The beginning of the twentieth century supposed a radical rupture in artistic sensibility marked by innovation, experimentation, and uncertainty about how the form and content of modern fiction should adapt to the shape and reality of modern life. In the field of narrative literature, this new sensibility came to be embodied in modernist fiction, usually defined on the grounds of its psychological concern with subjective consciousness (Stevenson 2).

Thus, in order to represent a world interested in the relationship between the physical reality and the inner reality, modernist writers sought to create an art that was “[f]ormally radical, subjectively real and aesthetically autonomous” (Parsons 3). This art, Parsons continues, represents a world in which past and present seem dislocated from one another and former beliefs about the external world and the human experience of it have been largely abandoned (3). The present study follows this interest and explores this relationship in the modernist novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, focusing on the writer’s treatment of space and time.

Fundamental to the relationship between the mind and the world, and tremendously relevant for contemporary thought, space and time became major categories of analysis for the modernist novel. Narrative in modernist fiction usually reflects the flow of time as it is experienced within the mind of its characters, rather than in terms of the linear sequence of events of classical realism (Parsons 109). Hostility to clocks, Stevenson suggests, is the result of these writers’ objection to rely on chronological time as the basis of their work (86). This hostility allowed them to emphasise the psychological nature of non-linearity, reshaping the flow of life as it is freely lived by the individual consciousness.

Virginia Woolf’s essay writing successfully illustrated the new literary inclinations of her time, as can be seen in what can be considered a “Manifesto” for the modernist novel:

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Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919). Far from being a scenario brightly lit by lamps symmetrically arranged, for Woolf, life is “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (9). This perception of existence resembles Bergson’s concept of duration (la durée) in which time is qualitative and organic; a pure heterogeneity which is always present and simultaneous (Bergson 226, 227). Thus, time can contract or expand according to the emotional states of the characters, as it is through our inner perception that we experience time as it really is.

This examination of mental life materialised in a transformation of the form and style of the novel necessary to embrace the spatial movement from the ‘outer world’ to the

‘inner world’ (Stevenson 18). Human life, thus, is inevitably immersed in physical experience. As Woolf suggests in ‘Phases of Fiction’ (1929), a central and distinctive aspect of modernist writing has been to hold up the mirror of art in order to “illumine the mind within, rather than the world without” (81). This means that modernist writers will attempt to turn their interests from the erroneous form of perception which places everything in the object to the truest approach of placing everything in the mind (Stevenson 17). In ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf resolves that a distinctive feature to be admired of this new writing is that “for the moderns […] the point of interest lies very likely in the dark places of psychology” (11). This urge to examine the mind more completely, Parsons suggests, seems likely to have resulted from Bergson’s theory that it was impossible to define the individual self beneath the composed surface of collective existence (57). Hence, the focus will be on the individual and subjective consciousness, exploiting free indirect discourse and the interior monologue as adequate techniques for the representation of subjectivity.

The purpose of this dissertation is then to explore the new modernist concern with space and time in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as an expression of deeper and more

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general changes of attitude in early twentieth century fiction. This will be achieved by an attentive reading of the novel based on a previous study of the work of the already- mentioned narrative theorists Deborah Parsons, Randall Stevenson, and Virginia Woolf herself, among others. As it can be seen in the work of these critics, space and time occupied a distinctive position in the imagination of modernist writers, providing a fashionable terminology particular to the period. This terminology includes concepts such as ‘stream of consciousness’, ‘subjective experience’, ‘psychoanalysis’, ‘free indirect discourse’, and, of course, ‘time’ and ‘space’. This is why, in the following sections, I will explore them as paramount categories in the analysis of Mrs Dalloway. The first part of this dissertation will explore the novel’s experiments with time. The inability of the Big Ben strokes to mark the experience of ‘duration’ in the mind will be a constant point of reference in this section. Moreover, a lot of attention will be drawn to the way in which Woolf connects past and present through the common memories from Bourton that the characters share. Subsequently, the second section will focus on the treatment of space in the novel. This section will centre on how the cityscape is presented not as a meticulous portrayal of London and its inhabitants, but rather as a fluid sequence of impressions, emotions, and perceptions interrelated and tied together by the frequent water imagery. In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf seems to withdraw into the oceanic spaces within the self in order to penetrate the memories and associations of each character and to make consciousness and city undistinguishable.

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1. Time: the Intensity of Experience and the Inability of the Clock as Time Surveyor

Clarissa plunges into a day of June with the aim of buying flowers for the party that she is giving that evening. In Mrs Dalloway the action occurs within a single day, beginning with Clarissa’s morning preparations, and ending with her final revelation in the middle of the party. Yet, as Kohler remarks, “[w]ithin this space of time, by the seemingly casual contacts she makes and the associations and memories they evoke, the whole of Mrs Dalloway’s life is laid bare” (19). These few hours, however, have minor dramatic relevance in the understanding of the story. Their function is rather to expose the substance of human experience in a condensed temporal length. This chapter is going to focus on how the time involved in the novel takes place in the consciousness of its characters, rather than only in the single day in which the novel is set. This consciousness takes the characters back to the 1890s in Bourton and again back to the narrative present in London again. In order to convey the relevance of time in the modern city, on the one hand Woolf employs a careful and proportioned division and arrangement of life in accordance with the strokes of the different clocks that appear in the novel. On the other hand, however, there is an inclination towards a deeper and less restrained access to memory and perception that moves away and differs from the exactness of an objective perception of time.

The normalisation of the Greenwich meridian in the late 19^th century and the synchronisation of clocks throughout the world made the passage of time adjust in a widely acknowledged and universal manner. Parsons explains that despite this coordinated temporal and spatial universality, both the physical and psychological sciences were paradoxically beginning to reveal time’s arbitrariness and the relativity of temporal experience (109). Mrs Dalloway is formally structured “rhythmically, in time with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben” (Woolf 36). Apart from being a constant reminder of objective time, Big Ben arouses the characters’ feelings and summons

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their unconscious memories. Its chimes fall across the novel’s structure, flowing into the characters’ minds and perceptions. In its first appearance, Clarissa feels a “solemnity” and

“suspense” before the clock strikes. “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (3, 4). This last sentence, used repeatedly throughout the novel, echoes every time Big Ben strikes and expands its sound, making Clarissa certain of her love for life as she crosses Victoria Street: “[f]or Heaven only knowns why one loves it so” (4). Here the reader can see how the strokes of Big Ben intrude into the thoughts and heart of Clarissa as she reflects upon life. It could be argued, then, that while Big Ben’s leaden circles set objective time, subjective time or stream of consciousness, indifferent to the clock, changes according to the intensity of experience.

The presence of chiming clocks is thus necessary to set the overall fictional time.

However, the unconscious memories and reflections that these chimes produce on the characters are just as necessary as the symbols of clock time. The distinction between the two is important because, as Hasler argues:

An inescapable concomitant of [Bergson’s] durée is … the inadequacy of the clock as time- measurer. The clock divides the flow of time in parts, while man’s ‘inner’ or ‘psychic’ time is not perceived as a chain, a succession of separable units of thought, but as a continuous, uninterrupted flux. (147)

Psychological time is concerned with memory, anticipation, duration, extension, compression, and mental connection. Triggering moments in the present, like that of the chiming of the clocks, offer a tunnel through which the past experience of characters in the novel can be brought, in the full sense of the word, to the actual moment.

Just after the last tremors of Big Ben’s great booming voice shake the air round Peter Walsh announcing half-past eleven, the clock of St Margaret’s, slightly lagging

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behind the stir of her dictatorial male counterpart, insists that she is not late: “Ah, said St Margaret’s, like a hostess who comes into her drawing-room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I am not late” (37). Both Clarissa and St Margaret’s differ from Big Ben in the impact they want to make upon society. They are not bold in individuality; they are just hostesses: “[n]o, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says. Yet, though she is perfectly right, her voice, being the voice of a hostess, is reluctant to inflict its individuality” (37). Woolf draws a clear parallel between St Margaret’s and Clarissa. In fact, its chimings make Peter think of her: “like Clarissa herself, thought Peter Walsh. […]

It is Clarissa herself” (37). At first, he recognises Clarissa at Bourton “as if the bell had come into the room years ago, where they sat at some moment of great intimacy” (37). But then, as if the chimes of St Margaret’s had deteriorated and fainted, he remembers that Clarissa has been ill, and his thoughts fly away to her future and imminent death: “the final stroke tolled for death that surprised in the midst of life, Clarissa falling where she stood, in her drawing-room” (37). Finally, as in an attempt to deny the inevitability of death, Peter comes back to the present to remember that “[S]he is not dead! I am not old”, and continue with his walk “as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending, his future” (37). The image of time as a continuous flow can be seen perfectly in this example, in which past, present, and future work together to devise a kaleidoscopic conception of existence. This flow of thoughts thus emphasises Parsons’ idea that the clock is unable to illustrate the experience of duration in the mind, revealing the absurdity of the standardisation of time (114). Therefore, the constant impact of the past on the present and the harmony between past, present, and future in the mind overcomes time as measured by the clock.

Past and present are more solidly connected through the shared memories of Bourton that infiltrate several characters’ thoughts while in London. However, Woolf does not only use the heavy strokes of Big Ben and St Margaret’s to trigger these memories. She

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captures every sight, smell, and sound that helps to create an impressionist collage of shared experience. If these impressions are recurrent throughout the life of one character they can cause memories to rise. Clarissa is at one moment deliberately trying to recall her past, and yet “she could not even get an echo of her old emotion” (26). However, after she

“took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing table, [and] began to do her hair”, a sensory and physical stimulus triggers an involuntary feeling that “began to come back to her” (26). Such an ordinary and insignificant object as a hairpin has triggered in Clarissa an old emotion she could not feel a moment before: “That was her feeling –Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!” (26). Then she embarks on a journey backwards to her past at Bourton that serves only as background for her love for Sally Seton. She compares Sally’s kiss to “a present,” an indestructible

“diamond, something infinitely precious,” a “revelation” imbued with “radiance” and

“religious feeling” (26, 27). In her modernist attempt to place everything in the mind, Woolf uses memory as a means of including past and present experience together (Stevenson 92). The past at Bourton remains so vivid in Clarissa’s memory now that she feels those emotions as if they were happening in the present. Mrs Dalloway reflects Woolf’s desire of going backwards and forwards and of recalling our past experience in what seems at first an arbitrary order thanks to the simplest and most ordinary objects.

However, this order is subordinated to present sensations, emotions, and perceptions. As she suggests in her novel Orlando (1928):

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting. (52)

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These unconscious recollections, unlike those intentionally recalled, bring about moments of deep emotion and understanding that Woolf herself called ‘moments of being’. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf recognises the way in which memory does not separate past and present but rather brings them together in what is experienced as an intensification of the present: “[i]n those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present” (98).

The first meeting between Peter and Clarissa seems to be happening more at Bourton in the past than at London in the present. When Peter visits Clarissa in the morning, her misspeaking –she reminds him that her father did not like him for wanting to marry her– makes both recall that he had been her rejected lover. Woolf cleverly relates Peter’s grief to the moon: “and [he] was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from the terrace” (31). Even at this time, he feels his sorrow just as acutely as he felt it when he was turned down. Then his consciousness flies away “as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace” moving gradually towards Clarissa, with the moon hanging above them (31). Strikingly enough, the narrator instantly jumps into Clarissa’s consciousness, to discover that “she too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight” (31). Peter and Clarissa are held together in soul-mixing understanding by Woolf’s verbal cleverness, yet the words in their dialogue are not able to express this shared mental experience. Sometimes, thus, the only feature that associates characters in Mrs Dalloway is the moment of the past they have shared together.

Past and present are connected at their highest point in the figure of the shell- shocked, World War I soldier Septimus Smith. Painful memories enable him to accomplish a sense of reconciliation between his past and his present in an unusual yet superior way (Günes 192). This is mainly because the memory of a traumatic event can be forgotten in time and regained again in a symptomatic form when triggered by some external event

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(Berger 570). Consequently, when his wife Rezia mentions to him the word ‘time’, the word “split its husk; poured its riches over him; […] and flew to attach them to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time” (52). Septimus’s condition of traumatised victim, thus, prevents him from distinguishing between his past and his present. He seems to be frozen in the time of battle, with his friend Evans, killed at the front, answering “from behind the tree”, singing “among the orchids”, and waiting for the war to be over (52).

Furthermore, there is an interesting comparison between the oppressive nature of the clock and the Harley Street doctors that are treating Septimus’s “lack of sense of proportion”.

When Rezia admits that she does not like Sir William Bradshaw, the Harley Street clocks

“nibbled at the June day”: “shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing”, they

“counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantage of a sense of proportion” (75). Rezia’s opinion about the doctor is immediately followed by the personified strokes of the clocks of Harley Street, emphasising the cruelty of external time as well as that of the doctors. It is important to keep in mind that the doctors –like the clocks– “shred” and “slice” at Septimus until he decides to commit suicide, symbolically implying that clock-time, a creation of society, is damaging to emotional accomplishment. Hence, by throwing himself out of the window, Septimus is liberating himself, Clarissa, and the reader, from a view of a life full of torment and clock- limitation.

It should also be considered how Woolf uses the motif of the strokes signalling the passing of time in order to jump from one consciousness to another and consequently emphasise how time serves as a unifying or splitting element between characters in time and space. As Septimus and Rezia sit in the park contemplating the misery of their marriage, the clock strikes: “‘[t]he time, Septimus,’ Rezia repeated. ‘What is the time?’”

(53). Septimus, however, is immersed in his own past, mistaking the figure of Peter Walsh,

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passing near them, with that of his dead friend Evans. “‘I will tell you the time,’ said Septimus, very slowly, very drowsily, smiling mysteriously at the dead man in the grey suit” (53). Although sitting together on the same bench, this couple is not experiencing time in the same way. While Rezia is worried about the present –asking constantly about the time– and anxious about her and her husband’s future, Septimus is unable to escape the phantom of his past. As suggested above, trauma victims act out their past traumatic experiences in the present without being aware that these experiences took place in their past. That is, there is no distinction between past and present for them. It is only when the clock strikes, that the reader is able not only to leave Septimus’ delusion, but also to jump into the consciousness of Peter himself: “[a]nd that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed them” (53). Kohler suggests that by using the chiming of the clock here, Woolf accentuates the duration of a particular day as well as the shift from one consciousness to another and the subsequent change in the characters’ different experience of time (23). It could be said, then, that while the strokes of the clock are clear indications of the story time, they are also a transitional device used by the writer in order to shift from one consciousness to another and from a system of time to another.

This chapter has tried to prove that although the strokes of Big Ben and the other compliant clocks are a fundamental part of Mrs Dalloway, they by no means delimit the real essence of the novel. The characters’ flow of thoughts, reflections, and memories, impregnate the structure of the novel to create a fascinating world of durée bergsonienne, emphasising, as suggested previously in this section, the inability of the clock as time surveyor. The subjectivity of experience is constantly highlighted by the way in which each character experiences the miscellaneous recollections unconsciously triggered in their minds by different stimuli. Therefore, fertile moments in the present, as Stevenson suggests, allow a full recollection of these characters’ earlier lives to be presented within

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the single day of consciousness that Woolf concentrates in Mrs Dalloway (100). All these different consciousnesses are going to be the defining feature of the London that appears in the novel. In fact, if time is determined by the intensity of experience, space in the novel is subject to the impressions, emotions and perceptions of the people wandering around the city. The following chapter will deal with the relationship between city and consciousness and with the link which makes it possible: water symbolism.

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12 2. Space: London as the Oceanic City

The modern city as locale has been perceived by several critics as tremendously relevant in modernist fiction. In his attempt to determine the importance of the city in this type of novel, Meyerhoff asserted that “[t]he “identity” of the city has the same face as the

“identity” of the persons in the city. The fragments of lives in each are gathered together by a unitary, symbolic frame of reference, which also constitutes the unity of the narrative itself” (39-40). Following these ideas, Virginia Woolf’s re-created London in Mrs Dalloway could be seen as a symbol for the states of mind of its inhabitants while they try

to deal with external reality. T.S. Eliot theorised all these emotive reactions and said that

[t]he only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (cited in Kermode 48)

The city in Mrs Dalloway becomes the objective correlative of its inhabitants and their states of consciousness. These consciousnesses are absorbed and translated into clearly individualised emotions positively connected with the cityscape in order to convey those emotions to the reader. London thus becomes a space of emotional transit to the characters’

feelings, allowing Woolf to carry on with the modernist concern with the subjective experience.

In order to join together city and subjective experience, Woolf makes use of the free indirect discourse and the recurrent water imagery. When working together, these two techniques help to give fluidity to the spatial domain as well as providing a graceful transition from one consciousness to another. The purpose of this chapter is to bring to the fore the effect that the aqueous environment has on the several characters and consciousnesses, which plunge into the continually metamorphosed body of water and

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create a flowing parade of feelings and emotions in a perfectly re-created oceanic scene.

Moreover, despite the city being a prominent element in the novel, a lot of attention will be drawn to the modernist shift from the outer world to the inner world. In order to do so, several passages of Mrs Dalloway are to be considered and analysed, culminating in and drawing most of the attention to Clarissa’s party, the epitome of interaction between the different thoughts, memories, and experiences of the most important characters.

Virginia Woolf praised Joyce in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ for what she considered his concern “to come closer to life” and “to reveal the flickerings of the mind”

(9-10). However, as Stevenson suggests, she differed from Joyce’s unmediated report of character’s thoughts in the first-person, present tense form of stream of consciousness: that is, the interior monologue (54). Rather, she relied on the “she said to herself” or “he thought” characteristic of free direct discourse and on free indirect discourse, which uses the third-person and past tense in order to adopt the style and mood of the character’s inner voice. Her personal approach appears already in the opening passages of the novel:

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning –fresh as if issued to children on a beach. (3)

The report of the external narrator is present from the very first line. However, there is a feeling already apparent in the allusion to Lucy in the second line, that this third person narrator is being gradually replaced by Clarissa’s inner voice. In fact, the familiarity with which Lucy and the Rumpelmayer’s men are mentioned clearly points to Clarissa’s body of acquaintances and personal relationships (Stevenson 54). Moreover, the first description that the reader gets from London is that it is fresh “as if issued to children on a beach” (3).

This voice belongs yet more clearly to Clarissa’s train of thoughts, because, as confirmed

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in the following line, the exclamation “What a lark! What a plunge!” feels as a passionate celebration of what she feels is going to be an intense day. The first glimpse of her consciousness, thus, is that of being drawn into water, mixed with the sound of the hinges and the remembrance of Bourton that feels “like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave” (3).

Garvey assures that in Mrs Dalloway London is the subject of frequent transformations into a body of water, and attributes these changes to the hands of the narrator or, as in the previous case, to the thoughts of Clarissa (65). Therefore, in Woolf’s struggle to illumine

‘the mind within’, she gave her characters the liberty to illumine ‘the world without’ in the light of their inner thoughts and emotions. These emotions transformed the outer world into a deeply flowing river into which numerous consciousnesses could plunge, submerge themselves, and blend with one another.

However, not only does London experience transformations in the hands of the different consciousnesses, but the characters themselves are sometimes altered by the city’s oceanic domain. These changes take place, for instance, when a character feels as if surrounded by a marine setting. Clarissa is able to find the essential isolation of her life while walking through the crowded city streets: “she had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone” (6). The connection between consciousness and water clearly reveals the way a character is going to be understood (Garvey 67). Sometimes the rhythmic flow of the sea is breath-taking and absorbing, while other times it threatens to drown whoever is too vulnerable to resist its pressure. This happens to Septimus, who faces London’s menacing waters standing “high on his rock, like a drowned sailor on a rock” (52). Clarissa is a diver and, although well aware of the dangerousness of this element, she is not afraid to plunge into it and become part “of the trees at home; of the house there […] of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen

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the trees lift the mist” (7). However, while Clarissa wilfully dives and plunges into the cityscape, Septimus agonisingly drowns and sinks into it: “I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead, and yet am now alive, but let me rest still, he begged” (52). Septimus and Clarissa, therefore, embody discrepancy within harmony; plunging versus sinking; living versus dying. The way their consciousness experience and react against the water symbolism determine their inner- selves, their attitude towards life, and the position they are going to occupy within the arrangement of the narrative.

Considering now the multiple and collective rather than the individual and private, Woolf’s writing in Mrs Dalloway joins together the different consciousnesses that overlap and weave together in a moment of common understanding. In her essay ‘Oxford Street Tide’ (1932), Woolf describes this area of London as “the pebbly bed of a river whose stones are forever washed by a bright stream”, and as a “river of turning wheels” in which

“[m]usic streams from their banqueting rooms free” (199-200). What Woolf metaphorically refers to as a stream or river might allude to all the passing cabs, omnibuses, and planes that create this traffic flow in the cityscape. Therefore, the comparisons between the city traffic and the streaming water made in this and the following paragraphs are something that Virginia Woolf herself had already drawn attention to.

In Mrs Dalloway, Parsons explains, the thoughts of people wandering around doing their different errands are momentarily reduced and drawn together by this flowing traffic (114). This happens early in the novel, when a majestic car bearing the crest of authority leaves everyone in Bond Street wondering about whose face is inside it. “The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street” (13). This ‘slight ripple’ that swamps Bond

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Street can be compared to the ‘bright stream’ in Oxford Street. Both works, the essay and the novel, present the London streets as smooth rivers flowing through the glove shops and banqueting rooms. After the stately car in Mrs Dalloway leaves Bond Street, the different consciousnesses are left completely submerged in the same shared ocean: the ocean “of the dead; of the flag; of Empire” (14). The communal experience as the passing car sinks is so formidable, that for half a minute “all heads were inclined the same way” (13).

Apart from the motorcar, Woolf employs a notable variety of linking devices in order to emphasise moments of mass hypnosis at some points in the novel. Just before the car episode finishes, for instance, a sky-writing plane makes “all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, [and] in Regent’s Park” look up and wonder about which word it is writing (16). The clocks of Harley and Oxford Streets connecting Rezia and Hugh, and the ambulance connecting Rezia and Peter Walsh after Septimus’

suicide are other of these mechanical links. By incorporating public symbols like the stately car or the aeroplane, and as suggested by Meyerhoff, Woolf is allowed to integrate disparate subjective Londons into a full entity, suggesting that the congregations of thoughts wandering around and about the city are, in one way, the city. Thus, while everything in the novel happens inside the characters’ consciousnesses, the external elements that flow through the city help to unite, mix, and bring attention to them.

Throughout Mrs Dalloway, thus, the reader is continually confronted with situations trying to make shared experience accessible. Clarissa’s party can be seen as Woolf’s final attempt to gather the disparate aspects within each character and the conscious experience of society together (Philipson 134, 135). The passage previous to the beginning of the party describes Peter Walsh arriving at Clarissa’s street and realising that the traffic there flowed “like water round the piers of a bridge drawn together […] because they bore people going to her party, Clarissa’s party” (119). Significantly enough, the door

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of the house is said to stay open, suggesting perhaps that this flowing stream coming from the outside is permeating the house and all the people inside it. As Mrs Dalloway observes, welcomes, and speaks to almost everybody, her only desire –the same as Woolf’s– is to see her guests communicate and merge with one another enthusiastically. However, after hearing Lord Lexham’s pretexts for his wife’s absence, and seeing Peter wishing not to have come, she can only feel that “it was going to be a failure; a complete failure” (122).

She only considers her party a success when she sees Ralph Lyon, engaged in dialogue, repel a curtain that has momentarily knotted around him (123). As the interpersonal relationships are restored and the guests begin to feel comfortable in her party, Clarissa becomes optimistic, and the waves return to fill the place of water symbolism. Mrs Dalloway herself is described by Peter as “lolloping on the waves” when her party dress metamorphoses her into a mermaid (126). The party is now a victory of shared experience over alienation and isolation, and as Woolf allows herself to jump into the consciousnesses of twenty four different characters, Clarissa becomes “a creature floating in its element”

(126). Now that everyone has found the people and the places which complete them, Clarissa happily swims around the house contemplating how Sally and Peter are there (126); how Willie Titcomb, Sir Harry and Herbert Ainsty are laughing together (127); and how Professor Brierly talks to young Jim Hutton (127-128). She is even able to get old Miss Parry, her aunt, and Peter –“and yet he had not had a word with her all the evening!”–

together (129). However, a moment of self-reflection and alienation comes to Clarissa when she overhears a conversation about Septimus’s suicide: “[i]t was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness” (134). In her moment of epiphany she realises that Septimus’s death is, like her party, a struggle to communicate, and the leaden circles of the clock remind her that she must return and assemble her friends. Schaefer tries to relate the experience of the party to the

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consciousness of that revelation: “the party is something that lives, as it were, spatially in the area surrounding the guests, in the thoughts and emotions that unite them” (29). The threads that unite Clarissa with Peter and Sally are so strong, that the party could not have had ended without their meeting. Woolf’s purpose to present the self as the interaction of many individuals is thus achieved by the end of the novel, as she is able to explore the party consciousness through the multiple voices and discourses.

This chapter has tried to prove that in her modernist attempt to draw attention to the

“dark places of psychology”, Woolf was able to write a novel in which the city became the symbol for her characters’ consciousnesses. In order to do so, she made use of the frequent water symbolism that, together with the techniques –mainly free direct discourse and free indirect discourse– used to reproduce her characters’ thoughts, served as a link between the inner and the outer world. In this way, London became the objective correlative of its inhabitants, capable of conveying to the reader their states of mind and emotions. These characters can wilfully plunge or inevitably drown into the often submerged city, but either way, they will mix with one another and become a single and full entity. Therefore, and as suggested several times in this chapter, the city’s identity is determined by the identity of the persons in the city, connected and drawn together by the recurrent water imagery.

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19 Conclusion

Virginia Woolf was part of a generation born into the last decades of the Victorian Era, yet whose accomplishment concurred with the technological experimentation and scientific progress. This is why she, together with her contemporaries, might have had the feeling that the traditional approach to fiction seemed inappropriate to the representation of her present reality. Based on the interest that these modernist writers had in order to adapt their work to modern life, this study has focused on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway as the one of the ultimate representations of the so-called ‘psychological’, or ‘modernist’

novel.

Time and space underwent a refreshing treatment at the turn of the twentieth century in the visual arts, science and philosophy which provoked a re-evaluation of these two categories in modernist fiction. In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf adhered to this re-evaluation and explored the ideas of time and space within the realm of the novel. Modernist fiction rejects the approach to time of classical realism and focuses on the inner consciousness of the character as the most sincere approach to time. Therefore, in order to emphasise the intensity of experience as the truest form of time perception, Woolf relied on the strokes of Big Ben and the other clocks to set a careful and proportioned division and arrangement of life to, then, disregard it. This means that although the novel is structured through linear time by the strokes of the clock, the intensity of experience privileges subjective time over time set by the clock. Psychological time involves past recollections, duration, continuation, and free association of ideas. This is why, in Mrs Dalloway, the action is not delimited to the day of June in which the novel is set. Rather, time is subject to the characters’ emotions and perceptions, which sometimes take them back to their common past at Bourton or even to their future an imminent death. Therefore, although the strokes of Big Ben are constantly present throughout the novel, establishing the objective time in

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the narrative, the modernist hostility to clocks is present in Mrs Dalloway. The challenge that Bergson proposed, and that the vast majority of modernist writers followed, was to think of time not as a line or a chain, but as a ‘pure heterogeneity’. Bergson’s theories left a deep imprint in Virginia Woolf herself, who made of her novel Mrs Dalloway an impressionist collage of past, present, and future emotions and perceptions.

The modernist movement from the external and objective world to the internal and subjective experience had its effect on Virginia Woolf’s writing too. London plays an undeniably fundamental part in the novel, yet most of the action takes place inside the characters’ minds. The city works rather as the objective correlative of its inhabitants, expressing their emotions and sensory experiences in order to reveal them to the reader.

The technique that Woolf employed to merge London with the inner thoughts of the characters was the water symbolism that impregnates city and consciousness. Together with the free indirect discourse, water imagery serves as a link between the character’s subjective experience and the cityscape. Virginia Woolf was concerned with seeing his character merge and communicate with one another, and she made that her protagonist, Clarissa, shared that same interest. This is why her party, right at the end of the novel, becomes the epitome of interaction between individuals.

Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece Mrs Dalloway continues to inspire subsequent generations of writers and readers. Both Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Ian McEwan’s Saturday, for instance, are homages to Woolf’s immortal novel. Mrs Dalloway deserves to be transposed to other places and times, to be shared, evoked, and

continually thought of. With her sensitive prose, Woolf created an infinitely flexible and eternally fresh work which literary significance goes beyond what has been suggested in this or any other study. Virginia Woolf, the great lover of words, the great admirer of everyday life, and one of the greatest pleasure-givers of contemporary literature, has left a

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literary legacy that includes nine novels, a volume of short stories, and a remarkable number of non-fiction books. Considered a modernist and feminist icon, Woolf remains one of the most influential authors of the 20^th century, and her call to open-mindedness resonates today more than ever.

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22 Works cited

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Schaefer, Josephine O’Brien. The Three-Fold Nature of Reality in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. The Hague, Mouton, 1965.

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