Learning Path » 5A Interacting
I'm going to analyse an extract taken from "Mrs Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf.
It is the start of the novel. We know that the novel has not got an important story line, because of the changing of the concept of time in Modernism: it evolves from linear to simultaneous. It means that time is a mixture of past, present and future in the character's flux of consciousness.
The extract immediately starts with a free indirect speech "Mrs Dalloway said...herself". It introduces the situation: she is going to buy some flowers for the party she is giving in the evening. There is the presence of a 3rd person omniscient narrator, who speaks from the point of view of Mrs Dalloway.
The second paragraph starts with a short conjunction: "for". It introduces another character: Lucy. She probably is a servant at Mrs Dalloway's house.
Going on reading, the reader comes across the sequence of Mrs Dalloway's thoughts, reported by the narrator through free direct thought: you have access to he interior monologue. "What a lark! What a plunge!" is a clear example of free direct speech/thought and, together with the exclamation marks, gives the reader the impression of hearing the exact words.
When the reader comes across a passage where there is a frequent use of free indirect thought/speech, he feels as if he were crossing the character's mind. Every element of character's experience is contained in his subjective consciousness. That is the reason why there is no linearity and no organization into chapters.
The use of conjunctions in narration creates the effect of the eclipse of the narrator. That one, together with the use of the shift of the point of view, are technical devices typical of Modernism.
One of the most distinctive features of Woolf's novel is that it seems as if the writer cuts the distances between prose and poetry. She adopts language in prose that is similar to the one of poetry, because of different orders of reason:
anaphoric constructions ("What a lark! What a plunge!", " How fresh, how calm")
alliterations (of letters r, s, l, w and words like winding, rising, feeling, falling, standing, looking)
similes ("like the flap of a wave")
repetitions (wave - wave, looking - looking)
use of language of sense impression (she could hear, feeling, looking,...)
In addition the use of this features has the function of sticking into the reader's mind what the writer wants to underline and emphasize.
The intelligent reader can understand that in Modernism there was more interest in how to say thing instead in what to say because the movement wanted to express reality in the better way possible to give the reader the idea of concrete reality.
The cadence of the rhythm depends on textual organization and it is created by the repetition of verbs in the progressive aspect: it creates sinuosity. Further more the use of the simile "like a wave" recalls the idea of something fluid and flexible.
You can see one of the rare intrusion of the narrator: he provides the reader an additional piece of information about the youth of Clarissa, when she was 18 , in Burton. Through the intrusion the reader can understand that the narrator seems to know everything about the character.
She reminds a particular episode of her youth which make her remind also Peter Walsh, a new character and also the feeling that something awful was happened. We know about the new character, Peter, through the filter of Mrs Dalloway's interior monologue. The use of direct speech is functional to provide the reader a more detailed mental image of the episode.