 |
| Mrs Dalloway |
Virginia Woolf sets Mrs Dalloway over the course of a single June day in 1923, and the compression is deliberate: everything that has ever happened to Clarissa Dalloway is happening simultaneously within that Wednesday, memory and present experience so intertwined that the self she moves through the world with is not a fixed thing but a continuous process of negotiation.
Clarissa is preparing for a party — buying flowers, returning home, receiving guests — and these practical actions serve as the surface of a novel conducted almost entirely below the surface. As she moves through Westminster, the city herself moves through her: the sounds of a street, a passing car, a woman she half-recognizes trigger memories and reflections that Woolf follows without announcement, moving between present observation and past experience as naturally as thought actually moves.
Septimus Warren Smith moves through the same London on the same day without ever meeting Clarissa. He is a veteran of the recent war, shattered in ways that 1923 London has no adequate language for and no adequate treatment of. The doctors he encounters — Bradshaw with his system, Holmes with his hearty insistence on proportion — are as dangerous in their way as the shell fire was, because they are trying to cure someone who is not wrong, exactly, but who has seen too directly into something that the functioning social world requires you not to look at directly.
The two narratives never intersect directly, but they inform each other throughout and finally meet at Clarissa's party, obliquely, when news of Septimus's death arrives among the guests. Clarissa's response to this information — a woman she never knew, dying on a day she is giving a party — is the novel's emotional center, the moment when Woolf brings together what the two separate streams have been exploring.
Peter Walsh, arriving from India after years away, opens in Clarissa the question of what her life might have been — not regret exactly but that specific wistfulness of the path not taken, the recognition that every choice forecloses others. His love for her, still present and still a little proprietorial, complicates her certainties without resolving them.
Mrs Dalloway established stream-of-consciousness as a technique for something more than technical novelty: a way of rendering consciousness as it actually is, which is to say porous, plural, unbounded by the moment, reaching constantly into the past and the future from the unstable platform of the present. The novel remains a distillation of that understanding.
Get Mrs Dalloway
Post a Comment