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Mrs Dalloway notes

Modernism/Postmodernism (National University of Ireland Galway)

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Single day in June 1923 London. Whole breatdh, width of London in a small time. To cut across class and
gender, age. Way story is told/function > tale itself.

Concerned with capturing in words the excitement pain beauty and horror of the modern age.
Constantly seeking new creative forms that could do justice to the complexities of modern conciousness.

Montage (cinematic) of experiences.

Reflect authenticity, mirror the universal human experience.

Streched form and content at a rapid rate reflects the modern city, fast moving and developing. Woold
embraced depicting the effect this had on characters.

Fragmented plot, time/order/perspective (no chronological order)(no reliable omniscient narrator)

(ambiguity of ending).
Subjective narrative emphasizes the unreliability of memory.
A woman's whole life explained within a single day.
content ugly – psychological effects of the war, toxic masculinity drove men mad - Septimus Warren
Smith suffers in a society that despises feelings. Self made, self educated went into the war and was
psychologically destroyed (shellshock/ptsd).

https://bu.univ-ouargla.dz/master/pdf/soumia_bouzid.pdf?idmemoire=286
Clarissa suffers from more subtle everyday oppression of English society

Modernism was self-reflexive/concious leading to experiments in form and content

use of interior/symbolic landscape: 'to go inside the world against realist representations of the exterior
as a physical, historical site of experience'. Time considered as pyschological not historical (realism) but
the bells of the churches give a physical idea of time passing.

STREAM OF CONCIOUSNESS
literary technique to give the written equivelant of a character's thought processes. Continuous flow of
ideas, thoughts, images, feelings so we'd move deeply in to the human mind. No chapters but flow.
Trying to mimic the way we loosely associate when jumpiny from thought to thought. Our minds are
alternately engaged, and in an alternative manner. The way we're taking art in is different.

Characters are presented as split beings who live in the past and present. Their thoughts, feelings and
memories reveal to us who they were and who they are now. The introspective analytical reflective point
of view is important here, and SOC brings this out

Time, memory, desire and inner consciousness combine to create an allusion that the character is talking
in the first person present tense although gramatically it may be the 3 rd person past tense.

Contrasts to soliloquoy which speaks to the audience or an absent 3 rd person, it primarly talks to the
characters internal self.

Interior monologue is SOC in a more organized way, the characters thoughts may still be disjointed or
make associative leaps but there's more proper punctuation and grammar usually. Used interchangably,
some consider SOC the gener with IM the technique for delivery.

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Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably
cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to
believe that death ended absolutely? But that 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; of the house there; ugly, rambling all to bits as it was; part of people she had never
met; being laid out like a mist between people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she
had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as
she looked into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover?

Self-concious about her hat infornt of hugh makes her think how Peter disapproved of Hugh (what
could’ve been)

Modernity
Wolf was struck by the changes in the aftermath of WWI, affecting class system and family. Modernity
reflected in cars, cinemas, planes. The Edwardians wrote about character in fact, how much does he
make, what's his diet, his passtimes, where do the women spend their spare time. This data is
materialistic and superficial and she wanted to get at something else. A way of dealing with personality
not so much influenced by external fact (things you owned, money you had), but more psychological,
interior – consciousness.

Gov Car and Ad Plane bring people’s thoughts in unison ‘all along the mall people werE standing and
looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly still’..

Narrative – managed by multiple perspectives, not one omniscient, several different POV's in the story.
All characters must see, but be seen and to be seen from a number of different point of views. She
wanted to deal with psychological notation. What's the interior reality, what's happening on the inside as
people see the world as they live in with their own memories fantasies, projections, associations and as
they are perceived by the people they encounter. Subjective internal mental world of various characters.
Seldom uses grammar, or quotation marks to denote dialogue (ie in Clarissa and Hugh’s encounter,
ensures divide between internal/external remains fluid, allows us to evaluate characters from internal
and external POVs

Spatial Metaphor for modern Urban life - A million spokes coming from an axle without a tyre to connect
their tips. Axle is the objects of their common experience. The million spokes’ connection to 1 axle
denotes the enlargement of experiences. Their intersection at the axle implies unity/uniformity of
experience but their disconnection from the other spokes at the far end signals the alienation of the
individual and the disintegration of societal bonds. Their varied direction from the axle indicates various
perspectives, and the weakness of the objects commonness.

“[Clarissa] had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown”, lost in “this astonishing
and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street”

Amorphous crowd of passersby on Bond St is the defining aspect of Fin De Siecle urban life.

The objects of modern experience that bring uniformity albeit briefly to people’s actions are the
cars/plane – paragons of modern technology. Mr Bentley says of the plane - a symbol […] of man’s soul;
of his determination […] to get outside his body”

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The external mechanical nature of technology is at odds with the individuals internal innate nature.

When Septimus becomes the ‘axle’ when he obstructs the car he goes from anonymity to spectacle, and
it nearly destroys him (world is about to ‘burst into flames’). The axle can no longer be human, and yet it
replaces human relations.

The indecipherability of the axle (who’s in the car, what is the plane spelling out) leaves a loose
connection for the spokes, they all see it differently. But the answers to that aren’t enough for
interpersonal human conversation. Woolf’s faith in the novel is that as an object of interpretation, it has
the power to reassert the individual and allow him to speak as such to others.

Loss of Ego: The impersonal, egoless state brings about a feeling of anxiety, terror and despair due to
powerlessness/lack of control over the chaotic universe. Others feel liberation and peace.

Criticism of society: lack of depth and sensibility, forgotten their inner truth and feeling, they only live for
a social public life. Many of Woolf's characters are the leaders of their society – Hugh Whitbread works
at the Court and represents the 'most detestable in the English middle class' and 'has read nothing,
thought nothing'.

Miss Kilman: ugly and always in an old makintosh. Her love and religiosity are born out of escapism from
her anger and hatred not pure feelings, so her love is possesive and her religion corrupt. 'love and
religion, thought Clarissa going back into the dressing room tingling all over. How detestable, how
detestable they are! … Did she not wish everybody merely be themselves? … but love and religion would
destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul'.

Clarissa is an offspring of society whose values she upholds . Peter Walsh says 'the perfect hostess'. Her
life is shallow and meaningless, she does things not for themselves but to for people's opinions. She
marries Richard (a political man) although she's in love with Peter.

Void between Richard and Clarissa (can’t tell her he loves her) reflects impersonal aspect of modern city.

Peter marvels ironically at the level of London’s civilization when he hears the ambulance going for
Septimus. Clarissa realizes life in the city was overwhelming for Septimus and people like Sir William
Bradshaw made it intolerable. Admires him for not compromising his soul.

Masie Johnson says of Septimus and Lucrezia bickering ‘both seemed queer’ because she has no access
to their struggle or marital distress or Septimus’ struggle. She has no access to their aura, only their
bodies in motion, she can’t emphathize. Peter sees the same thing and says ‘and that is being young’
(cheerier but equally innaccurate). Septimus later realizes there’s nothing that could make a passerby
‘sspect here is a young man who carries in him the greatest message of the world’. His self perception is
wrong but he’s right. Everyone shares the central object but are alientated from each other.

Woolf’s novel is the central object. Their disconnection breads lack of dialogue, the depth of the spokes
the depth of their internal characters.

On Bond st there’s spits dialogue, people just utter stuff. They can’t and won’t connect with one another.

Woolf’s use of the jarring darting perspectives and narratives, getting into the internal mentality of each
character is almost an effort to fix this. By introducing us one by one and letting the reader know the

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character, and to distinguish them against the masses, the seed of empathy is planted in the urban
jungle.

Big Ben gives some order to the fluid thoughts but also sounds out the march towards death.
Ordinary day, ordinary lives, special day for Clarissa. Richness and importance of the Quotidien
No clear linear path to drive it along but lots of near misses and connections brought about by what
characters are doing when they hear Big Ben or look at the Car/Plane.

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