An extract from Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Exercise 1

Read up to line 3 and say who the narrator is.

The narrator is in the third person and she enter character's mind, adopting interior monologue.

Exercise 2

You will have realized that the narrator is talking about Mrs Dalloway. Go on reading and while reading the questions below. At the end you will have a summary of Mrs Dalloway actions and movements.

• a) Where is Mrs Dalloway? She is in Bond street.
• b) What is she doing? She is buying at the fishmonger's.
• c) What does she do then? She goes on up Bond street and she stops at the glow window.
• d) Where is she going? She is going to Mulberry's the florists.

Exercise 3

Read the passage again carefully and underline, whenever possible, the places where the train of thought jumps abruptly from one point to another.

In this novel we have two narratives: a narrative of physical actions and a narrative of thought. The first is related by an impersonal narrator and the second evolves in Mrs Dalloway's consciousness by way of a free associations of ideas.

• a) And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves. (...)
• b) But her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not a strew for either of them. (...)
• c) Still, better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman; better distemper and tar and all the rest of it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a prayer book. (...)
• d) But it might be only a phase, a s Richard said, such as all girls go though. (...)
• e) Anyhow they were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to Communion. (...)
• f) Dulled their feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians (...)

Exercise 4

Now consider the diagram below and answer the following question.

Has the time of the narration any relation with chronological time? Remember that most of what is told takes place in Mrs Dalloway's mind.

The narrator enters Mrs Dalloway's mind: when she stops at the glow window, she has a lot of thoughts, made of associations (they dealt with different subjects); if all the thoughts are though while she is looking at the window, they concern actions or feelings about the past, the present and the future (simultaneity of time).