B.A. (Hons.

) English – Semester V Core Course

Paper XII : British Literature: The Early 20th Century Study Material

Unit-2
Virginia Woolf : Mrs. Dalloway

Edited by: Dr. Seema Suri

Department of English

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

University of Delhi
Paper XII – British Literature: The Early 20th Century
Unit-2

Virginia Woolf : Mrs. Dalloway

Prepared by:
P. S. Nindra
School of Open Learning
University of Delhi
Delhi-110007

Edited by:
Dr. Seema Suri
School of Open Learning
University of Delhi
Delhi-110007

 
SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING
UNIVERSITY OF DELHI
5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007
Paper XII – British Literature: The Early 20th Century
Unit-2

Virginia Woolf : Mrs. Dalloway

Contents
S. No. Title Pg. No.
1. General Introduction 01
2. Virginia Woolf: Her Life 05
3. Virginia Woolf as a Novelist: Aims and Objectives 08
4. The Literary Context 09
5. Mrs. Dalloway: The Novel 11
6. Technique in Mrs. Dalloway 17
7. Characterization in Mrs. Dalloway 21
8. Mrs. Dalloway: A Discussion 25
9 Critical Excerpts 29
i) ‘Repression in Mrs. Dalloway’s London’ by Jeremy Tambling 29
ii) ‘Thinking Forward through Mrs. Dalloway’s Daughter’ 40
by Rachel Bowlby

Prepared by:
P. S. Nindra

 
SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING
UNIVERSITY OF DELHI
5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007
1. General Introduction
Let it be stated at the outset that Virginia Woolf is a difficult novelist to read. Going through
any one of her major novels, we are bound to get puzzled; their characters and events are
often unclear. Why? For the simple reason that she follows an entirely different method in
writing her novels, known as the “stream of consciousness” technique. She completely
rejected the conventional conceptions of the novel, where we find straightforward narration,
with emphasis an on incident and external description. The “Stream of Consciousness” was
not a new technique. Earlier, novelists like Dorothy Richardson had used it in her novels. So
had James Joyce, a greater exponent of this method than either.
But first let us be clear what precisely do we mean by the “stream of consciousness”
technique. Briefly stated, one can say that the novelist here attempts to convey all the
contents of a character’s mind - memory, sense perceptions, feelings, intuitions, thoughts-in
relation to the stream of experience as it passes by, often at random.
Some critics distinguish between ‘stream of consciousness’ and ‘Interior Monologue’
preferring to use the latter to refer to the strict attempt to reproduce the flow of consciousness
in a character’s mind, without intervention by the author, and perhaps even without grammar
or logical development. In practice, the terms are usually interchangeable. This technique,
however, has its own advantages and disadvantages. Its great advantages are that it offers
previously undreamt-of possibilities for the analysis of mental states; its disadvantages - the
great demands it makes on the reader, and the dangers of incoherence and mere virtuosity,
which beset the author because of the lack of a logical time sequence and the temptation to go
into the most minute detail.
We will have occasion to say more about this technique later in the lesson. But right
now, let us come back to our original point: difficulties in Virginia Woolf’s novels. For
example, how do we react when we open a novel like Mrs. Dalloway? After a few pages, we
are bound to get puzzled, and start wondering: where is the story, where is the author or the
narrator telling us about incidents, characters, and so on? Instead, what we find is quite
different: an exploration of the. consciousness of a few characters. The whole thing, no doubt,
seems quite irritating to the uninitiated. The word ‘uninitiated’ is important, because once one
gets fully familiar with the technique, one is bound to enjoy the subtle explorations of the
restless minds of the characters. Our minds are never at rest: we are always thinking of one
thing or the other. There is a constant flow, constant stream of feelings, emotions, memories
passing through our minds. Our mind suddenly goes to the past - remote or recent - or comes
back to the past, and even thinks about the future.
In Mrs. Dalloway too, we find that the narrator delves deep into the minds of a few
people, and skillfully portrays their characters, and in the process, manages to tell a sort of
“tale’, which undoubtedly is quite different from a tale in a traditional novel. But the fact
remains that we need a lot of patience to go through the whole book. One may wonder at this

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stage: why write novels which are complex and difficult, and which turn away most of the
readers? The answer can be given even in one line. Because modern literature is, by and
large, complex and difficult - be it poetry, drama, or novel. In order to understand fully what
Virginia Woolf stood for, and what she was trying to do in her novels, it would be quite
fruitful if you get acquainted with some of the salient features of the modern novel.
The Modern Novel
The novel in the present century, as in the Victorian age, is the most popular form of
literature. Judged by quantity alone, the number of novels poured forth by the British and
American presses is large enough to swamp all other -forms of literature put together. In
quality, however, the modern novel has made no significant advance. The modern novelist
has developed some new and eccentric techniques; he enjoys greater freedom of expression
in the treatment of sex; he delves deeper into the hidden comers of the mind. And he employs
these resources to reflect an outlook of crises, of impending doom and despair. Apart from
the demoralizing effect of the two world wars on the European mind, the pressures and
complexities of a highly technological age - urban congestion, unemployment, pollution of
water and the atmosphere, menace of noise-have made man’s life a nightmare.
The 20th century English novel is best studied against the background of the Victorian
novel from which it has evolved. Victorian society was homogeneous and stable, with a
generally accepted code of moral and social behaviour. Within this framework the novelist
portrayed the interplay between the hero and heroine on one side and the people and
institutions around them on the other. The experience of the protagonists brings them a
deeper understanding of themselves and of others together with keener discrimination
between the genuine and the false, between good and evil. The Victorian novelist was as
much interested in society as in the individual. In a Victorian novel the narrator is the
‘omniscient author’ who, as detached observer, comments on the action and even directly
addresses the reader.
The evolution of the modern novel from the novel described above may be traced
through several more or less clearly marked stages. The influences that changed the pattern of
the Victorian novel to what it is today have been the following: (a) Henry James (b) French
and Russian Realists (c) Post-Impressionists (d) The new Psychology of Bergson, William
James and Freud (e) Technological advance and communism (f) Post-war crisis.
(a) Henry James (1843-1916): This gifted American, younger brother of William James the
psychologist, travelled all over Europe and eventually settled in England, because he found
there the bond of a continuous cultural tradition which his country lacked. Known as the ‘the
Master’ because of the meticulous care with which he constructed his stories and polished his
style, James taught English novelists a salutary lesson in ‘form’. The great novels of the 19th
century were, by and large, sprawling and loose in structure. Notable exceptions to this
pattern are the novels of Jane Austen and Hardy. Besides, James was the first novelist who
made a minute and penetrating psychological analysis of his characters.

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(b) French Realists: The next important influence on the modern novel was that of the
French Realists Emile Zola (1840-1902) and Guy de Maupassant (1850-93). The Realists,
initiating the French Impressionist painters headed by Claude Manet (1840-1926), aimed at
presenting a scene in its salient features with a few broad strokes, but as they considered the
individual a product of environment, they described the environment in minute details or in
what is called the Naturalistic style. Further, as they were in revolt against the bourgeois
conventions of the Victorians, they emphasized the seamy side of life-filth and squalor, sex,
violence and vulgarity. Much of the cheapness and vulgarity of the realistic novel is
undoubtedly due also to the deterioration of manners and morals brought about by the two
great wars.
(c) Post-Impressionists: In the early 20th century, literature felt the influence of a new
school of painting called the Post-impressionists. The first English exhibition of their
paintings was held in London in December 1910. Speaking in 1924, Virginia Woolf, said:
“On or about December 1910 human nature changed’”. This exaggeration was, indeed, a
reference to the aforesaid exhibition. The Impressionists were concerned with expressing the
external reality; the post-impressionists wanted to go further and express a new vision of
reality - inner or spiritual reality. Imitating the post-impressionist paintings, the younger
writers also strove to be more realistic by presenting this spiritual reality which was first
reflected in the’ novels of Marcel Proust in France and then through him in the novels of
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
(d) This super-realism may, however, be traced to William James (1824-1910), and Henri
Bergson (1859-1941) whose works appeared in the 1890s. James in his Principles of Psychol-
ogy (1890) compared consciousness to a stream or a river which carries submerged and
floating memories and receives constantly changing impressions of the external world.
The French philosopher Bergson in his Matter and Memory (1896), revolutionized our
conception of the nature of reality and time. The centre of his philosophical system was the
belief in life as change, as a continuous flow or flux. Man’s consciousness is simply a part of
this ever-flowing stream of change, and man’s experience is also the awareness of the ever-
flowing stream of real Time or Duration- not a mere succession of moments, but the steady
progress of the past through the present into the future. The duree reelle (actual duration) or
‘inner time’ on which Bergson lays so great an emphasis is the approach to time as quality
and not as quantity. His works emphasize the importance of spiritual values, of what Bergson
himself called ‘The uninterrupted melody of our inner life’. It influenced greatly the fiction of
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Charles Morgan, and in the plays of J.B. Priestley.
Perhaps an even greater influence, however, has been exercised by the psychoanalytical
discoveries of Professor Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). His works became a handbook for all
interested in the study of personality. During the course of his analysis of the nature of certain
diseases of the mind, he came to the conclusion that human personality is largely influenced
by the combined action of the conscious with what he called the “unconscious” mind, the
latter being explained as a region which is brought into existence by a system of repression.

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The Freudian theory has had a powerful influence on almost all European literature of a
progressive nature. It has meant an almost complete change in our basic ideas about character
and morality; it has meant a re-emphasis on the importance of individualism; finally, it has
opened up a vast new field of experience to the novelist, the dramatist and the poet. All the
major work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and that of many of the younger poets is
deeply indebted to the theories of Freud.
Coming back to the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, we noted earlier its advantages
and disadvantages. We stated that even though it offers unlimited possibilities for the analysis
of mental states, it has inherent faults of incoherence and complexity, making for the reader a
tough and challenging reading. Virginia Woolf, however, uses this technique with ever-
growing sure-ness of purpose; her keen mind and magnificent artistic sense enable her to
weld the parts into a unified artistic whole of sensitive, subtle portraiture. Her studies of
mood and impulse are handled with an almost scientific precision and detachment, and yet
she has a great gift for lyrical exposition.

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2. Virginia Woolf: Her Life
Born in London, January 26. 1882, Virginia Woolf was the daughter of the eminent Victorian
critic and scholar, Sir Leslie Stephen. Indeed, she was born into a circle where standards of
culture, taste, and intelligence were of the highest. From the reading and conversations of her
formative years she acquired an unusually wide literary background and a cosmopolitan
culture.
A few specific details about her life may interest you here. She was born of Leslie
Stephen’s second marriage to a woman named Julia Duckworth, who was a widow and
already had three children. From his first marriage (his first wife Laura died suddenly)
Stephen had a mentally retarded daughter. Thus, at the time of their second marriage Stephen
and Julia had four children between them. To these four, they added four more during the
years 1879-1883. The names of these four were Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian. As a
sister, she was very close to her sister Vanessa, and brother Thoby. She had a stepbrother
George, too, and both Virginia and Vanessa suffered a great deal at his hands. He subjected
them to intense sexual advances, and the two sisters underwent a traumatic experience. The
memory of this painful experience in her early youth left a permanent mark upon Virginia’s
whole career.
Right from early life, Virginia suffered from bouts of depression and mental disorder.
This fact of her life is very important in so far as her works are concerned. It may be noted
that her father too suffered from some sort of mental disorder. For Virginia, however, mental
illness became almost a regular feature in her life, and she had to undergo long periods of
treatment and care.
Bloomsbury Group
Since Sir Leslie Stephen was one of the best-known scholars of late Victorian England, many
eminent men became his friends. Virginia, thus came in contact with a particular section of
London’s privileged and literary society. The Stephen family friends included such novelists
as Thomas Hardy, Henry James and George Meredith. After her father’s death in 1904,
Virginia, then twenty-two, moved from Kensington to Bloomsbury Square, and formed part
of a close circle of intellectuals. Collectively, they became known as the Bloomsbury Group.
Many of them had studied with Virginia’s brother, Thoby, at Cambridge. They included
Leonard Woolf (Virginia’s future husband); the novelist E. M. Forster, the painters Duncan
Grant and Vanessa (Virginia’s sister), the economist Maynard Keynes, the art critics Roger
Fry and Clive Bell (Vanessa’s future husband); the biographical novelist’ Lytton Strachey,
the philosophers Moore and Russell, the historian G.M. Trevelyan, to name the leading lights.
The many accounts and reminiscences of this group’s shared values and practices all em-
phasize the importance which they placed on aesthetic enjoyment, on personal ties and
affection, and on intellectual honesty and clarity. They were remarkably sure of their position
as the self-appointed leaders of English culture. They saw themselves at the front of new
social and cultural trends, experimenting, in their different fields, with new forms of analysis

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and expression, more suited to post-First world war Britain than those established values
which were firmly rooted in the nineteenth century. Leonard Woolf, in his autobiography,
Sowing, describes their position: ‘We found ourselves living in the spring time of a conscious
revolt against the social, political, religious, moral, intellectual and artistic institutions, beliefs
and standards of our fathers and grandfathers-we were out to construct something new; we
were in the van of the builders of a new society which should be free, rational, civilized,
pursuing truth and beauty.’ The Bloomsbury Group members were quite hostile to
imperialism and to militarism. This hostility in Virginia’s case, was directly related to her
feminism. She regarded wars as man-made, arguing that the sympathies of women are too
broad to be contained within national boundaries. ‘As a woman I want no country. As a
woman my country is the whole world.’
Marriage and Mental Illness
In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, for, as she told her friends later, he allowed her lot
of freedom and privacy. She was free to give him what she was capable of giving, and to love
him for his gentleness and his intelligence. (Mrs. Dalloway enjoyed almost same kind of rela-
tionship with her husband).
Virginia, however, did not enjoy good health, and occasionally suffered from fits of
partial insanity. In 1915, her condition was so bad that she had to be looked after by nurses all
the time. After her recovery, and to keep her busy, her husband established a press, calling it
“Hogarth Press”. In spite of her delicate health, she continued to write, and also work, for the
rights of women. She knew that women were suffering socially and economically, and
showed her concern for them in her works A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.
One of the important, and perhaps surprising aspect of her character was her lesbianism.
It was hard for the public to believe that a woman of such caliber and genius could have such,
what was considered at the time, abnormal tendencies. This aspect of her life finds reflection
in Mrs. Dalloway also: in her love for Sally Seton. As we noted earlier, Virginia did not keep
good health throughout her life, and suffered from nerve shattering fits of depression. The
outbreak of First World War in 1914 had a traumatic effect on her. Later, the outbreak of
World War II completely destroyed her will to live. In 3 941, she committed suicide by
drowning herself in the river near her home.
Her Works
Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915) follows the conventional narrative pattern, but with a
concentration of interest upon character and a delicacy of touch typical of all her work. Her
next novel. Night and Day (1919) shows the same emphasis on character-analysis and lack of
incident. Then came her first really mature novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), in which her
distinctive technique is fully used for the first time. By a series of disconnected impressions,
revealed mainly through the consciousness of people with whom he came into contact, we are
made aware of the personality of Jacob. These momentary impressions, which shift and
dissolve with the bewildering inconsequence of real mental processes, are revealed by the use

6
of the internal monologue, and from them we are intended to build up gradually a complete
conception of the young man.
This same method, handled with greater firmness, is again used in Mrs. Dalloway
(1925). Though what little ‘event’ there is occupies only one day, Virginia Woolf is able to
create not only the lives of her chief characters, which are studied with a penetrating subtlety,
but even the London background. Her next novel. To The Lighthouse (1927), shows a still
firmer mastery of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, and is considered to be her finest
work. The ultimate development of her method appears in The Waves (1931), from which
plot, in the normally accepted sense, is almost entirely lacking. Her other novels were Flus
(1933), The Years (1937). and the unfinished Between the Acts (1941). She also wrote a sort
of fantasy. Orlando, A Biography (1928), which stands alone among her novels. In addition
to her novels. Virginia Woolf wrote a number of essays on cultural subjects, which appear in
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924): The Common Reader (1925); A Room of One’s Own
(1929); The Second Common Reader (1932); Rogery Fry (1940); The Death of the Moth
(1942); and The Moment (1947). They reveal her as a critic of penetrating insight and superb
stylistic gifts.

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3. Virginia Woolf as a Novelist: Aims and Objectives
From what we have learnt about Virginia Woolf, we can easily say that she was a different
type of novelist. She wanted to capture, in words, the nature of human consciousness—what
it actually feels like to be alive. She wasn’t particularly interested in telling a story, and this,
of course, is one of the things which makes Mrs. Dalloway seem very different from other
novels you have read. You can hardly find it so interesting as to hurry through the pages;
there is no urgency on your part to know what happens next.
In most of the other novels, you must have found that the novelist, in a way, stands
alongside his/her invented characters, comments on their actions, their appearance, their
personal histories. But Virginia Woolf reveals her characters through what they themselves
think and say, and through the different, often contradictory impressions which other people
have of them. This lack of fixed, all-knowing viewpoint is something else which makes Mrs.
Dalloway challenging to read. We have already stated the fact that Virginia Woolf was not
satisfied with the fiction of her time. But what exactly she wanted to put in its place? We sort
of fiction she herself wanted to write? What in other words, was the cause of her
dissatisfaction?
The-answers to these questions are provided to a large extent, by her articles, diaries and
letters. It is important that we do not see her as an isolated individual, but as someone who
had very close links with other artists and intellectuals of her time. Through looking at the
text of the novel itself, at Woolf s attempt to represent the workings of the mind, we shall see
how, in practice, she carried out the representation of what was to her the most fragile,
dangerous, and exciting of processes: Life itself.

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4. The Literary Context
When she looked around her in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf was disappointed by the limita-
tions she found in many contemporary novelists - writes like H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy,
and Arnold Bennett. She complained that they wrote far too much about things, and not
enough about people - or, if they described people, that they were far more interested in what
they looked like, what kind of house they lived in, what furniture they put in it - than in their
thoughts and feelings. Her chief accusation against novelists such as Bennett was that they
spent, ‘immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the
true and the enduring’ (essay: Modern Fiction).
If we look at her non-fictional writings, they can help us to understand not just what she
was hoping to achieve in specific novels, but also to see the way in which she was
experimenting with the traditional novel form. From 1920 onwards, she was explicitly
thinking of a new type of fiction: one based upon the novelist’s ‘own feeling and not upon
convention’. It was to have ‘no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in
the accepted style’ (essay: Modern Fiction). These elements are not easily discernible in Mrs.
Dalloway.
Take, for example, the death of Septimus, which is undoubtedly a ‘tragic’ event in the
novel. In a conventional novel, the novelist would have spent a few pages, and developed it
into a ‘moving’ scene. But here, Septimus’ death is casually reported in the party. It is a
different matter that the news deeply affects Mrs. Dalloway’s consciousness. The ‘love
interest” in the ‘accepted style’ is also missing. We are only reported what happened in the
past. One wonders if this ‘reporting’ can be as effective as the usual description in a
conventional novel.
In fact, Virginia Woof wanted to write with an ‘entirely different’ approach: ‘no
scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen’. (Diary, 26 Jan., 1920) Instead of putting her effort
into organizing a carefully constructed plot, she preferred to manipulate words and sentences,
to juxtapose different ways of seeing a scene, in order to show the way in which ‘an ordinary
mind on an ordinary day’ receives, and indeed itself organises, ‘myriad impressions.’ (essay:
Modern Fiction) As we have noted earlier, her two earlier novels were fairly conventional in
their style. However, her later novels show her experimentations with new techniques at
work. In Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and a few
others, the novelist stresses the importance of understanding her characters from within.
These novels represent a working out in practice of the theories which she put forward in two
important essays, ‘Modern Fiction (1919), and ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1924). In
these, she makes it clear that the presentation of life and thought is never going to be clear-
cut, because of the disorganized nature of experience, and because, at any one time, there is
always taking place in anyone’s mind a complicated interaction between response to the
present and memory of the past. Let us quote her. in full:
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this’. Examine for a
moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad

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 impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of steel.
From all sides they come, incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they
fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance comes not here but there: so
that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose,
not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon
convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or
catastrophe in the accepted style. ‘Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically
arranged;’ (gig lamps were the lamps in front of horse-drawn carriages, carefully
illuminating a small and circumscribed portion of the road ahead). Life is a
luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelists to convey this varying,
this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it
may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are
not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper
stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality
which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James
Joyce is the most notable, from that of their predecessors. They attempt to come
closer to life, and to reserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves
them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are
commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the
mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however
disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores
upon the consciousness.
Logically, of course, it is hard to see what could be ‘alien and external’ if one is
presenting impressions — any impressions — as they fall upon an individual mind, since this
mind, as Woolf makes it clear elsewhere, had the automatic power to select from, to
assimilate, and to bring to an otherwise confusing mass of facts and sensations. Perhaps
Woolf is suggesting that if the reader is too much aware of the narrator, presenting ideas and
information which haven’t been filtered through the mind of a character, this narrator
becomes something of an alien, distracting presence? The way in which she believes, in fact,
that any thought or impression may indeed be relevant to the novelist’s presentation of
consciousness is made clear in a sentence in the concluding paragraph of her essay ‘Modern
Fiction’: ‘The proper stuff of fiction does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction,
every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception
comes amiss.’ You will notice that for Virginia, feelings, thought, emotion are important;
everything that passes through the human brain or touches the human soul is fit enough for a
novelist to deal with.

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5. Mrs. Dalloway: the Novel
It is now time to come straight to the novel, consider its story in brief, and then discus some
of the important aspects of the text. As you will see, the story-line is quite thin. Mrs. Clarissa
Dalloway. a middle-aged woman belonging to high society, steps out of the house to
purchase flowers. Why? Because she is going to give a party that night, and a number of
important persons, including the Prime Minister, have been invited. As she moves about
London, every encounter she has produces a response coloured by the whole texture of her
earlier experience, so that as we follow her stream of consciousness, we learn all of her
previous history, or all that matters.
Though mainly the story of Mrs. Dalloway. our attention is equally focused on another
character - Septimus and his insanity. In fact, the Septimus - Rezia plot runs as a sub-plot,
though Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus hardly meet or know each other throughout the novel.
According to mechanical or clock time, the action of the novel is limited to a single day
in the life of its principal character. Mrs. Dalloway, and in space to a single place, London,
and emotionally to the relations of Mrs. Dalloway with a few other people like Peter Walsh,
Sally Seton, Sir William Bradshaw, Doris Oman, Lady Bruton, Richard Dalloway, and so on.
(Characters like Septimus and Rezia do not come in contact with her at all). The action is
presented through the minds of these few characters, and as the mind ranges without any
limitations of time or space, the novel is actually concerned more with the past of its
characters than with the present of a single day, as much with other scenes as with London.
The narration does not move forward in a chronological order, but there is much backward
and forward movement.
We move in Mrs. Dalloway’s mind from London to her girlhood in her family home at
Bourton, and back again to London. Thus the world of a pleasant London morning fuses and
blends with the world of her memories, and in this way, with great rapidity and economy, we
are given intimate knowledge of the characters and their relationships. Just as the action
moves in time and space, so it also moves from one consciousness to another, and this
movement throughout is an alternating one. From the consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway, we
move to the consciousness of Septimus, Rezia, Peter Walsh, Oman and others, and then back
again to the consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway. In this way, there emerges a complete picture
of not only Mrs. Dalloway, but her whole society, a society which is spiritually hollow, based
on false assumptions. We are thus given a vital picture of both Mrs. Dalloway and the upper
middle-class London which she lives and moves in.
The important point about this novel is that the novelist has been able to present her
material in a relatively clear and coherent manner. In fact, Mrs. Dalloway represents a
compromise between the need for formal clarity of presentation and the formlessness
apparently inherent in the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique with its insistence that
‘everything is the proper stuff of fiction’, that, “no perception comes amiss’. Obviously,
without achieving such a ‘compromise’, Woolf s novels would have presented a major
problem for her readers.

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 In keeping with the requirements of the technique, Virginia Woolf does not divide her
novel into books or chapters. The only division that we find is in paragraphs - long or short.
Let us concentrate now on some of the immediate concerns of the novel. It is, as we have
seen, mainly the story of Mrs. Dalloway. But the character of Septimus also emerges quite
strongly. His mental state, his “insanity and its treatment engage our attention in no small
measure. Thus, we find in the novel a study of insanity and suicide. What is more interesting
for us to watch is: how the world is perceived by the sane and the insane side by side. To
quote Woolf here: ‘In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death,
sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system and to show it at work, at its most
intense’. The novel, thus, presents a critical picture of contemporary society, its parties and
silly chatter, its hypocrisy, snobbery and materialism.
It may interest you to note here that, originally, Woolf had intended a somewhat different
story: Mrs. Dalloway was to die at the end, suicide or no suicide. But instead of killing her
heroine, the novelist decided to introduce Septimus, her double, who would die in her place.
He is the objectification of the deadness of her soul, as well as of the deadness of contem-
porary civilization. Thus, the Septimus - Rezia story runs as a sub-plot to the main story. The
world of the Dalloways and the world of Septimus - Rezia are quite different, but as we read
the novel, we gradually realise that their lives are complementary to each other. Instead of
Mrs. Dalloway, it is Septimus who is made to die and act out her role by proxy. In his death
he defies the evil represented by the likes of Sir William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist - a
portrait inspired by the novelist’s malice and hatred of those who dominate others, especially
by sharing excessive but false concern.
Other important points about this novel may also be noted. According to Tambling Mrs.
Dalloway refers to many particular historical and political circumstances. As pointed out ear-
lier, it is set on a single day in June 1923 in London. Some of these circumstances are explicit
in the novel, others are implied - these include the First World War of which Septimus is a
direct victim, and the British Conservative government of which Richard Dalloway is a
member and whose Prime Minister visits Clarissa’s party. and London itself in 1923: its
sounds and its buildings, some of them quite new. (Tambling: Essays in Criticism)
Tambling also draws attention to the novel’s references to late nineteenth-century
socialist movements, to the British Empire and the characters, loyalties to it, and also to the
thinking of the time about health, illness, insanity, and sexual identity. Mrs. Dalloway also
shows us a society in which acceptable personal and sexual identities are strictly defined, so
that anything other than narrowly conventional heterosexuality becomes subversion or
neurosis, and is suppressed. (Students should note that we have included Tambling’s essay,
titled ‘Repression in Mrs. Dalloway’s London”, in our lesson, and they should read it
carefully).
Autobiographical elements in the Novel
Earlier, we gave a brief account of Virginia Woolf s life, and you must have noticed some of
the important features which stand out more prominently than the others: her bouts of

12
depression and recurrent attacks of mental disorder; her distrust of doctors, as she suffered
greatly-as she believed - at the hands of doctors; her relationship with her husband - its exact
nature; her lesbian tendencies; her strong inclination to commit suicide: her concern for
privacy of the soul, and so on.
Out of these, the autobiographical feature which we find most prominently reflected in
the novel is Woolf’s bouts of insanity, and her desire to kill herself. During her extreme
attacks, she was attended by doctors and looked after by nurses. Her husband. Leonard
Woolf, arranged medical help for her, and in general looked after her very well. But what she
precisely felt during those periods, her reactions to her doctors and husband, can best be seen
in her portrayal of Septimus Warren Smith.
In fact, Virginia Woolf s account of the circumstances and the fate of Septimus shows
the mind of an expert at work. Her own fits of madness must have stared starkly before her
while writing about Septimus’ condition and his final suicide. The anguish, the despair, the
sufferings of Septimus are a direct projection of her own experiences. And the suicide of
Septimus Smith is a mysterious or intuitive anticipation of her own suicide fourteen years
later. (Remember, Woolf drowned herself in a river in 1941.) If the character of Septimus is a
study in insanity, then what about the characters of Mrs. Dalloway and Peter Walsh? Can we
say that Clarissa is a specimen of insanity? Perhaps yes. But what about Peter? Is he insane?
Perhaps not. Perhaps he is not fully normal also. He projects himself as an insecure,
unbalanced man.
Clarissa Dalloway’s experiences throughout life show that she is able to maintain a
somewhat balanced approach to life. Even a major decision, like choosing a partner, does not
cause any mental conflict: she coolly decides to marry Richard Dalloway. This shows she
does not possess too passionate or emotional a nature. She has come to a son of
understanding with her husband, who does not mind if she sleeps separately. She has a
positive attitude to life, enjoys London and its sights, and keeps herself busy by throwing
parties. Of course, she does have an inner life too, when she thinks of her own death. But
strangely, the death of Septimus enables her to win a victory over thoughts of death.
Symbolism in Mrs. Dalloway
A symbol, in the broadest sense of the term, is anything which signifies something else. As
commonly used in discussing literature, however, symbol is applied only to a word or set of
words that signifies object or event which itself signifies something else, that is, the words
refer to something which suggests a range of reference beyond itself. Some symbols are
‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’. Thus ‘white’, ‘lion’, and ‘rose’ commonly symbolize or
represent innocence, courage and beauty. Writers, especially poets, use these conventional
symbols, but they also invent and create symbols of their own.
Novelists also commonly use symbols. The particular objects, scenes, episodes or
characters that come to stand for the major themes of the work may be repeated or mirrored
in many different ways so as to give the work a symbolic structure, although this may be only

13
delicately implied. Symbols, you must remember, are essentially words which are
connotative as well as emotive and evocative. Through symbols, the writer is able to increase
the expressiveness of the language, and convey his meaning with greater clarity. In fact, the
novelists using the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, can best convey their meaning only
through symbols, for it is difficult to convey through ordinary language the vague sensations
and emotions fleeting through the human consciousness.
In Mrs. Dalloway, we find that a definite symbolic structure emerges out of the various
objects and episodes in the novel. Even characters have symbolic significance. They
represent either one or the other aspect of contemporary western civilization. The Dalloways
represent the outward facade, the outward glitter, pomp and show, of a civilization which is
hollow and rotten within. Through Septimus Warren Smith, the novelist criticizes the
contemporary civilization which generates neurosis, nervous breakdown and insanity. The
horrors and grim realities of war have had an unsettling effect on the mind of Septimus, and
he cannot tolerate persons like Dr. Holmes and Dr. Bradshaw.
Doris Kilman represents the ugly aspects of religion and love. Through her, the novelist
severely criticizes the “corrupt religiosity and possessive love.” Not only the frustrated Doris
Kilman, but a number of clergymen also come under this category - those who hide the love
of power under a religious cloak. Some of Kilman's actions also have symbolic overtones.
The way she eats ‘greedily’ shows her inner deficiency, her hunger for domination and
intimidation. Her external ugliness and shabbiness symbolize her spiritual hollowness. The
car incident at Oxford Street does not fail to strike us as symbolic of the widespread worship
of Royalty by the English. Hugh Whitbread and Bradshaw also symbolize the desire to keep
the existing order undisturbed. They represent the false pride and snobbery in the higher
society.
The airplane, which is seen by many people, unknown to each other, may not be a
specific symbol in itself, but it certainly projects the novelist's view that humanity is bound
by a common thread; the main characters in the novel are seen as part of a larger humanity,
acting, participating in life which goes on and on. The Big Ben, chiming every now and then,
at one level, merely tells us the exact time. But at another level, it is also symbolic of the
march of time, regulating peoples” lives and actions. The characters, at any given time, may
be lost in their consciousness, may be ruminating over past events, but the clock ties them to
the present, to action and decision rather than inaction and indecision. The past is important,
true, and one’s consciousness can never get rid of, but the present is also important.
Certain actions in the novel, too, have symbolic overtones. The most important example
is Peter Walsh’s knife, which he always carries in his pocket. Basically, it symbolizes his lack
of confidence in general, his weak-mindedness, and by fidgeting with it, he reassures himself.
The pocket-knife is also a phallic symbol. His repeated handling of it at different occasions’
shows his sense of his own masculinity. He has met failures and frustrations in life, and this
habit may be a way of assuring himself that sexually at least he is a vigorous man.

14
Plot Overview
Since this is an experimental novel with no conventional features like a clear-cut story, we
have to search for the same, using our own resources. Of course, we have to remember the
technique that Woolf was following in this novel.
Mrs. Dalloway goes out shopping: an ordinary act for any lady in London. But there is a
difference. We have to follow her thought-processes. What she thinks, how she reacts to
sights and sounds, and so on. And as more and more characters are introduced, we have to
follow their thought-processes also. As we said, Mrs. Dalloway is out to purchase flowers.
But we quickly learn that when she was young, she was in love with Peter Walsh. But she
preferred to marry Richard Dalloway as she thought he would give her greater freedom and
independence. Dejected, Peter had gone to India. That was years back. Now we learn that he
has come back from India, having separated from his Indian wife.
Thinking about Peter and her affair with him, Mrs. Dalloway comes to the conclusion
that she was right in marrying Richard Dalloway. He allowed her a great deal of freedom in
life, and so did she. Peter, on the other hand, would have been very demanding and
possessive. Clarissa also remembers her relationship with her friend. Sally Seton. They liked
each other and developed a sort of lesbian relationship. She was worried about her daughter
Elizabeth’s relationship with her teacher Miss Kilman. She was unhappy that Miss Kilman
had a great amount of hold over her young pupil, and again she suspected a lesbian
relationship.
Next, we learn about Septimus Warren Smith, who has become mentally deranged. He
was an efficient employee in a firm, and joined the army when the war broke out. and won
laurels in the war. However, his immediate officer, Evans was killed, deeply affecting
Septimus’ mind. After the war, he went to Italy, where he married Lucrezia. After sometime
Evan’s tragic death began to haunt him; it led to severe depression. He almost became insane.
To get treatment, his wife Lucrezia (or Rezia as she is often referred to), has brought him to
London, where Dr. Holmes has been treating him.
Coming back to her home, Clarissa gets busy in mending her green dress. Peter arrives to
meet her, and the two talk about various things and think about their past relationship. He still
loves Clarissa deeply, thinks about his past, and is filled with a sense of failure in life, and
starts weeping. Clarissa consoles him. Big Ben strikes the half-hour. It is half-past eleven,
and he quickly leaves, and meets Elizabeth on the way. He too has been invited for the party
in the evening.
Next, we again hear about Septimus and Rezia, and come to know more about their
relations, and their past. Rezia is absolutely unhappy as Septimus says very cruel and harsh
things to her. She wonders why he should feel so much at the loss of his friend Evans, as lots
of people lost their friends and relatives. Septimus, indeed, is no longer a sane man and is
being treated by Dr. Holmes! Dr. Holmes does not find anything wrong with him, and at his
suggestion, Rezia takes Septimus to a specialist, Sir William Bradshaw. The new doctor
quickly comes to the conclusion that Septimus suffers from complete physical and nervous
15
breakdown. Septimus is fed up with Sir William also and distrusts him completely. In fact,
both doctors seem to be symbols of evil, who want to impose their will on him. In order to
escape their tyranny, he thinks of putting an end to his life. At last, he does commit suicide.
As soon as he realizes that Dr. Holmes has come to see him, he jumps out of the window.
Then we approach the main event of the novel - the party at night. The Prime Minister
and other important people arrive and everybody is in a mood to enjoy. The arrival of Sir
William Bradshaw and Lady Bradshaw signals a new development in the story. They are late
because, as Lady Bradshaw informs the hostess, one of the patients of Sir William had
committed suicide. A young man had jumped out of the window and killed himself. The
news of the death of a young man disturbs Mrs. Dalloway a great deal.
Even though she is unhappy that Lady Bradshaw should spoil her mood with the terribly
sad news, Mrs. Dalloway cannot help thinking about the young man and the manner of his
death. It was only because of her husband’s active support and co-operation that she was still
alive and mentally sound. The novel ends at a point where Peter looks at Clarissa, completely
fascinated by her. Fie still adores her.
Comments
This is only an outline of the story that one can piece together from the thought-processes of
different characters. There are whole lot of other details about characters and their past and
present history which we have had no time to touch upon. When you read the novel yourself,
you will come to know what we are referring to. But the point is, even this bare outline will
help you understand the novel. I am sure, it would be a novel experience for you. The whole
exercise of following the stream of consciousness of various characters can be quite
interesting. Only, you must be fully familiar with the various aspects of this technique.
As we have noted earlier, the ‘events’ of the novel are confined to one single day in June,
a few years after the first world war. Mrs. Dalloway walks through the West End of London.
In fact, every character reacts to different sights and sounds, while walking around important
places like Green Park, Regent’s Park, Russel Square, the Strand, Piccadilly, Bond Street,
Whitehall. London is indeed important in the novel.

16
6. The Technique of ‘Stream of Consciousness’ in Mrs Dalloway
Let us be clear about one thing: the whole novel hinges or depends on a particular type of
technique. We have referred to it already, and during the course of our discussion of this
novel, we will have occasion to comment on this technique again and again, so that you may
be able to comprehend fully the various aspects of the novel. All the characters, as we have
seen, walk through important places of London. They walk and they think. Nothing of note or
importance happens. There may be a tyre burst in the market, or overhead an aero plane may
fly, making repeated passes over a certain area: or. an ambulance may rush through, carrying
the injured to the hospital. All these seemingly trivial happenings stir memories, associations,
and feelings in the minds of the different characters, so that the inner and the outer aspects of
experience are interwoven.
For instance, walking to Bloomsbury for dinner. Peter hears the bell of the ambulance
that has picked Septimus up. This sight and sound trigger his mental processes. He marvels at
the ‘triumphs of civilization”, and the efficiency, the organization, the communal spirit of
London. Soon his thoughts turn to Clarissa, with whom he had explored London, sitting on
top of an omnibus. His “stream’ of consciousness continues, and we learn about other
meetings between the two. It is in this way that a character’s mind works, and in the process
provides us with the necessary information about him and other characters.
Let us take another instance, again with Peter. While on his way to his lawyer, Peter
comes across Septimus and Rezia. He thinks they are having a serious quarrel, and wonders
why. Later, the beauty of the scene captures his attention, and then he thinks of Manchester.
But why Manchester, he wonders. Then he remembers that it was Sally Seton who married a
rich man settled there.
It is in this way that the stream of consciousness flows, by a natural, easy transition. His
mind goes to Bourton, Clarissa and then to her friends. Impressions and memories are linked
up emotionally, not logically; by the law of association, one event recalls another.
Remember another point. The novelist deliberately makes the paths of some of the
characters cross and re-cross. They don’t know each other, and remain strangers throughout
the novel. Yet they are bound to each other by a common humanity. They see the same
sights, and react to it in their own way. The same airplane is seen by Clarissa, and by
Septimus and Rezia, and a few others like Mrs. Coates, Mrs Bletchley, evoking varying
feelings and emotions. Similarly, the Royal car is seen by many; Septimus’ death is reported
at Clarissa’s party, and shocking her a great deal. The coincidence may be startling, but this is
life. And we have already hinted at the deeper connection between Clarissa and Septimus -
the latter acting as Clarissa’s double.
Manipulation of Time
One of the important features of the novel is the skillful manipulation of time. First, we have
to take into account the ‘mechanical’ or ‘clock’ time: the passing of minutes and hours,
measured by the striking of the clock. Second, there is the ‘psychological’ time or inner time,

17
(Bergson’s concept of time) which may be a voyage from youth to age, from the present to
the past, and to the future.
Thirdly, there is the historic time, or time in relation to nation-wide and world-wide
events. For example, there are direct references to the War which is just over; also, there are
indirect references to the British Empire (Peter’s visit to India). The dock-time tells us about
the passing of time, and this is indicated by the chiming of Big Ben – the great bell in the
clock tower of the British Houses of Parliament. The frequent chiming of the clocks marks
the progress of the day. Read the novel carefully, and you will find that it is early morning
when Clarissa comes out of her house to purchase flowers; eleven o’clock when Peter comes
in to meet Clarissa, half-past eleven when Peter is in Trafalgar Square; a quarter to twelve
when (in response to Rezia’s query) Septimus, very slowly, very drowsily, smiles mys-
teriously at the dead man in the grey suit: twelve o’clock when Septimus and Rezia enter Sir
William Bradshaw’s house and Clarissa lays her green dress on the bed; half-past one when
Hugh Whitebread and Richard Dalloway meet for luncheon at Lady Bruton’s in Brook street;
three o’clock when Richard comes home with his flowers; half past three (‘Big Ben Struck
the half hour’) while Clarissa is thinking about Elizabeth and Kilman, and then watches an
old lady move away from the window; six when Septimus kills himself (‘But the clock went
on striking four, five, six’), and Peter thinks of the ‘triumphs of civilisation’.
The march of time cannot be stopped. Most of the characters on different occasions are
conscious of its importance, and regulate their lives accordingly. It brings proportion, order,
discipline in their lives. But unknown to them, Time also performs the act of uniting, binding
different characters, different situations in its folds. Coming to psychological time, let us
quote David Daiches here:
. . . the added dimension afforded by allowing the persons of the novel to move
back and forth in time to encompass an entire life in a few seconds of thought,
enriches not only the personality of the characters but, in a great measure, the
psychological depth of the book.
The psychological time involves the backward and forward movement of the stream of
consciousness of the various characters. This device of the flashback is often used in films,
where it is quite easy to show the past. But in the written medium, one has to be extra careful
in closely following the thought processes of the characters. We frequently move into the past
and, then come back to the present, and in the process, learn a lot about the characters. For
example, when Clarissa thinks about her past, we come to know about her younger days at
Bourton–about thirty years ago. This peep into her past, also tells us of the various events and
forces which influenced her, moulded her personality.
This exercise goes on throughout the novel, and we learn a lot about Clarissa through her
own ‘flashbacks’. But the novelist uses the consciousness of other characters too to present
before us a full, rounded personality of Clarissa. We will come to this point when we discuss
her character. In this way, the story of a whole life-time is concentrated within the compass of
a few hours. The other characters too are portrayed in the same manner. This concept of

18
mechanical time or clock-time and psychological time is quite significant. Critics have used
the term ‘confrontation’ to explain the relationship between the two. The mechanical or clock
time is a June morning in the present, but the psychological time is also Mrs. Dalloway’s
girlhood thirty years ago. The scene is London, but it is also Bourton. the town where Mrs.
Dalloway lived before her marriage. Threes early June morning reminds her of equally fine
mornings at Bourton in the country-side. It simply means that the specific time in a day -
notified by the Big Ben and other bells - helps in the smooth transition from the past to the
present, or from one consciousness to another. A character is fixed at a place, and is
conscious of the time of the day, but his mind travels tar and wide. There is danger of
complete chaos and disorder. But the novelist achieves a semblance of order and discipline
by the smooth transitions that we have noticed earlier. As we have noted earlier also, the
chiming of Big Ben is nothing haphazard and meaningless: it marks the transition from one
personality to another, from the past to the present, or from one space to another (for
example, London to Bourton).
Sometimes, the characters are fixed in a moment of clock-time, while the novelist gives
an account of the various events taking place in space at the same time. For example, the
sudden ‘explosion’ outside the flower-shop attracts the attention of many people: Clarissa,
Miss Pym, Septimus and Lucrezia. and many others. All making various types of guesses,
and reacting in different ways. The incident, in itself, is insignificant, but it leaves a ripple of
excitement among the people. It is the people who constitute humanity, and we see here
humanity in action, giving us a sense of the flow of life.
Again, we have the example of the airplane. It is being looked at by many characters
simultaneously - Mrs. Coates, Mrs, Bletchley, Mr. Bowley, Lucrezia - all see the airplane.
Later, one or two other characters too notice the plane - evoking different reactions. Mrs.
Dempster is reminded of her nephew who was a missionary in a foreign land. For Mr.
Bentley, it is a symbol of human aspiration and mental concentration. And exactly at this
time Clarissa enters her house, enquiring from her maid: ‘what are they looking at?’
Unknown, unrelated characters reacting to the same event, thus bound by the same
thread. This is the flow of life, where humanity is linked to each other in this way. We get a
sense of the wider life that goes on round the principal characters. Those were ‘clock-time’
examples. But conversely, we are also made to move up and down in time through the
memory of one of the characters. We are kept from straying by the constant reminder of the
speaker’s identity. For example, if it is Clarissa’s stream of consciousness we are following,
we are constantly reminded of her by some such words: ‘That is all’, she said. “Not a straw’,
she thought, or, ‘Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through the swing doors
of Mulberry’s the florist’.
Now, let us come to the third type of time - the historic time. The novelist makes
references to important historical events, such as the first world war, the British Empire, and
so on. The war is over, but it has left painful memories for people like Mrs Foxcroft or Lady
Bexborough who have lost their dear ones - killed in battle. The after effects are to be seen in

19
the form of rising prices. Otherwise, life was usual, everything was fine. ‘The King and
Queen were at the Palace’. The general public was keenly enjoying their sports - cricket,
horse-racing or polo. The after-effects of war are felt in other ways too: it has emotionally
upset, almost unhinged, people like Septimus; for whom, nothing is left except committing
suicide.
Coming to the British Empire we find there is oblique criticism of the way the natives in
India or Africa are treated by their masters. People like Peter Walsh, of course, are somewhat
innocent, they are honourable, dutiful servants of the empire, and not guilty of ‘conversion’
(page 81). European powers often resorted to ‘conversion’ of their ‘subjects’ - forcible or
otherwise - and imposed their will upon the hapless ones. Sir William Bradshaw, similarly, is
a determined imperialist, imposing his will upon his patients. Septimus is a new subject to be
‘converted’ to his iron will. ‘Conversion’, as the novelist tells us, is practised ‘in the heat and
sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever, in short the
climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own’. It is ‘that
Goddess whose lust is to override opposition, to stamp indelibly in the sanctuaries of others
the image of herself (page 81). Like the European imperialists, Sir William’s greatest desire
is to exercise power: ‘Naked, defenseless, the exhausted, the friendless received the impress
of Sir William’s will. He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up.’ Notice the choice of
words; these are strong words, both for Dr Bradshaw (representative of medical profession),
and for British Empire.

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7. Characterization
Keeping in line with her new method of writing a novel, Virginia Woolf also evolved new
methods of presenting her characters. What is, by the way, the conventional method of
character portrayal? In other words, how did the earlier novelist present his characters. First,
he gave a description of his characters - in some cases, a very detailed description. His
appearance, manner of dressing up, and other salient features of his character - all these are
described by the narrator. Secondly, we come to know about characters through their own
deeds and words, as well as through what others have to say about them. Mrs. Woolf,
however, considered such methods of characterization as superficial. In this way, according
to her, we get the externals of character, and not the inner reality. (You are advised, in this
context, to read Virginia Woolf s essays, entitled “Modem Fiction”, 1919, and ‘Mr. Bennett
and Mrs. Brown’, 1924). She admired the Russians who gave importance to the ‘soul and the
heart’ of a character. Virginia, in her novels, wanted to delve deep into the soul or the
‘psyche’ of her characters, and the conventional method of character - portrayal seemed
inadequate to her. Life, as Virginia asserted, should be conveyed not only in its external
aspect, but as it is experienced. As she asserted in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919), ‘the proper stuff
for fiction’ was the myriad impressions received by the mind “exposed to the ordinary course
of life’. Since her approach was psychological, she shifted the focus from the mind of the
narrator to the minds of the characters. Calling this as an important discovery, she wrote thus
in 1923: “I should say a good deal about the hours, and my discovery; how 1 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, and each comes to daylight at the present moment”.
Later she refers to this as her tunnelling process, by which, she adds, ‘1 tell the past by
instalments, as I have need of it’.
It is important for you to understand this ‘tunnelling process’. It is deeply connected with
the new technique that she experimented with: stream of consciousness, or internal
monologue. The personality of a character is built up not all at once, but gradually, step by
step, by noting the impact on his soul of significant scenes and moments, both past and
present. Further revelation of a character is achieved by noting his or her impact on the minds
of other figures in the novel. Thus, we derive our impression of them from the effects they
produce on the minds of other characters in the novel. This method can be termed
“cumulative”: there is gradual increase in information about the characters as they think
about themselves or about others. On our part, we have to store in our memory what
additional information we get in this manner. That is why. Virginia’s characters cannot be
judged in isolation. In other words, we cannot form an independent judgement of a character:
he has to be judged in a specific context, and the context involves different opinions of
different characters about a particular character.
For example, take Mrs. Dalloway’s character. We came to know about her through her
own thoughts and memories, and through the minds of several other characters. Stepping out
to purchase flowers on a fine Sunday morning, her mind goes to her past when she was

21
young, a girl of eighteen years, and her love for Peter Walsh. Thus, through her stream of
consciousness, we learn a lot about her. But that is all. We get other points of view about her.
We come to know what her husband, Peter, Elizabeth, Kilman, Sally Seton, and others, think
about her. We know about her as she is today and as she was in the past, and also know the
various factors which have influenced her soul and determined her character. In this way, we
have been given a peep into her soul; we come to know her more intimately than would ever
have been possible by the use of conventional methods.
Later on, Peter Walsh too indulges in self-revelatory monologues and broods over his
relationship with Clarissa Dalloway. The train of his thoughts continues in this manner, and
we come to know a lot about him and about Clarissa. But to learn more about him, we have
to see what other characters like Sally Seton, Richard Dalloway, and of course, Clarissa,
think about him; what are their impressions about him. This practice of portraying character
from the comments made by others is common enough in fiction. What distinguishes Virginia
Woolf from others is the predominance that interior monologue has in throwing up the
various traits of a character throughout the novel.
Thus, Virginia Woolf, in her novels, emphasizes the fluidity of human personality, rather
than its fixity. Character is not conceived as anything fixed and definitive, but as something
constantly growing and becoming different. Certain scenes and moments are selected which
throw a character into sharp relief, and in this way. through a number of such scenes and mo-
ments, understanding of the peculiar traits of that character is built up. And there is no dearth
of richness and variety of characterization in the novel. Through Peter, the novelist eminently
succeeds in conveying the deep anguish of frustrated love; through Doris Kilman, the agony
and bitterness of frustrated ambition, and through Elizabeth what it feels to be young and
healthy. Through Septimus, she has conveyed the nerve-shattering impact of war, and
through Rezia, what it feels to be lonely in a crowded, populous city. In fact, Rezia emerges
as the most pathetic figure in English fiction. Similarly. Septimus strikes us as one of the
most convincing studies of ‘a mind adrift’. of neurosis induced by the horrors of life in the
trenches.
Since Rezia and Septimus hardly come in contact with any other character in the novel,
their characterization is achieved through ‘inner monologue’ as well as through direct
description. The novelist, in her capacity as an omniscient writer, supplies the missing details.
However, critics have noticed that most of the time Virginia deals with characters belonging
to the upper middle class. She herself belonged to this class, and so could write with author-
ity. The Dalloways and their circle all belong to this class. To that extent, her range of
characterization can be said to be limited. But when it comes to drawing characters like Doris
Kilman, Rezia and Septimus, Virginia shows her skill in bringing them alive, even though
they belong to a lower class.
Apart from limited range, critics have also pointed out certain shortcomings in her
characterization. There is no drama in her novels, for drama depends on clash of characters,
and there can be hardly a clash if each of them is a solitary, self-centered person, enveloped

22
in his own luminous halo or semi-transparent envelope. The treatment of the theme of love
too, has its shortcomings. It is different from what we find in a traditional novel, where love
forms the climax of the story. In Mrs. Dalloway the real love-story begins after her marriage.
But this love story between Clarissa and Peter somehow fails to touch us deeply. The
characters, no doubt, do come alive and impress us because of their feeling and passion for
each other. But too much concentration on their inner lives leaves us puzzled and cold
sometimes.
Some Features of Virginia Woolf’s Style
One of the important features of the novel is its style, which is out and out, poetic. Ordinary
prose would not have served her purpose since she was experimenting with a new technique.
Her attempt to convey the inner states of mind compelled her to use vivid similes, metaphors
and symbols. And metaphors and symbols, as you know, are frequently used by poets. And as
David Lodge observes (see his essay in our lesson,) use of metaphor and symbol is a sign of
modernist writing.
The images which Woolf’s metaphors evoke are often more vivid and startling than the
metaphors of normal prose. Again, like the diction of poetry, her style is highly allusive and
suggestive. Her words suggest much more than they actually connote. Significant words and
phrases are repeated, and such repetitions are very close to the refrain of a song. R. L.
Chambers observes: “What Mrs. Woolf does is to borrow the technique of poetry to enlarge
the possibilities of expression in prose, at one and the same time to make clear her meaning
and drive home its emotional implications.”
In the first paragraph itself, we have description of ‘a morning-fresh as if issued to
children on a beach’. This is a poetic description of a particular morning. The next paragraph
begins with quite evocative phrases: ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ Her mind goes back to the
past. And the past is recaptured in a style that brings back the past most effectively. ‘How
fresh, how calm . . . the rooks rising, falling.’ (p. 1) The fresh morning symbolizes the
morning of Clarissa’s life, her happy girlhood at Bourton. Flowers and green fields in the
novel, again and again, symbolize peace and contentment. Thus, when Lucrezia dreams of
her happy life at Milan, she thinks of fields and flowers. A rose is a symbol of love and
fulfillment. When Richard Dalloway wants to express his love for Clarissa, he brings roses
for her. Again, while walking home along the Strand. Elizabeth observes the beautiful
cloudscape with its alternating lights and shades: “A puff of wind . . . darkness.” (p.112)
Alternating light and shade symbolize the alternating joys and sorrows of life.
Another feature of the style is economy of words. ‘The King and Queen were at the
Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of
galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh.’ The relative calm and
peace that prevails in Britain after the war, and the British sporting life has been captured in
these few lines.
This technique of presenting characters is deficient in one respect: lack of variety. There
is a deadening sameness in the style. All characters - rich or poor, young or old - are
23
presented in the same style - the style of the creator. The cool, cultured, snobbish, upper class
Mrs. Dalloway is presented in the same language as Peter, a broken-down, insecure failure.
However, while reading the novel, one is not necessarily put-off by the sameness of
style. We get thoroughly involved in the inner drama of the minds that is unfolded before us.
On the poetic element in the novel, Joan Bennett observes: “often the form and substance of
Mrs. Woolf’s novels resemble the form and substance of lyric poetry more closely than they
do those of prose fiction”. A lyric is subjective, giving expression to personal emotions. As
we have noted earlier, Mrs. Dalloway illustrates these characteristics of a lyric.

24
8. The Character of Mrs Dalloway
In the light of what we observed about Virginia Woolf s art of characterization earlier, let us
briefly discuss Mrs. Dalloway’s character. Mrs. Dalloway steps out of her house to purchase
flowers, walks through London’s streets and parks, (as she tells Hugh Whitebread: ‘I love
walking in London’ and comes back. But in the process, important things do happen. If not
outwardly, at least inwardly. Clarissa perceives, thinks, remembers and generalizes, and in
doing so suffuses her present experience with the feelings and experiences of thirty years ago.
What she remembers becomes a part of what she sees now, and these in turn contribute to
what she thinks; her attitude to life: London: this, moment in June.
In fact, the opening sentence seems to be the start of a conventional story: “Mrs.
Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. But it proves to be a deceptive start: we are
immediately taken into her past. The delight of plunging into the London morning reminds
her of similar feelings experienced as a girl at Bourton, and makes her think of Peter Walsh.
which brings into her mind the fact that he is soon due to return from India. She vaguely
remembers his remarks about vegetables, his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, and so on.
Notice that the past here is not in contrast with the present, but involved with it. Mow?
Because. Clarissa feels the same as she did at Bourton. “What a lark! What a plunge!” Peter,
we shall find, is still making remarks about vegetables and playing with pocket-knife.
While Clarissa is lost in her thoughts, she is observed by her neighbour, Scrope Pervis,
who thinks how charming she is, and compares her to a bird, a joy, blue green, light,
vivacious, and notices how white she has grown since her illness. Can you guess why Scrope
Pervis - who does not appear again in the novel - is made to observe her in this way? Simply
to give us an idea of her personality, outward instead of inward. Avoiding a direct method of
description, the novelist is able to give an external view of Clarissa - ageing, pale, elegant,
and charming. And thus, we have two views of her, internal, emotional life - about which we
keep learning throughout the novel, and an external view.
What we have just witnessed is the stream of consciousness technique in operation. But
in order to avoid incoherence and chaos which this method can lead to, the novelist briefly
describes the location, setting, and a few historical details: “For it was the middle of June.
The war was over . . .’ This is the conventional way of describing a scene. The chance
meeting with Hugh Whitebread in St. James Park activates her memory, and we come to
know more about her love for Peter Walsh; how and why they separated, and why she came
to marry Richard Dalloway. “She could remember scene after scene at Bourton.” (p. 5) In a
flashback, the whole past came surging back, giving us a peep into her mind, (as Virginia
says, ‘digging caves’ in her mind) and we come to know that Peter was very possessive. His
remark that she was ‘the perfect hostess,’ still rankled her. (The remark implied that she was
insincere and hypocritical; that she believed in showing off and threw parties for ulterior
motives.) So, she finally rejected him and married Richard Dalloway – a man of means and
status.

25
 As she remembers, she was right in not marrying Peter. He would not have allowed her
freedom and independence. But Richard was different, and allowed her plenty of
independence. As she recalls;
For in marriage a little license, a little independence there must be between
people living together day in day out in the same house: which Richard gave her,
and she him. (Where was he ‘his morning for instance? Some committee, she
never asked what). But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone
into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene m the little garden by
the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both
of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about her for years like
an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish: and then the horror of the
moment when someone told her at? Concert that he had married a woman met on
the boat going to India! Never would she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude,
he called her. Never could she understand how he cared But those Indian women
did presumably - silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For
he was quite happy, he assured her - perfectly happy, though he had never done a
thing that they talked of: his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.
(p. 6-7)
Clarissa, it seems from the above passage, prized ‘privacy’ and ‘freedom’ much more than
anything else. She had the wisdom and intelligence to judge that she won’t be able to lead a
happy manned life with Peter, even though she loved him intensely. Hence, she married
Richard Dalloway Thus she loved one person, but married another one. What does it show?
Was Peter right when he taunted her that she would marry a Prime Minister and become the
perfect hostess? Perhaps yes. She might have married for money and status. But the fact
remains that her judgment her ‘instincts’ prove correct. With Peter, her very soul would have
suffered. She is an independent bird. Her nature is indeed paradoxical. She feels very young,
and at the same time very old “She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time
was outside, looking on This, and the rest of the paragraph sums up her personality. Later on,
we are told: ‘Her only girt was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on.’
Such a woman could not have become almost a slave to a person like Peter. As we said
earlier, she vehemently believes in the privacy of the human soul. She believed that;
there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and
that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one
would not part with it oneself or take it, against his will, from one’s husband,
without losing one’s independence, one’s sell-respect -something, after all,
priceless. (p. 97)
How right she was, becomes immediately clear when she reaches home. She reads the
disconcerting message written on the telephone pad: ‘Lady Bruton wishes to know if Mr.
Dalloway

26
will lunch with her today’. And Lucy tells her: ‘Mr. Dalloway, ma’am, told me to tell you he
would be lunching out’. This news, no doubt, deeply upsets her; makes her even jealous. But
she is not prejudiced against her husband. They have a clear understanding: freedom to go
wherever they want. And she has her own ‘attic room’, her single bed, symbol of her single,
private life, for she gives utmost importance to the privacy of the human soul. In fact, as we
gradually learn through her stream of consciousness, her real problem is instinctive dread of
menfolk. She remembers the times when she ‘failed’ her husband, failed to satisfy him
sexually. She is ‘cold’ towards her husband, and we must acknowledge that Peter’s charges
of coldness, hardness and woodenness against Clarissa are largely true. But she did yield to
the charm of a woman. Sally Seton, for example. (Her lesbianism is another feature of her
character.) Thus, her choice of Richard and rejection of Peter symbolize her commitment to
emotional, and even sexual virginity. For, loving and protecting her as Richard does, Richard
would never intrude on Clarissa’s well-guarded privacy. It is precisely because of this reason
that she hated Miss Kilman and Sir William Bradshaw.
Let us turn to the section where she gets upset on seeing Miss Kilman and Elizabeth
going to the market. (p. 102) Why should Kilman try to ‘convert’ Elizabeth, to dominate her,
to possess her soul. “Had she ever tried to convert anyone herself? Did she not wish
everybody merely to be themselves? . . . but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it
was, the privacy of the soul. The odious Kilman would destroy it.” (p. 102-103)
Clarissa’s dislike for Dr. Bradshaw stems from the same reasons. Men like Bradshaw try
to impose their will on others, and Clarissa, as we have seen, hates such people. And as we
noted earlier, it was because of Richard’s moral and psychological support that she could
survive.
Coming back to her consciousness again, we find that she reveals a lot more about
herself. For this, you should concentrate on two sections: when she is at home, in the
afternoon, and when she is busy in the party. For, even while attending to her guests, her
mind is at work, all the time. But Clarissa’s character is also revealed through the thoughts of
Peter and Sally Seton. For instance, it is from Peter’s stream of consciousness that Clarissa
comes across as a worldly-wise woman, who cares too much for rank and ‘getting on’ in the
world. According to him, Clarissa enjoys imposing herself upon others, likes to have famous
people around her, and that she is a snob. (For Peter’s views, you have to read different
sections of the novel carefully, as his thoughts are scattered here and there. For Sally’s
thoughts, you can read the party section.)
Let us now sum up her character. As we have seen, she is a sociable lady, likes to visit
people, above all, likes to throw parties. Of course, she throws parties for selfish reasons, like
enhancing her husband’s career. We also notice that she is a loving wife and an affectionate
mother. She sincerely appreciates her husband’s gestures like presenting roses or bringing in
her pillow and quilt. ‘Part of his adorable, divine simplicity, which no one had to the same
extent.’ Her way of introducing Elizabeth to Peter as ‘My Elizabeth’ shows that she is proud
of her daughter.

27
 One of the most important aspects of her personality is her love and passion for Sally
Seton. Her girlish friendship for Sally has lesbian overtones, and we are reminded of Virginia
Woolf’s own passion for Vita Sackville-West. (Read carefully the section where Clarissa re-
members her relationship with Sally, p. 26.)
The next important aspect of Clarissa’s character is her suicidal tendency. She is deeply
hurt to hear about a young man’s suicide. She remembers an occasion when she too wished to
die. In Septimus’ death, she sees her own image. If, for Septimus, life was made intolerable
by people like Dr. Bradshaw. For Clarissa, life was made tolerable by her husband, who
provided psychological support to her. Otherwise, she would not have survived. Mrs.
Dalloway, ultimately, represents the upper middle-class world of London, in which she lives
and moves. Through her. the novelist criticizes the society also. As one critic puts it: “she is
an animated mirror, having a life made up of the world she reflects: she is a living image of
the surface of the society Virginia Woolf was concerned with”. It is not without reason that
Peter calls Clarissa a ‘perfect hostess”. The implication is quite clear: she stands for the
insincerity, the triviality, the hypocrisy of the upper-class social life. The world she moves in
reminds us of the world of the waste land. For T.S. Eliot, modern civilization is a spiritual
waste land, and this death of the soul, is also symbolized by Mrs. Dalloway. There is no
depth of feeling or understanding in her. She lives on a superficial plane. She is painfully
conscious of her own spiritual sterility, of the lack of purpose and direction in her life. Hence,
she gives parties frequently - parties which are a symbol of social triviality and frivolity. In
this way, she is able to forget her loneliness.
But when we say that Mrs. Dalloway is a representative figure, when we say that she is a
typical product of her environment, it does not mean that she does not have an individuality
of her own. Virginia Woolf s skill lies in portraying a character who is both representative as
well as individual. She remains etched in our memory, and we remember her as a young girl,
a wife, a mother, as a woman in love, and as a conventional hostess. All this is achieved
through the stream of consciousness technique which helps bring out a highly interesting
figure with whom we can easily identify. All her strong points and weak points of her
character are part of common humanity. We enjoy, in fact relish, some of the thoughts which
pass through her mind, and we cannot fail to remark: this is real life.

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9. Critical Excerpts
i) Repression in Mrs. Dalloway’s London by Jeremy Tambling
Mrs. Dalloway is set in 1923, so its protagonist, who is in her fifty-second year (p. 34) is to
be assumed as having been born around 1871 - eleven years before Virginia Woolf. Mrs.
Dalloway’s affair with Sally Seton, which occurred when she was eighteen, is therefore to be
thought of as taking place before 1829; two years after the criminalization of male
homosexual acts (but not lesbian ones), and three years before Keir Hardie became the first
independent Socialist MP. With Sally Seton who read Morris, she meant to found a society to
abolish private property (p. 36): Morris had founded the Socialist League in 1884, Sally
Seton’s other theme then was ‘women’s rights’ (p. 80): that topic of the 1890s. Labour finally
became the official opposition in 1922, under Ramsay MacDonald, taking 25 more seats than
the Liberals, and the election of December 1923 enabled a minority Labour party to come to
power in January 1924 (Lady Bruton seems to anticipate this, p, 121). The Empire is under
threat in 1923; the novel refers to the ‘news from India’ (p. 121) and presumably when Peter
Walsh wishes to find out what the conservative duffers’ are doing in India (p. 176) he refers
to the agitation for independence there. In contrast Aunt Helena Parry remembers India in the
1860s (pp. 195-6), and Burma in the seventies (before it was made a province of the British
Indian Empire, in 1885). Peter Walsh, who has had the same penknife for thirty years (p. 47),
was sent down from Oxford in 1893, presumably for his Socialism (the echoes of Sally,
whom Sally also reads, are probably deliberate), and his then love of abstract principles and
his reading of science and philosophy (p. 55) epitomize a radicalism that he has not been able
to maintain: the future has passed from him. Indeed, he reflects with surprise that journalists
can now write about such subjects as water closets which ‘you couldn’t have done ten years
ago’ (p. 78).
Ten years ago, of course, is 1913: the irony of the remark suggests how far this London
society has managed to say ‘the War [is] over’ (p, 4), as though it could never be an issue
again. Significantly, Peter Walsh thinks in terms of the changes between 1918 and 1923. not
of those changes brought about through the war itself- one of the major themes of Mrs.
Dalloway. This novel is usually treated in terms of its use of ‘stream of consciousness’, or as
a meditation on time and on building up the person every day afresh, but it nevertheless
incarnates a critique of Empire and the war. taking the state as the embodiment of patriarchal
power, and the upholder of what even Richard Dalloway calls ‘our detestable social system’
(p. 127). Dalloway’s comment echoes Virginia Woolf s record of her intention: ‘In this book
I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to
criticize the social system and to show it at work, in its most intense’.1 The novel looks back
on a lifetime’s history and anatomizes the situation produced by the part that obtains in
‘London; this moment of June.’ It is not a complete account, and its vision of London is itself
nostalgic. It takes no note, for instance, of the beginnings of the Americanization of the
capital which was also a feature of the interwar years,’2 and its social range is limited. Its
sense of London is not distinctly different from the nostalgia and the myth-making that late
Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian architecture evokes.
29
 Westminster, which Elizabeth Dalloway finds neither serious nor busy - the point is
made in contrast to the professionalism obtaining in Chancery Lane and the Strand (pp. 149-
50) - is at the centre of the novel. Its symbol is Big Ben. Heard repeatedly throughout the
course of the day’s events, its chimes death-like (‘leaden’) and its presence, like that of the
state, pervasive. Its evocation of negative feelings in the novel focuses the critique made of
the state, ‘viewed by Woolf as the very embodiment of patriarchy, both assertive and
restricting. By a set of metonymies which deserve farther inspection, it now stands in
contemporary media representations for both Parliament and the nation: although Virginia
Woolf did not live to know how the emotional power of its chimes heard on the wireless in
the Second World War acted as a focus for the nation, the novel startlingly anticipates this
deployment of the clock for ideological ends. Big Ben tolled for the funeral of Edward VII in
1910, and its chimes ringing out the old year were first heard on the wireless in December
1923: moments noteworthy for their provision of an apparent, though. imaginary. national
unity. In the decade of unemployment and class differences leading? the General Strike.5
such a simulacrum of unity could only seem more needful. The broadcast chimes may even
find their analogue in he pervasive sounds of Big Ben described in the novel. The potential of
meaning goes deeper than the novelist can know, suggestive even down to the fit between air-
waves and the fictional waves in which the leaden circles of Big Ben dissolve - a seeming
synesthesia which becomes literal in the age of the British Broadcasting Company. Time’s
expression is not so much the existentialist enemy in this novel, as a part of the language of
state-power which is felt to be threatening and minatory, and which clothes itself in its
architecture and statues.
Peter Walsh’s walk after leaving Mrs. Dalloway’s house in Westminster (pp. 52-60) pro-
vides visible illustration of the power of recent history and the state. He turns into the signifi-
cantly named Victoria Street, opened in 1851, and the site of the Army and Navy Stores. The
name, which appears later, when Elizabeth and Miss Kilman visit it, is also suggestive:
beginning in 1871 in order to furnish the military throughout the British Empire, it opened to
the public as a department store in 1920, evoking the omnipresence of the Services within
public life. Walsh passes St. Margaret’s (restored by Gilbert Scott, 1878) at half-past eleven,
missing out Westminster Abbey, later visited by Miss Kilman, who watches people shuffle
past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior (p. 146) - again, a then new feature of London public
ideology: the soldier was buried in 1920. But the carries on up Whitehall, and ‘glar[es] at the
statue of the Duke of Cambridge’ (p. 55): Commander in Chief of the British Armies from
1856 to 1895 (and therefore during the time when Walsh was sent down from Oxford). The
references to the Duke of Cambridge and Walsh leaving Oxford are lightly juxtaposed in
Woolf s text, as though implying the easy association of the army and the academy.
As Walsh meditates on his past, he is overtaken by marching boys of sixteen in uniform,
too young to have fought in the war and destined ‘(since there would be no more wars) to
become grocers, to “stand behind bowls of rice, cakes of soap on counters.’ Their expression
is statue-like, ‘praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England’ (p. 55). Since they have
come from Finsbury Pavement, they belong presumably to the Honourable Artillery

30
Company, the regiment privileged to march through the city. They have come to lay a wreath
at the Cenotaph, again new: Lutyens set it up in stone in 1920. The regiment passes on to the
Strand; Walsh comes up to Trafalgar Square and faces statues of Nelson, Gordon, Havelock,’
‘Gordon whom as a boy he had worshipped; Gordon standing lonely with one leg raised and
his arms crossed, -poor Gordon, he thought’. Gordon, who died in 1885 (his statue, now on
the Victoria Embankment, was set up in 1888), the fighter of the Crimea, of the second
Opium War in China, and the hero of Africa, epitomizes those values that Walsh cannot free
himself from - despite his 1890s socialism. His past in India, his playing with the penknife,
that symbol of awkwardness within the desire to be aggressively male - these things give the
sense of an irresistibly returning patriarchy. Walsh’s childhood hero proves more potent in
terms of character-formation than his Oxford rebellion. In the spirit acquired by association
with such war heroes, he follows a young woman flirtatiously and has a ‘fling’ (p. 60).
[There follows here a long passage, which has had to be omitted, in which Tambling
describes the Westminster of 1923 - which seems old to us but which was new then, with the
Victoria Memorial still under construction. Tambling’s point is that the London of the novel
is the historical London, which was then forming into the embodiment of a society which
worships imperialism: and that that imperialism involves both homophobia and the
veneration of an ideal of ‘Motherhood’ which represses all emotion and presides over
militarism. The passage concludes with a reference to Septimus’s final moments in which, no
longer stifling his feeling for Evans and his own femininity, he ‘becomes a more complete
character’. Ed.]
Character, in Mrs. Dalloway, is not something merely inherent within a person: it is the
result of an interrelationship between individuals and the space they inhabit. Clarissa’s
‘theory’ of the 1890s, expounded to Peter Walsh from the top of the omnibus in the new
Shaftesbury Avenue, built in 1886, is that ‘she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”;
and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up
Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the
people who completed them, even the place’ (p. 167). One such place is the formal, squared-
off London of statues in rigid poses which helps to form those who live within its
environment. Here is the Modernist sense of character not as something innate, but produced
from without, from the lived practices (which must include the ideology) of a society, rather
from a deep personal subjectivity.
On this basis, what character does this London produce? An answer might be that it has
the capacity to intimidate and create a character that responds to it in terms of feelings of
inadequacy- hence the novel carriers in it a prevalent sense of neurosis or hypochondria. Its
first page mentions Mrs. Dalloway’s recent illness which has affected her heart; the third
refers to the Whitbreads coming up to London to see the doctors. Septimus Smith began
‘weakly’ (p. 94) and after the war is in a state of collapse which licenses the prowling
attention of Dr. Holmes (the name implies the doctor’s role as the detective) and Sir William
Bradshaw. Bradshaw, whose name recalls the railway timetable (the irony is comparable to
that against Baedeker in A Room With a View) and suggests his rigidity, has been practicing

31
for thirty years - Septimus Smith’s age - and he has, like Dalloway and Whitbread, a wife
defined by weakness. Lady Bradshaw’s will was sapped fifteen years ago; she is forced to
‘minister to the craving which lit her husband’s eye so oilily for power’ (p. 110) and at dinner
parties she suffers from a disagreeable ‘pressure on the top of the head’. A pattern of male
control and female illness is established amongst the upper classes in the novel. The pattern is
only reversed by Septimus Smith, who must be looked after by Rezia, until he concludes his
life by suicide. Further victims of illness include Lady Lexham, who does not attend the party
because she has caught a cold at a Buckingham Palace Garden party (p. 184). and Ellie
Henderson. Who is obsessed by people catching chills. (pp. 184-5)
Bradshaw is at the heart of this medic lived society, identified by Woolf with serving the
interests of the militaristic state. He uses the power of the law in his consignment of people to
mental asylums (p. 106): his worship of Proportion - a no doubt classical goddess - ‘made
England prosper.’ (p. 109) At the same time Proportion’s allegorical sister, Conversion, is
imperialist. engaged “in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the
purlieus of London”. Rezia deduces that Conversion, which conceals itself under the names
of “love, duty, self-sacrifice”, “loves blood better than brick.” (p. 110) The appearance of
monumental London-dignified, proportioned, the celebration in stone and marble of the big
words which Conversion and the marching sixteen-year-olds use - really signifies the desire
for power that stops at nothing, certainly not the bloodshed of the war.
But what kind of criticism is Woolf able to mount of this will to power in Mrs.
Dalloway, and why does she fasten so much on matters of what would be called hysteria (in
Septimus Smith) or neurasthenia (possibly Mrs. Whitbread, probably in Clarissa Dalloway)?
An answer in the spirit of Michel Foucault would stress the privileged nature of the doctor’s
discourse in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western societies. The doctor’s knowledge,
which in Bradshaw’s case ‘secluded lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it
impossible for the unfit to propagate their views’ (p. 89), is power and a means of social
control, since it contains the potential to define each and every non-medical person. David
Armstrong’s The Political Anatomy of the Body, amongst much else, suggestively details the
rapid increase within medical discourse of terms for mental illness from the 1800s onwards
and into the twentieth century. He sees this as part of a whole construction of people as being
potentially mentally disturbed, through the intensified power of that discourse. Thus in 1922,
Sir Humphrey Rolleston, President of the Royal College of Physicians, pronounced that
‘probably the bulk of patients in ordinary practice present some disorder, however slight, of
mind, conduct or feeling’/ Neurasthenia, an illness characterized by mental fatigue (hence the
opposite of hysteria, which involved over-excitement), was first diagnosed in 1880. By the
1930s, according to Armstrong, the term was dumped as a clinically useless description. Like
The Waste Land (1922) which ends with Hieronimo mad again and contains what F. R.
Leavis in 1932 characterized as the “neurasthenic’ passage ‘My nerves are bad tonight’,5Mrs.
Dalloway makes mental instability a dominant theme. In the novel the necessity is for the self
to ‘compose’ its fragmentary parts into ‘one center, one diamond’ (p. 40). Biographical
considerations are involved in both Eliot’s and Virginia Woolf’s cases - Bradshaw may owe

32
much to Sir George Henry Savage, who sent Woolf to a private nursing home in 1910 and
again in 1913 - but such considerations are only part of the texts’ larger historical story,
involving the increased medicalization of society, the readiness to label people as mentally
ill, and the absorbed attention given to nerves and mental instability.
Mrs. Dalloway certainly evokes a prevalent sense of neurosis; according to Armstrong,
in the early twentieth century the word was taken to contain a warning of possible madness.
The psychopathology of everyday life is visible in Peter Walsh playing with his penknife, in
Hugh Whitbread writing capital letters with rings round them in his typically pompous
manner (p. 120), or in Lady Bruton’s slightly obsessive idea of solving the problems of
unemployment by sending people to Canada. Even Mrs. Dalloway’s slightly arch or fey
interest in fresh air- ‘fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge’
(p.3) - can be related to this medical discourse: Armstrong says that delicate children were
now to be looked after in environments stressing fresh air and open window’s and. from 1907
onwards, in open air schools. The obsession with order, or Proportion, includes Mrs.
Dalloway’s strong class and probably sexual dislike of Miss Kilman, and prevents Richard
Dalloway telling his wife he loves her. A further craziness affects Sir Hugh Whitbread,
whose fetishizing of his twenty-year-old silver fountain pen suggests his comfort with things,
not people. The novel involuntarily colludes with the dominant medical discourse in seeing
people in the light of the clinic, assenting to the individualizing gaze provided by twentieth-
century medicine with its sense that health is something relative and social, an objective
towards which the individual strives, the attainment, in fact, of complete ‘proportion’ (p.108).
Armstrong’s argument substantiates Modernist perceptions of character. The
development of the dispensary within local communities, which is where he starts, stresses
the idea of disease as being in the social body itself, in the environment-not in the individual,
but in the spaces between people, It is less a question of quarantining and separation of
people from a society-in that sense, Armstrong could be used to imply that Sir William
Bradshaw belongs to an older system of thought in more ways than one-but rather one of
seeing people as created from the outside. Mrs. Dalloway thinks about the spaces between in
relation to herself: ‘Somehow, in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here,
there, she survived. Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of
the trees at home [ Bourton]: of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bites and pieces as it
was. part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew
best... (pp. 9-10). She associates her existence with both London and her past home: she
exists in the interstices between people and her character rises from contact with these things.
The space between is what cannot be sealed off; there can be no hard edges of separation.
General Gordon stands looking out as a lonely individual, but that isolation denies the
creation of character from without.
Mrs. Dalloway not only makes use of a discourse which reads people in the light of their
secret and diseases, but builds up a sense of their characters from that. As a novel, it cannot
criticise that model of knowledge, however much it may despise Sir William. But the text im-
plies that the prevalent neurosis may be accounted for in terms of a brutalizing and

33
destructive sexual politics. Armstrong is comparatively silent on the effects of the war in his
discussion of the formation of a society known by its neuroses. Shell-shock and gassing could
not be accommodated within the prevailing patterns of discourse. Further, the war issue from
the social values seen in public architecture; and we have seen how the goddess Conversion
not only gives doctors a license to change people’s lives, but empowers the state to destroy
rather than to build up-to love blood better than brick. The feeling that the war harbours
include the displaced homoeroticism of the Smith-Evans relationship. Paul Fussell’s The
Great War and Modern Memory aptly suggest the unrecognized homosexuality underpinning
officer-men relationships: feelings that cannot be acknowledged, but which because they can
be translated into myths of innocent and doomed soldier-boys do nothing to prevent the
continuance of the war. Destruction is sustained through images of sacrifice and the
unwillingness to allow innocence to change into experience. Boys coming into the trenches
must not return from the battlefield into the dull working-class existences from which they
had, superficially, been freed - which Peter Walsh envisages for the sixteen-year-old member
of the regiment.6 These homoerotic feeling are denied at a conscious level. That they are so
is, in Woolf s terms, the result of the dealings of Proportion, which imposes identity, but
which Mrs. Dalloway left to herself to be labile: ‘she would not stay of any one in the world
now that they were this or were that . . . she would not say to Peter, she would not say of
herself. I am this. I am that.’ (pp. 8, 9)
To suggest that male homosexuality is at the heart of the book helps us to fill out the
text’s gaps and silences. The text, however, works by indirection as well as by unconscious
motives, some of which Woolf is aware of, some not. This Miss Kilman/Elizabeth rela-
tionship and the Clarissa/Sally Seton memories both present cases of mutual female attraction
which parallel the male feelings of Smith and Evans. In the 1928 Preface to the novel, Woolf
wrote that ‘in the first version, Septimus who, later is intended to be her [Mrs. Dalloway’s]
double, had no existence, and Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself at the end of the
party’. The neurosis making suicide so potent a possibility in the text is less important than
the fact that sexual difference - the male/female distinction – is, for Woolf, in no way fast and
definite, but constructed. Septimus Smith emerges out of a potential in Mrs. Dalloway. The
novel questions how much the characters may recognize these differences as socially
constructed, maintained through the patriarchal discourse of Sir William, for whom the
distinction between normal and marginal behaviour is to be violently maintained by the
imposition of willpower, and by the relegation or ‘conversion’ of the person who feels
differently.
Yet Mrs. Dalloway feels herself misnamed within her culture. She goes upstairs to her
narrow bed, which itself anticipates a death-bed, and where she has been reading Baron
Marbot’ s Memoirs the night before - memoirs being texts composed in order to guarantee
that the person writing them is the same as the person who has experienced such things,
making it possible to say. ‘I am this, I am that’:
Lying there reading, for the slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved
through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly

34
 there came a moment - for example on the river beneath the woods at Cliveden -
when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed him . . . She
could see what she lacked. It was not beauty; it was not mind. It was something
central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled
the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. For that she could
dimly perceive . . . she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charms of a
woman . . . confessing, as to her they often did. some scrape, some folly. And . . .
she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. Only for a moment, but it was
enough. (p. 34)
As with Madame Bovary, in Flaubert’s novel, an irony attaches itself to the married
name of Mrs. Dalloway since it can never be uniquely descriptive. Further, the name ‘Mrs.
Richard Dalloway’ (p. 11) misnames. But the name ‘Clarissa’ a silent other possible title for
the heroine (and the novel), suggests a mode of resistance to male aggression that Mrs.
Dalloway does not know, though it belongs to the novel’s frame of references. It evokes both
the social satire of The Rape of the Lock and Richardson’s heroine, who dies after being
violated. But although through some unconscious process Woolf harks back to two texts
depicting rape in comic or tragic modes, Mrs. Dalloway, despite having a daughter, still feels
herself essentially virginal. The sensed alliance between this ‘narrow’ bed and her death-bed
implies both a contrast and a similarity to Clarissa Harlowe, whose loss of virginity ties itself
immediately to the prospect of death, just as her loss is the ‘contact of man and woman’ and
(with Anna Howe) ‘women together”. Mrs. Dalloway is a marginalized figure in her attic: the
echo of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre is also perhaps present (it is worth recalling the use of
that novel in A Room of One’s Own). But it there is something deathlike about the state of
women in this meditation, as the bed-linen is white, and Mrs. Dalloway has grown very white
since her illness (p. 4), she fits with other nineteenth-century women in white, fictional or
real: Miss Havisham, Ann Catherick (The Woman in White), and Emily Dickinson who
dressed in white, all victimized figures of virginity, of madness - hysterical or neurasthenic -
and of confinement; indeed, all faintly relating to Clarissa Harlowe herself.
Mrs. Dalloway herself is aware of a personal ‘coldness.’ The text does not require us to
share in her self-blame, or agree that warmth is what Mrs. Dalloway lacks in her relations
with her husband. The criticism is self-deprecating, in a way fitting with a dominant medical
discourse which defines sexuality and codifies what a woman’s response should be to a man.
The ‘virginity’ of Clarissa Dalloway indicates that the contacts between men and women are
inherently ‘cold’ in this society, as are those between women. The point is glossed in A Room
of One’s Own: ‘I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that
when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve.
Women are hard on women. Women dislike women’.7 It is not a matter of what qualities
personally inhere in Clarissa Dalloway: rather, that a coldness, according to Woolf, exists in
the codes of behaviour dictated by the way sexual difference is defined, between women.
Sexual difference fits with class differences too: much of Mrs. Dalloway’s and Miss Oman’s
mutual dislike is due to the class distinction making a warmth between the two women

35
impossible. Mrs. Dalloway has noticed the coldness in herself: the effect upon her is of a
feeling of guilt, and of personal inadequacy.
The central, warming ‘something’ which could amend the coldness would have to ‘break
up surfaces’, and this would involve refusing to accept not only the terms in which sexual
difference presents itself- but also the dominant forms of London’s formal late Victorian and
Edwardian architecture, with its insistent ideological representations of power, duty and self-
sacrifice. In describing this ‘something’, Woolf is glancing at her own writing: at the need for
a text which would cut at those hard distinctions, beginning with the point that the
“androgynous” (the word is taken from Coleridge) mind is ‘resonant and porous; that it
transmits emotions without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and
undivided’.8 Thus any attempt to make difference stick is likely to be arbitrary and wilful.
Androgyny, in its traditional sense of ‘combining the attributes of both sexes’, suggests an
essentialist (or nineteenth-century) reading of the characters of the sexes, whereas Woolf
tends towards the view that any delimitation of the characters of the sexes is itself the
problem which her fiction must resolve.
What could permeate, and thus overturn the opposition man/woman—which also
involves the opposition woman/woman, since the failure in the first, privileged relationship
must prevent ease in the second - is undefined by Mrs. Dalloway’s meditation. But the
discourse of medical science in her day rejected strongly the implications involved in Mrs.
Dalloway’s refusal of a single unitary state, of ‘I am this, I am that”. Sexual difference, for
Woolf, is founded absolutely on the basis that identity is so delimitable by and within a
society. Recent French feminist criticism works from the premise that identities are born
through cultural practices, associated with subservience to the rule of patriarchy. Julia
Kristeva speaks of the Modernist ‘fragmentation’ of language, meaning the break-up of solid,
realist nineteenth-century narrative-like style. The writing in Mrs. Dalloway with its breaks
and leaps across time and interruptions of the onward flow of events with other moments
remembered in metaphor, might be seen as ‘fragmented” in that it cuts away from ‘a culture
where the speaking subjects are conceived of as masters of their speech’, as Kristeva puts it.
She sees fragmentations as modes of “traversing or denying” such mastery, adding that ‘the
word “traverse” implies that the subject experiences sexual difference, not as a fixed
opposition (man/woman) but as a process of differentiations’.9
‘Mastery’ in the novel is male-based, or reveals itself in matriarchs whose behaviour
borrows from male codes, as when Lady Bexborough shows the same hardness and stoicism
that belongs, in mythology, to the battlefield where John died, and which Septimus Smith
displayed in relation to the death of Evans. The demand for mastery requires a firm sense of
character as self-creation: ‘making it up, building it round one’ (p.4), as Peter Walsh creates
his Clarissa Dalloway (‘For there she was’, p. 213). But the novel also suggests that the
power to make up the character it still a matter of loss, of misnaming, and that ‘the speaking
subjects are not masters of their speech’ in so creating themselves. Mrs. Dalloway discovers
this at the mirror, ‘seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that night to give a
party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself . . . She pursed her lips . . . it was to give her face

36
point. That was her self, pointed, dart- like, definite. That was her self when some effort,
some call on her to be her self drew the parts together . . . ” (p. 40) The moment in front of
the mirror plays on the ambiguity of ‘herself’ and ‘her self’ suggests the constructed and
partial nature of the self she must create that night, and implies that the peremptory call on
Mrs. Dalloway to create that self does not allow for individual liberty: it also invokes the
subjection of disparate parts so that they can be elided into one unit. An analysis using
Kristeva or Lacan would see this naming of the self as dictated by the authority of the law of
the Father so that the naming is according to the codes and differences set up within the
society that insists on clear-cut differences.
But ‘patriarchy” in this novel does not mean something abstract or simply inherent in a
family structure: it means the rule of an oppressive state power that has as its spokesmen
Bradshaw telling people whether they are well or not in the name of ‘Proportion’, or Richard
Dalloway pronouncing on poetry and on its dangerous emotional or sexual charge. Nor is
there anything of abstraction in Woolf s account of the loss the self sustains in its learning of
sexual difference. The war-spirit sustains rigid difference and separation. Madness ad suicide
and coldness imply the price paid for non-recognition of the presence of otherness within the
unitary self. Woolf suggests in the news from India, however, that even the Empire cannot be
preserved as a monologic and monolithic entity: the signs of otherness are forever coming
back in opposition. The architecture of London, the medical knowledge of the doctors with its
power of surveillance, class considerations - registered so potently in people’s response to the
car going past near the novel’s beginning - these elements show how patriarchy as an
ideology is created through specific practices within this society. Woolf s stress on veiled
homosexuality suggests that what is repressed could either be a source of warmth, if released,
or destructive, if not.
Yet-though the novel would like to replace the definition and hardness of patriarchalism–
the cutting edge of Victorian sculpture giving way to the soft, epiphanic vision of London by
Pisarro and Monet, so different from the tastes of the Royal Academy–it might also be said
that it can imagine no alternative to the rule of patriarchy. How far, in the end, can it distance
itself from Peter Walsh’s attitudes?
A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season;
civilization. Coming as he did from a respectable Anglo-Indian family which for
at least three generations had administered the affairs of a continent (it’s strange,
he thought, what a sentiment I have about that, disliking India, and empire, and
army as he did) there were moments when civilization, even of this sort, seemed
dear to him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England; its butlers;
chow dogs; girls in their security... And the doctors and men of business and
capable women all going about their business; punctual, alert, robust, seemed to
him wholly admirable, good fellows, to whom one would entrust one’s life . . .
(p.60)

37
 The ironies here in Walsh’s recognition of his own unreasoning sentiments, in the
comment on the doctors, in the class-bound choice of things to be noticed for approval; are
important. But it is not just the interest in the ‘the season’ that connects Walsh’s perceptions
to Mrs. Dalloway’s He is at home here, as she is, because the status quo suits him very well.
The novel’s failure, despite its local use of irony, to make something of social as well as
sexual difference seems to be the blindness accompanying its insight. The moments when
either Mrs. Dalloway or Peter Walsh recognize that this London does not suit them can be
forgotten as they cannot be for Septimus Smith or Rezia - figure the novel keeps collusively
on its margins. Septimus Smith could not really be Mrs. Dalloway’s double. And neither he
nor the others could, after all, attend Mrs. Dalloway’s party.
[From Essays in Criticism, 39 (April 1989), 137-55.]

NOTES
[Jeremy Tambling reads Mrs. Dalloway as a novel centrally concerned with history, with the
First World War and British imperialism and militarism and with the possible connections
between these thing and ideas about the nature of the individual. It uses critical methods
deriving from the work of the French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-84), who sought to
understand texts in terms of the discourses on which they are constructed, rather than as
products as a single authoritative mind and with one overt meaning. Tambling argues that
Mrs. Dalloway criticizes the established stare as oppressive, and also articulates the
modernist idea of personal identity as not fixed but fluid: and that it indicates that rigid
definitions of sexual deference are the products of an oppressive society, and that individuals’
suffering is frequently the result of such definitions and of the repression of homosexuality.
But, he goes on to argue, the novel cannot offer any alternative because it is itself built in the
discourses it criticizes. It defines its characters in terms of contemporary authoritarian idea
about mental health and illness. It even admires, almost nostalgically, the sophisticated
society of a powerful states.
Tambling himself constructs his conclusion in a dominant discourse of today’s criticism,
describing the opposition within Mrs. Dalloway in Kristevan or Lacanian terms, as a struggle
between the mastery of a dominant narration and the disruption and fragmentation of that
narration.
As throughout this volume, references to Mrs. Dalloway are to the Penguin edition with
an Introduction and Notes by Elaine Showalter and text edited by Stella McNichol (London,
1992). Ed.]
1. Leonard Woolf (ed.), A Writer’s Diary. Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia
Woolf (London and New York, 1953), p. 57:19 June 1923.
2. The ‘Ainericanisation’ of London is discussed by Gavin Weightman and Steve
Humphries in The Making of modem London 1914-1939 (London. 1984). pp. 9-10 and
throughout.

38
3. See Kate Flint, ‘Virginia Woolf and the General Strike’. Essay in Criticism, 36 (1986),
3 19-34.
4. David Armstrong, The Political Anatomy of the Body (Cambridge. 1983). p. 22.
5. F. R. Leavis, New Bearing in English Poetry (London. 1932: Harmondsworth. 1963). p.
84.
6. Paul Fussell, The Great Liar and Modern Memory (Oxford. 1975). ch. 8.
7. Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own (London. 1929: Penguin, 1945, 1992), p. 109.
8. Ibid., p. 97.
9. Julia Kristeva. interview in Elaine Mark and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds). New French
Feminisms (Brighton. 1981). p. 165.

39
Critical Excerpts
ii) ‘Thinking Forward through Mrs. Dalloway’s Daughter’ by Rachel Bowlby
How far have women come? To answer such a question, it would be necessary to establish
where women meant or were meant to go, to know their destination, and that of feminism. In
Three Guineas, notoriously, Woolf looks forward at one point to a time when the word ‘femi-
nist’ will have ceased to exist. In the context the concern is with ‘the right to earn a living’:1
at the end line, feminism has done its work when women have become eligible to enter the
professions on the same basis as men. But elsewhere, it is not at all clear what for Woolf
would constitute the ‘end’ of feminism: its purpose or its dissolution, as the movement
reaches its goal.
[Three paragraphs in the original essay, omitted here, Woolf s ‘equivocations’ on issue
of what women’s aims and destinations should be, and suggest that Mrs. Dalloway
foregrounds many of these issues. Ed.]
When Elizabeth Dalloway steps out and takes the bus up the Strand on a fine June day in
1923, everything seems to suggest that she is the bearer of new opportunities for her sex, a
woman who will be able to go further than her mother, still bound to the conventional
femininity of the Victorian Angel in the House denounced by Woolf in ‘Professions for
Women’.2 Elizabeth indulges in an excursion of independent fancy through the streets of
London during which she is associated with the omnipotence attributed to the means of
transport:
Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded the omnibus,
in front of everybody. She took a seat on top. The impetuous creature - a pirate
started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself for a pirate
it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing
dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing
eellike and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up
Whitehall. (p.148)
The movement through unfamiliar parts of the city inspires Elizabeth with idea of a life
quite different from that of her mother, criticized by Peter Walsh as ‘the perfect hostess’
(p.67):
Oh, she would like to go a little farther. Another penny, was it, to the Strand?
Here was another penny, then. She would go up the Strand.
She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open to the
women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. So she might be a doctor. She
might be a farmer . . . It was quite different here from Westminster, she
thought, getting off at Chancery Lane. It was so serious; it was so busy. In
short, she would like to have a profession. She would become a doctor, a
fanner, possibly go into Parliament if she found it necessary, all because of
the Strand. (Mrs. Dalloway, p.149)

40
Elizabeth’s imaginative venture could be taken as a positive sign of women’s progress: she if
driven by ambition beyond the ken of women, thirty years before, and unencumbered by the
pressure of masculine interference. Rather, in that she may become an MP, like Richard
Dalloway, she identifies with the possibilities of a paternal profession.
No bar is placed on her rambling exploration, which suggests a difference from a related
Victorian text which is cited, and censured, in A Room of One’s Own. ‘That is an awkward
break’, announces the edgy narrator,1 who wishes that what seems to be Grace Poole’s laugh
did not intrude upon what then seems all the more defensive a protest on behalf of women’s
‘restlessness’ and right to wider experience. The chapter of Jane Eyre from which Woolf
quotes begins with the optimistic statement that ‘The promise of a smooth career, which my
first introduction to Thornfield Hall seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer
acquaintance with the place and its inmates’,4 but the limits to the satisfaction afforded by
that career appear on the very same page:
I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might
reach the busy world, towns, region full of life 1 had heard of but never seen; I
desired more of practical experience than 1 possessed . . .
Who blames me? Many. no doubt, and 1 shall called discontented. I could
not help it; the restlessness was in my nature: it agitated me to pain sometimes.
Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards
and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s
eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it - and, certainly, they were
many and glowing: to let my bean be heaved by the exultant movement, which,
while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life: and, best of all, to open my
inward ear to a tale was never ended - a tale my imagination created, and narrated
continuously: quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and
had not in my actual existence.
Woolf s own citation of the passage beginning ‘Who blames me?’ breaks off awkwardly
after ‘pain sometimes.’ The focus is then one a “restlessness” detached from both the desire
for ‘practical’ experience and sight of ‘the busy world’, and the imaginary ‘relief of the
‘bright vision’ and the ‘tale that was never ended’, supplying ‘all of incident, life, fire,
feeling’ missing in actuality.
It is these omissions which make possible Woolf s criticism of gratuitous expressions of
anger by women writers. But it is as if the eliminated parts return in Woolf s own novel to
structure her twentieth-century rewriting if the Victorian spinster’s prospects, where every
element is included except the anger. For Elizabeth Dalloway there is no censorious Beadle
or Woolf to put a stop her reverie. A practical aspect to her dreams is suggested in the
repeated, tangible fact that women can now enter the professions: Elizabeth is presumably in
no danger of having to become an impecunious orphan governess. So, it might indeed seem
that what was mere fantasy for a nineteenth-century woman, an imagining of liberty so futile
as to be psychologically debilitating, has now become a realist possibility. Whereas Jane Eyre

41
dreams out form a distant rural rooftop, Elizabeth Dalloway is already on top of the bus,
travelling through the city in which she may well fulfil her ambitions. . .
Elizabeth Dalloway comes of Establishment stock, and has herself been educated by an
impoverished exile. This is the formidable Miss Kilman, who has had none of her pupil’s
chances, and whose bitterness is perhaps, by caricature, another Woolfian jab at the anger of
the Bronte heroine. It is as if Miss Kilman is a nineteenth-century specimen rudely
repackaged and sent on. Complete with a religious faith whose anachronism in the secular
Dalloway society is underlined by its fundamentalist excess.
But these complexities should already suggest that the passage form the nineteenth to the
twentieth century is not so direct or progressive at it may at first have seemed. For while
Elizabeth Dalloway’s daydreams are certainly more realizable in one sense than Lucy
Snowe’s or Jane Eyre’s, they are no less marked, like Jane Eyre’s, by a fantasy of
transgression, which is set in a close relation to the various familial and educational influence
on her.
The bus trip is initially an escape from the by now unbearable company of the same Miss
Kilman who is the origin of her ideas of female aspiration. But Elizabeth’s attachment to her,
and in particular this afternoon’s outing which began as a visit to the Army and Navy Stores,
is in part in defiance of her mother, to whom it is a cause of distress. Professional plans are
explicitly conceived as antimaternal: she is ‘quite determined, whatever her mother might
say, to become either a farmer or a doctor’ (Mrs. Dalloway, p. 150). And this despite the fact
that her mother apparently considers the idea of Dalloway professional women as a long-
established tradition, not a revolutionary breakthrough or breaking away:
But then, of course, there was in the Dalloway family the tradition of public
service. Abbesses, principals, head mistress, dignitaries, in the republic of
women–without being brilliant, any of them, they were that. (p. 150)
For Clarissa, female authority is a matter of course. Elizabeth’s professional fantasy is
thus ironic in that it functions as an escape from what she perceives as the constraints of two
supporters of professions for women, the mother and the governess. And Elizabeth readily
returns for the time being to her domestic calling as a good, civilized daughter: ‘She must go
home. She must dress for dinner. But what was the time? - where was a clock?’ (p. 150). The
novel’s finale places her at the side of her father, with whose professional achievements she
earlier courted an identification. Now. instead, she is seen by him, unrecognized at first, as a
beautiful young woman. This does not make her father’s equal or surrogate, but effectivity
returns her to the position of the idealised object of what she dismissed before as ‘trivial
chatterings.’ (p. 150)
Elizabeth’s destiny, then, is far from certain in either its evaluation or its outcome. Her
predicament places her alternatives as between the possibility of participation in the center of
masculine power, as ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘arrogant’ as the bus (p. 148), and what appears as
an ignominious succumbing to a ‘trivial’ femininity as the object of male admiration. The

42
incompatibility of the two is pathetically suggested by the scene of Miss Oman’s resentful
and random purchase of a petticoat in the department store.
But Elizabeth’s story is not. of course, the primary focus of Mrs. Dalloway. That is part
of what makes it so innovative a text, in that the heroine is the woman of fifty and not her
eighteen-year-old old daughter on the brink of courtship. For the most visible subject of the
novel is the insistent re-enactment for the older woman of the romantic drama which
according to most of literature should have been “settled” once and for all thirty years before,
with her choice of Richard Dalloway as a husband.
In a stimulating essay on Mrs. Dalloway, Elizabeth Abel says that the novel
‘demonstrates the common literary prefiguration of psychoanalytic doctrine, which can
retroactively articulate patterns implicit in the literary text’.10 Recapitulating the difficult of
the development towards ‘normal’ heterosexual femininity as descried by Freud. Abel reads
the conclusion as Clarissa’s belated acceptance, thirty years after the events, of her ‘choice’
of Richard over the pre-Oedipal female bonding of her relationship with Sally Seton.
The particular inflection in Mrs. Dalloway of such a claim for the prefiguring of
psychoanalytic theories can be pointed up, once again, by a comparison with Bronte. In
Villette, there is a literal recovery of the original family setting when Lucy Snow awakens
after her lapse of consciousness to find herself once again surrounded by the relatives familiar
from her childhood, magically removed to the same foreign city; which then leads to the
beginning of what she imagines as a romantic relationship with her attractive male cousin. In
Mrs. Dalloway, such a structure is reinscribed in the form of the literal reappearance of many
of the chief and minor actors in the decisive period of Clarissa’s youth: Ellie Henderson,
Aunt Helena- ‘for Miss Helena Parry was not dead’ (p. 195) - Sally Seton, and above all
Peter Walsh. Yet this functions not as a new start in the form of new romantic commitments,
but as a means of negotiating what are shown to have been insistently present rememberings
of that time in the minds of Clarissa and Peter throughout the day and, by implication,
throughout their lives.
Sally’s passionate kiss, interrupted by Peter and another man, is centred in Abel’s
reading as representing the impossible and abandoned alternative to the nun-like chastity
Clarissa has instead adopted in becoming Mrs. Richard Dalloway. Her daughter’s liaison with
Doris Kilman, in contrast, is a more ambivalent female bonding, since it is described in terms
of conflicting determinations and structured in relation to a revolt from her own mother, the
first, and female, object of love. The ‘purity’ (p. 37) of the relationship with Sally stands out
all the more by comparison; but it is in virtue of its status as a memory, an old wives’ tale
which figures in retrospect for Clarissa as the lost idyll of youth before she married and
moved to London. What the novel suggests, then, is not so much the purer status of love
between women as the giving up implicit in the turn to maturity, in this case heterosexual.
For as Abel points out, Clarissa’s feelings for women are themselves infiltrated by masculine
and feminine imagery: ‘she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt’ (p. 34).

43
 Peter Walsh also features in Clarissa’s reminiscences (as she in his), representing the
romantic hero rejected in favour of the conventionality personified by the Conservative
Member of Parliament.” She reacts after Peter’s unexpected morning visit:
If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day!
It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow. She had gone
up the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun. (p. 51)
Again, it is not so much implied that Clarissa should have married Peter really, as that the
choice of a life as Mrs. Dalloway made way for the idealization of the two other lovers
thereby given up: that it was not a one-and-only choice and as a result has been written over,
throughout its long duration, with memories and imaginings of the other lives neglected for
that of the ‘perfect hostess’.
The instabilities and overlappings of individual identity are constantly, repeatedly
emphasized in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa herself ‘would not say of any one in the world not
that they were this or were that’ (p. 8); the ending, with her reaction to the suicide of a man
she has never heard of, reinforces a connection that the narrative, with its separate account of
the drama of Septimus and Lucrezia Warren Smith, has implicitly made all along. Her
objection, in the same context, to the psychiatrist’s doctrine of ‘Proportion’ (‘Sir William said
he never spoke of “madness”; he called it not having a sense of proportion’ [p. 106] parallels
Septimus’ own.
The lack of settlement or of fixed identity in Clarissa’s life stands out also in its
difference from the order and regularity — the daily ‘proportions’ - indicated by the repeated
chiming of Big Ben. ‘The intoning of the hours is associated with the authority of national
and other institutions: with what Paul Ricoeur, following Nietzsche, calls “monumental”
time.12 Ricoeur links this with the symbolic force of the figure of royalty passing in
anonymous majesty through London during Clarissa’s shopping expedition; or with the
enigmatically suggestive advertising slogan written on high and eagerly deciphered by the
crowd whom it equally draws together and hails from the sky with its brand-name riddle.
Such emblems of power are fully implicated in this novel, as habitually in Woolf, with
masculinity institutionalized and imposing. Here Peter Walsh looks on:
Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched,
their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written
round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England.
(p.55)
Big Ben keeps in time with this lifeless national parade of conformity and ‘discipline’ (p. 56):
The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with
extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were
swinging dumb-bells this way and that. (p. 52)

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It is as if the highlighting of the time, almost a refrain with the repetition in the narrative of
exact forms of word, brings to the fore the artifice of the naturalized structure within which
individual lives and times are differentiated. A similar effect is produced in The Waves by the
poetic interludes describing the movement of the sun, and making the analogy between a life,
or six lives, and a day. But whereas that time is represented as the natural framework of a
recurring solar movement, in Mrs. Dalloway the use of the clock and the specification of
hours and half hours proceeding in order from one to twelve and from a.m. to p.m. makes
time more linear than circular, emphasizing the man-made, cultural arbitrariness of the
twenty-four’ hour into which the day is divided.
In Mrs. Dalloway, the imperial Big Ben time is undermined not only by the
discontinuous temporalities of the various characters and the double time which they live, but
more literally by the belated chiming of other clocks which challenge or mock the precision
of Big Ben’s time-keeping. The clock with a feminine name follows after:
Ah, said St. Margaret’s, like a hostess who comes into her drawing room on
the very stork of the hour and finds her 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. Some grief
for the past holds it back; some concern for the present. It is half-past eleven, she
says, and the sound of St. Margaret’s glides into the recesses of the heart and
buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to
confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest - like
Clarissa herself, through Peter Walsh, coming downstairs on the stroke of the
hour in white. (Mrs. Dalloway, p. 54)
Via Peter’s thoughts, the narrative makes the already suggested link with the ‘hostess’
Clarissa explicit, and adds to the connections of that terms in Woolf s writing. In ‘Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, the novel of Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells were criticized for
their resemblance to hostesses who never get beyond polite introductions to substantive
communication. Here, on the other hand, the formalities of the doorstep are not so much
prolonged as superfluous in the face of an apparent breach of convention, the guests being
already installed. St Margaret’s makes of the perfect hostess (there on the dot, and ‘perfectly’
right) the possibly less than perfect, denying what may be her tardiness. She loses in any case
by the fact of asserting and acting on her different view: even if (according to the arbitration
same ultimate clock in the sky) it is actually she who is right, she has de facto renounced her
status by failing to defer to her guests. So, the feminine hostess cannot win: if perfect she is
too perfect, merely polite; if other than polite, differing from her guests, she is imperfect.
In contrast to the ‘indifference’ of Big Ben, St. Margaret’s wants to connect. Neither
wholly neutral nor wholly in the present, ‘some grief for the past holds it back; some concern
for the present’. It is ‘like something alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself.
The syntax of this part of the sentence creates a gap between ‘to be’ and ‘at rest’, before
‘Clarissa herself appears, and invokes all the uncertainty of her own attitude to life: at once

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an active an active pursuit, in the creative ‘gift’ of her parties, and a retreat in to her attic
room, a wish like Septimus’ to be finally at rest.
Such equivocation on the part of Clarissa/St. Margaret’s also render questionable her
relation to the preceding peal of Big Ben. St. Margaret’s more doubtful ring could be seen as
either complementary (the trivial following the serious, both making a well-tuned ensemble),
or lightly mocking (the second a gentle mimic), or challenging, by disrupting and detracting
from his univocal, authoritative announcement.
The significance of the hostess as clock is thus far from single in its resonances. ‘Clarissa
herself epitomizes the hostess/woman who barely, but just, finds a harmonious place within
the sound and purview of recognized social forms. Whereas Septimus Smith is the extreme
‘case’ of someone who has lost all contact with the external, common orders of daily life and
daily time, Clarissa is questionably situated like St. Margaret’s, neither within nor without,
somewhere between utter differing and absolute conformity. She is close enough to sound or
seem as if she simply echoes established authority, and distant enough for her chimes to
verge on an expression of doubt or an ironic doubling.
Clarissa is both perfectly conventional in her role as lady and hostess and, at the same
time, a misfit: Mrs. Dalloway is all about the fact that she is still unresolved in a choice
apparently completed a generation before. The calm security which is itself the conventional
appearance of the hostess is undermined on so far as Clarissa is frequently in different times
and places, remarking and reinforcing her preference for Richard over Peter, now structured
as a clear-cut opposition between stability and adventure. Like Mrs. Ramsay, to all
appearances a model of maternal equilibrium, she is in reality anything but ‘composed’,
except in the sense of being put together from disparate parts: ‘she always had the feeling that
it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.’ (Mrs. Dalloway, p. 9) . . .
Clarissa Dalloway’s predicament returns as a question for her daughter. In the same way
that, as Elizabeth Abe! points out. the significant and unconcluded episode of Charissa’s
youth appears to begin and end in late adolescence rather than infancy, Elizabeth Dalloway is
a young woman without a past and with man}- possible future directions: ‘Buses swooped,
settled, were off— garish caravans, glistening with red and yellow varnish. But which should
she get on to ? She had no preferences” (p. 148). Unlike her mother’s period of hesitation at
Bourton, Elizabeth’s takes place in the city which can then figure forth the new urban
opportunities not available to her mother’s generation of women. But Elizabeth’s fantasies
are represented, as we have seen, as a form of rebellion against maternal wishes: and the
narrator, sometimes via the thoughts of the mother, represent her as naive: ‘So she might be a
doctor. She might be a farmer. Animals are often ill. She might own a thousand acres and
have people under her. She would go and see them in their cottages’ (p. 149). This suggests
that Elizabeth’s professional ideas are childish rather than mature fantasies, and adds force to
the hints that she may turn from them to the more usual feminine place she presently refuses:
‘For it was beginning. Her mother could see that. The compliments were beginning’ (p. 148).
Further, the difference between being an object of poetic idealsation and being a professional

46
is structured for Elizabeth as a mutually exclusive opposition of the “trivial” to the “serious”.
For the time being, she places herself on the masculine side of that valuation, rather than
seeking to modify its hierarchy or its terms of exclusion.
Mrs. Dalloway makes visible the absence of unity behind the centred facade of ‘a
woman’ deemed to be emblem of such pacific completion- ‘the prefect hostess’, married for
thirty years-and this then seems to pave the way for the unavoidable non-finality of any
course that the daughter may come to take. The indeterminate places of both mother and
daughter draw attention to the greater complexity of women’s unroyal roads to a femininity
that is always other than fully’ integrated: but also to a greater openness from their very lack
of fit with the dominant masculine order. In the fictional ‘1923’. Elizabeth like her mother is
still subject to ‘some call’ upon her to live up to “the complements”, and the city career she
dreams of is marked as a ‘serious’ escape from a feminine triviality she rejects. It is because
and not in spite of this stark division that her ‘pioneer’ venture into parts of London where
Dalloway’s fear to tread (‘For no Dalloways came down the Strand daily’ (p. 151) may lead
to the discovery of an identity which is formed otherwise than by the deference between the
serious ‘procession’ of urban conformity and the angel or hostess in the house.
[From Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf, Feminist Destinations (Oxford, 1988), pp. 80-98]
NOTES
[Rachel Bowlby’s book from which this chapter is taken is an exploration of Woolf s
changing and unconcluded investigations, in her novels and major essays, of issues of
feminism: of what women are and what they might hope to be and do. It precedes its
discussion of Mrs. Dalloway with a chapter on To the Lighthouse, seeing that novel as an
exploration of ways in which feminine subjectivities conflict with the organized and linear
thinking of masculinity, so that both are untenable. Bowlby then moves on to discuss Mrs.
Dalloway as an investigation of how to represent ‘a more complex feminine or feminist
temporality’ (p. 79).
In explaining this idea in the essay printed here, Bowlby explores Mrs. Dalloway in a
variety of different critical discourses. She compares Elizabeth and Clarissa and Miss Kilman
as realistic representations of the uncertain roles available to women in the London of the
1920s. She compares Woolf s Elizabeth with Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, young women
confronting life in Charlotte Bronte’s novels, and she does this in the context of Virginia
Woolf s own ambivalent discussion of Jane Eyre in A Room of One’s Own. She also disputes
Elizabeth Abie’s psychoanalytic reading (see pp. 147-8 above) that sees Clarissa as having
had to abandon her own feminine sexuality to conform to heterosexual marriage, and
proposes instead a deferent reading that sees Clarissa as a fluid feminine consciousness.
1. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London and New York, 1938; Penguin edition 1977),
p. 117.
2. Michele Barrette (ed.), Virginia Woolf, Woman and Writing (London and New York,
1979), pp. 57-63. [See my note 3 to Homans’s essay, p. 139 above, Ed.]

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3. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London and New York, 1929; Penguin edition
1945, 1992), p. 70.
4. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847; Harmondsworth, 1984). p. 140.
5. Ibid., pp, 140-1.
6. Charlotte Bronte, Villette (1853; Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 109.
7. Ibid., pp. 117-18. «
8. Ibid., p. 107.
9. Andrew McNeillie, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1921-24 [London, 1988], pp.
427-8).
10. Elizabeth Abel, ‘Narrative Structure(s) and Female Development: The Case of Mrs.
Dalloway’ in Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland (eds), The
Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover and London, 1983), p. 171.
11. The Peter Walsh/Richard Dalloway difference may be compared with Woolf s story in
A Sketch of the Past.
12. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et recit, vol. 2. La Configuration dans le recit de fiction (ch. 4,
n.8). especially pp. 158-9.
13. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London and New York, 1931; Penguin,1992), pp. 127-8.

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Questions
i) Mrs. Dalloway is a fine specimen of the stream of consciousness technique. Discuss.
ii) Discuss the narrative technique employed by Virginia Woolf in her novel Mrs.
Dalloway.
iii) Discuss Mrs. Dalloway’s character, as portrayed in the novel Mrs. Dalloway.
iv) Attempt a critical evaluation of the role of the party in Mrs. Dalloway.
v) ‘No novel of Virginia Woolf’s is as saturated with the pain and the exultation of living,
the obsession with death, the terror of loneliness, as Mrs. Dalloway. Discuss.
vi) Write a character - sketch of Peter Walsh on the basis of your reading of the novel,
Mrs. Dalloway.
vii) Write a character - sketch of Septimus Warren Smith, with special reference to his
insanity.
viii) Mrs. Dalloway is a satirical comment on contemporary civilization. Discuss.
ix) Write a note on the love - theme of the novel.
x) How does Virginia Woolf deal with the theme of sanity and insanity in Mrs.
Dalloway?
xi) Discuss the significance of the use of symbols in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
xii) Write brief notes on: Dr. Bradshaw, Richard Dalloway, Lady Bruton, Doris Kilman,
Sally Seton and Elizabeth.

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