Wanting to expand my knowledge on 1920s Modernist texts after reading the brilliant The Great Gatsby, I picked up Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway at my school library. Being one of her most well-known novels, Mrs Dalloway was a spectacular introduction into Woolf's effortless and captivating writing style. The narrative follows Clarissa Dalloway through morning and night as she evaluates her lifestyle and past whilst preparing for an elite party. The novel explores internal monologue as the focaliser swaps between each of her guests throughout day as the reader familiarises themselves with the ultimate complexity of the human mind.
One of my favourite aspects of this novel was Woolf's presentation of time. Being a fluid and yet erratic concept, time confuses us all and never ceases to confuse which I believe Woolf captured perfectly. In a Romantic Modernist style, the beautiful lyricism of the prose juxtaposed with the frequent fragmentation of the past and the present creates a startlingly realistic situation as time seems to blur and merge constantly throughout the narrative. Moreover, the motif of Big Ben which illustrates the objective mechanical time of the clock, always appears unexpectedly and throws the reader straight back to the novel's present in that way that we're all familiar with: that the time within our consciousnesses never coincide with the time on the clock face. In doing this, the reader can empathise with the thoughts of the characters in a subtle and effective way where we begin to understand the impact of Clarissa's entangled past with Peter and Septimus' dreadful memories of the war. In true Gatsby fashion, Mrs Dalloway's characters all want to "repeat the past" and return back to the utopian place of hindsight. However, reality triumphs again and again where the slow and at times tiresome pace of the novel really accentuates this inability to escape from the present.
This theme of unforgiving escapism reappears in the underlying references to death. Clarissa and Septimus fantasise about it and embrace the thought of it which establishes an extremely ominous and profound undertone beneath the frivolity of Clarissa's desire to organise the perfect party. Even within Peter's mindless opening and closing of a pocket knife the reader is hinted at the possibility of a Romanticism in death.
"All of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere."
The technique of essentially swapping narrators every few pages was one of the most interesting aspects when reading the novel. There was a mixture of elegant naturalness - where the change in perspective was so seamless that the monologues passed on without me noticing - and intense confusion where I had to flick back a few pages just to check who was thinking. This combination may have been accidental or intentional but I thought it was effective in making me concentrate better on each characters' personal voice. It also emphasised the similarities in everyone's worries. A lot of the characters had unlikely correlating thoughts which was interesting to show the extent of similarity between unconnected people. It made me wonder: who else is thinking what I am thinking? Who else has the same stress and worry and confusion that I face?
Furthermore, being able to see the world through the eyes of every mentioned character was exciting as it created this paradoxical effect where everyone was connected and yet all were isolated. Although the book followed nearly every combination of relationship such as husband/wife, mother/daughter, teacher/student, doctor/patient, the interactions between the characters paled in comparison to the internal interactions the characters had with the reader. The power of uncontrolled unconscious thought really showed through Mrs Dalloway and was highlighted even further through the absence of chapters. Overall, Mrs Dalloway felt continuous, textured and above all, real.
