novel, and
even his name – which means ‘seventh’ or ‘seventh time’ – implies that
the prophetic relationship between the man and his death is controlled
by time.
This
was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of
words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to
the next…Dante the same… (p 98)
In
his insanity, Septimus likens himself to Dante who travelled through
the three realms of the dead during Holy Week in the spring of 1300. The
seventh (Septimus) circle of ‘the violent’ is divided into three rings,
the middle ring being for suicides who have been turned into rough and
knotted trees on which the harpies build their nests. (Dante, no date, p
60). His affinity with trees throughout the novel suggests that they
have become anthropomorphic to Septimus and he looks forward to the time
when he will become one himself. Cutting one down is, he considers,
equivalent to committing murder, an action that will be judged by God (p
28).
Septimus’s
contemplation of suicide is therefore a consideration of timelessness
and eternity. He can condone the taking of his own life because he views
it as an opportunity to take control of his destiny, to move into a
realm of timelessness where there is no death:
Septimus’s
transition from time to timelessness is finally accomplished when, in a
moment of insane panic, he plunges out of his window and onto Mrs
Filmer’s railings (p 164).For Rezia this symbolises a plunge into
widowhood and the beginning of a new time of her life. Woolf understood
that the most dramatic way of entering a character’s consciousness is
through time, as it is intimately connected with the ‘moment of being’
and the way that the character understands it emotionally (Richter, p
149). Entering Rezia’s consciousness in this way and rendering time in
emotional duration rather than clock time intensifies its impact and
heightens the response of the reader. In clock time, the span of that
moment of being is measurable in hours, minutes and seconds, but when
experienced emotionally the past and future become entwined with the
present and make up the ‘now’.
It
seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was opening long
windows, stepping out into some garden. But where? The clock was
striking – one, two, three: how sensible the sound was; compared with
all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus himself(p 165)
Just
as Septimus had imagined himself as Dante travelling through hell, so
too does Clarissa have apocalyptic imaginings which are stirred by the
news. Her dress flames and her body burns as, in her imagination, she
journeys into the eternal flames. The thud that she imagines in
Septimus’s brain mirrors the ticking of a clock and measures out his
last moments on earth. The image has a profound psychological affect.
Using
a fragmented discourse that reflects the changing society that was post
World War 1 Britain, Virginia Woolf involves the past with the present
and suggests that time exists in different forms. In the external world
it is ordered chronologically and she uses it to portray a vivid
impression of London society life in the 1920s. Its passing is marked by
the great clocks of Westminster and the leaden circles of Big Ben are a
constant reminder to Clarissa of the pulse of life itself. Kinetic time
and clock time are therefore inextricably linked. Perhaps more
importantly, however, is the suggestion that time also exists in the
internal world as a moment of being, which Woolf develops through the
medium of interior monologue. The principle characters – Clarissa,
Peter, Septimus and Rezia – are defined by their response to time, and,
as the novel draws to a close, there is an awareness of the past and
present converging. This creates an impression in the reader that they
are reading a news report or a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary clearly
showing itself to be a modernist work.
No comments:
Post a Comment