Write a detailed note on the characterization in the novel mrs dalloway

Headings
1. Stream-of-consciousness
2. Free-indirect-discourse (FID)
3. Characterisation through perception and perspective
4. Characterization through perception
5. The individual perception of London as a means of characterisation
6. Charactersation through perspective
7. Memory as a technique for characterisation

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is one of the great classics of literature that still
manages to fascinate readers. I propose that the subtle strength of observation and the
creation of its characters contribute to the strength and provide the main point of interest
in this novel. According to Abbott, “[o]ne truism about narrative is that it is a way we
have of knowing ourselves” (123). Abbott emphasises characters, as well as action, as
being among the principle components within narrative. He goes even further by arguing
that “[…] it’s only through narrative that we know ourselves as active entities that
operate through time” (123). This paper will examine in detail the creation of characters
with reference to Mrs Dalloway.

The Handbook of Literature states that there are three fundamental

methods of characterisation in fiction:

(1) the explicit presentation by the author of the character through direct EXPOSITION,
either in an introductory block or more often piecemeal throughout the work, illustrated
by action;
(2) the presentation of the character in action, with little or no explicit comment by the
author, on the expectation that the reader will be able to deduce the attributes of the actor
from the action; and
(3) the representation from within a CHARACTER, without comment on the character by
the author, of the impact of actions and emotions on the character’s inner self, with the
expectation that the reader will come to a clear understanding of the attributes of the
character. (Holman and Harmon 81)
There are however many more methods of characterisation that elaborate on those three
fundamentals and in this paper I will describe which methods Virginia Woolf uses to
craft Mrs. Dalloway. I will begin with an overview of the stream-of-consciousness and
free-indirect- discourse methods and then, by closely analysing the literary text, show
how Woolf uses this technique as a mode of characterisation. Memory as a technique of
characterisation will then be discussed followed by an examination of characterisation
through perception and perspective. These two aspects however are strongly linked to,
and can therefore be considered a subcategory of, the method of free-indirect-discourse.
Particular attention will be given to showing how the perception of London serves Woolf
as a tool for characterisation. Finally I will investigate the role of foil characters.

1. Stream-of-consciousness

A stream-of-consciousness passage according to Hafley is a “[t]ranscription of verbal

thought so direct that it seems to bare a human mind” (73). The author gives the
impression that no parts of the character have been selected, rejected, or corrected, and
the reader receives the impression that nothing is concealed. Whether or not Woolf uses
the stream-of- consciousness technique has been heavily debated and critics are far from
reaching agreement. Hafley, for example, writes that, “Although Mrs Dalloway does take
place on a single day, it does not employ the stream-of-conscious technique. Virginia
Woolf […] never did use it – here or elsewhere” (Hafley 73-4). Friedman on the other
hand argues that: “There are many technical variations possible within the stream of
consciousness form, chief among them that of the interior monologue. The technique of
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is recognizably different from that of The Waves; yet
they both exploit stream of consciousness” (Friedman 4). Mc Laurin takes the middle
ground and argues that Virgina Woolf is a “[s]tream of consciousness writer who does
not use the stream of consciousness technique” (Mc Laurin 31). To discuss these quotes
any further requires clarification of the exact meaning of the term. The Oxford
Companion to Literature explains stream-of-consciousness as follows:

Stream of Consciousness, a phrase coined by W. James in his Principles of

Psychology (1890) to describe the flow of thought of the wakening mind, but now widely
used in a literary context to describe the narrative method whereby certain novelists
describe the unspoken thoughts of their characters, without resorting to objective
descriptions or conventional dialogue.[…] The ability to represent the flux of a
character’s thoughts, impressions, emotions, or reminiscences, often without logical
sequence or syntax, marked a revolution in the form of the novel, and extended passages
of stream of consciousness are now so familiar that they no longer strike a reader as
avant-garde. (Drabble 955)

Woolf may be described as a stream-of-consciousness novelist, from that point of view,

since she frequently describes the private thoughts of her characters, and resists the use of
objective descriptions and conventional dialogue (Drabble 995). There are however, at
least two techniques for rendering this stream-of-consciousness: free-indirect-discourse
(FID) and interior monologue. It appears that Woolf frequently uses the former but rarely
the latter. The technique of FID aims to give readers the impression of being inside the
mind of the character, which Abbot describes as an internal perspective that highlights
both plot and motivation in the novel, and creates a feeling of connectedness, and
especially of depth of the connections between characters (Abott 70-1). Virginia Woolf
herself confirms this when she states her aims for Mrs. Dalloway (the novel’s working-
title was The Hours).

I have no time to describe my plans. I should say a good deal about The Hours, & my
discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly
what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each
comes to daylight at the present moment. (Woolf Diary, vol. 1, 263, my emphasis)

What exactly FID is and how Woolf made use of this technique within Mrs. Dalloway to
“dig out beautiful caves” behind her characters shall be highlighted in the following
section. It should be stated, however, that FID is not a mode on its own, but, especially
with regard to focalization, is closely linked to other techniques such as perception and
memory.

1.1. Free-indirect-discourse (FID)

Firstly however, the term FID warrants some discussion in more detail. Fludernik (110-6)
looks at FID from the linguistic point of view. She sees in it a mode of speech and
thought representation, which relies on syntactic, lexical and pragmatic features. On the
syntactic level, passages of FID are constituted by non-subordination and (if applicable)
temporal shifting in accordance with the basic tense of the report frame. Mezei (62-70),
from the literary point of view, defines FID in segments and explains its controversial
usage derived from its flexible nature. Mezei explains how FID provides the
“[a]ppropriate space for interchange between author, narrator, character-focalizer, and
reader” (Mezei 67). In general, FID means an indirect quotation of a character’s unvoiced
thoughts through the third person narrator. Thus it is an aspect of focalization (the lens
through which we see characters). The character's thoughts are reproduced directly and in
a way that one would imagine the character to think, though the narrator continues to talk
of the character in the third person. Since this is done freely, meaning without any
quotation marks or similar indicators, it is called free- indirect-discourse (Abbott 70). As
mentioned before, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is a good example for the frequent use of FID
and the FID-technique draws a continuous line throughout the novel. However, the
characteristics of indirect and direct speech are often mixed in such a way that it seems
there is no speaker or narrator at all. This becomes especially evident within the first nine
sentences of the novel.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for
her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And
then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a
beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it hat always seemed to her when, with little squeak
of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and
plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the
air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill an sharp yet
(for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the
open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the
trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking
until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among vegetables?” – was that it? – “I prefer men to
cauliflowers” – was that it? He must have said at breakfast that morning when she had
gone out on the terrace – Peter Walsh. (Woolf, MD 1)

Here the impression of a narrator talking to a reader is created along with the impression
that Clarissa Dalloway is talking to herself. She is doing that in the third person. The
question “To whom?” remains unanswered. Another example occurs when Clarissa
meets Peter again, who she has been in love with in her youth and had not seen for years.
Peter admits that he came to London to press ahead with the divorce of a young Colonial
English woman he has fallen in love with. Clarissa’s reaction to this statement is as
follows:

‘In love!’ she said. That he at his age should be sucked under his little bow-tie by that
monster! And there’s no flesh on his neck; […] and he’s six months older than I am! Her
eye flashed back to her; but her heart she felt all the same; he is in love. He has that, she
felt; he is in love. But the indomitable egotism which for ever rides down the hosts
opposed to it, the river which she say on, on, on; even though, it admits, there may be no
goal for us whatever, still on, on; this indomitable egotism charged her cheeks with
colour; made her look very young; very pink; very bright-eyed as she sat with her dress
upon her knee, and her needle held to the end of green silk, trembling a little. He was in
love. Not with her. With some younger woman of course. (Woolf, MD 38 )

Here Clarissa Dalloway at first begins her speech in ordinary direct discourse followed
by the descriptor “she said”, which could stand equally well in a novel that uses no FID at
all. Woolf then proceeds to illustrate Clarissa’s inner reactions that manage to bring
female disappointment and indignation to life. This again appears somewhat ambiguous
since Clarissa knew that “there may be no goal” for them “whatever”. Her thoughts thus
seem to contradict her feelings. This inner debate is further presented in the form of an
inner monologue. The climax, I would say, is: “[a]nd he’s six months older than I am!”
Here the verb is in present tense and the character whose thinking is expressed, talks in
the first person. That has the effect of causing the distance between narrator and
personated character to be somehow abandoned. A similar impression is created, for
instance, when Peter has just left Clarissa’s house. The visit revived feelings of their
love-affair from long ago at Bourton. Peter is surprised at the strength of his feelings as
he is walking through London:

He was not old, or set, or dried in the least. As for caring what they said of him – the
Dalloways, the Whitbreads, and their set, he cared not a straw – not a straw (though it
was true he would have, some time or other, to see whether Richard couldn’t help him to
some job). […] He had been a Socialist, in some sense a failure- true. Still the future of
civilisation lies in the hands of the young men like that he thought. (Woolf, MD 43)

This passage is written as if Peter were talking to himself, but is again written in the third
person. It almost sounds like a conscious, defensive argument with Peter arguing against
himself and the accusation that he is old. The strongest statement here is arguably that
“[h]e cared not a straw”, but everything else in the sentence undermines the resoluteness
of this phrase. First, it is repeated, which suggests a degree of insecurity about it. It
appears that he is merely trying to convince himself and that he does care after all.
Secondly, the phrase in brackets seems to express some hesitation. It seems as if Peter
were lying to himself. His style gives the impression that he actually depends on the
people he claims to disdain. He depends on “[t]he Dalloways, the Whitbreads, and their
set” to provide him with a job. Also Peter seems to have certain preoccupations with his
age and states with three different words that he is not old. He concludes that the future of
civilisation lies in the hands of the young men, like he once was, but is not anymore.
Another time, on his way back to the hotel after having visited Clarissa, Peter finds a
letter from her and through this letter he suddenly realises the impersonality of the hotel
in which he is staying, in which he is treated more like an object than a human being.
After reading her letter, Peter seems to be upset, which is illustrated in the following
passage:

These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up
their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s
noses.

As for cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much as bareness,
frigidity; a thing that had to be. Some arid matron made her rounds at dawn sniffing,
peering, causing blue-nosed maids to scour, for all the world as if the next visitor were a
joint of meat to be served on a perfectly clean platter. (Woolf, MD 137)

Again it seems as if Peter were talking to himself. He is once referred to as “him”

however, which suggests that a narrator must have spoken this sentence. Nevertheless it
seems to incorporate the thought-patterns of Peter which have been introduced before. In
the next passage it seems as if Peter is again addressing himself directly:

For sleep, one bed; for sitting in, one arm-chair; for cleaning one’s teeth and shaving
one’s chin, one tumbler, one looking-glass. Books, letters, dressing-gown, slipped about
on the impersonality of the horse-hair like incongruous impertinences. And it was
Clarissa’s letter that made him see all this. (Woolf, MD 137)

However it does not seem possible here to confidently exclude the narrator from any
intervention. The most striking example to illustrate this is arguably the last sentence:
“And it was Clarissa’s letter that made him see all this.” This could be either an
intervention of the narrator, explaining what has caused the line of thought that he had
just developed, or it could refer to a realisation on his own part that this is the explanation
of the direction of his recent thoughts. It seems that there is no way of separating
precisely thoughts or statements made or thought by Peter to those attributed to the
narrator.

In summary it can be argued that Woolf, in Mrs. Dalloway, made it possible for the
reader to enter the character’s mind through a frequent use of FID or as Mezei puts it,
provides the “[a]ppropriate space for interchange between author, narrator, character-
focalizer, and reader” (Mezei 67). To be able to examine the characters any further, the
other aspects of FID, namely perception and remembrance have to be taken into account.
In the following sections I will show how Woolf uses perception to show a character’s
present structure and memory to give the background necessary to understand this present
structure.