“What a Morning”- Virginia Woolf

Analysis of structural elements (title, setting, characters and narrative techniques) through notes from 13^th December

This text is taken from the modernist novel by Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway”. From the title the common reader understands main elements of the story: he expects the novel is about a lady, who is married. This information it’s the first step for Mrs. Dollaway’s characterization, directing the reader to focus on her social status. Certainly, when  Mrs. Woolf wrote the novel, being married was very important for a woman. Indeed while the married- woman- surname appears in the title an it’s repeated at the very beginning of the text, her first name, Clarissa, is mentioned later. 

Other textual clauses (the “fresh air…as if issued to children on a beach”, for example) helps the reader to focus on setting elements: he can easily hypothesize it’s spring or summer. This supposition is supported when Clarissa compares the moment she’s living with a moment in her past (when she “stands at the open window…looking at the flowers”) and confirmed at the end of the extract. The atmosphere is also created by language of senses: the writer implies onomatopoeic sounds and appeals to hearing (for example the sound of opening the window). Indeed the language seems nearer to poetry than to fiction, thanks to it’s use of similes, metaphors and lists besides figures of sound.

As most modernist writers, Mrs. Woolf’s aim is to provide the reader with the feelings (not with the teachings about reality) given from the senses of sight, touch, hearing and smell.

The characterization of Clarissa is also made up through her subjective response to that morning: when she opens the window she goes up with the mind to her girlhood, when she was eighteen because the weather allows this association. The narrator takes the reader in how Clarissa feels in that quick moment. Her actions, repeated as when she was young, become less important than her feelings.

The reader, through this kind of flashback, notices the novel doesn’t follow chronological time, but gives relief to the time of Clarissa’s unconscious. The setting is afterwards past and present together, according to Bergson’s idea of time. 

Mrs. Dalloway’s memory introduces also the figure of a man, Peter, that probably loved her in the past. Anyway he didn’t married Clarissa because, as the reader can notice, her surname is not Welsh but Dalloway. Peter Welsh  is characterized by Clarissa’s recalls, where he speaks through direct speech. This kind of narrative technique is straight, giving good evidence of Peter’s comic and funny feature. This representation of Mr. Welsh, particularly in using the mean of direct speech, provides the reader a new expectation on Mrs. Dalloway’s character. Her manipulation of language (using humanistic dialogues) to connote a person, points out her intelligence. Finally, another element of Clarissa’s characterization and kind of life, is the aristocratic custom of breakfast in terrace that makes her to belong to a close but rich and acculturated social class.