Mrs. Dallowayby Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925.

MRS. DALLOWAY

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. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it? —“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages.

The title of the novel, Mrs. Dalloway, provides the reader with a characterization of the female protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, from the social point of view, focusing on her social status of “wife of Mr. Dalloway”.  

Mrs. Dalloway takes place on a single ordinary day in June of 1923, and it follows the protagonist, the high-society woman Clarissa Dalloway, through a very small area of London, from the morning to the evening of the day on which she gives a large formal party. The plot turns out to be reduced to the minimum, a typical feature of the modern novel. With an interior perspective, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure. Therefore, actually the story takes place in Clarissa’s mind, following her stream of consciousness that  is nor chronological nor linear, shifting between past, present and future in the dimension of simultaneity. However, differently from Joyce’s stream of consciousness, Woolf’s narration is still kept by syntactical links and logical conjunctions.

In order to give voice to the protagonist’s thoughts, Virginia Woolf adopts the technique of the interior monologue, that is recorded by an intern narrator who tells the story from Clarissa’s Point of view.

The narrator reports Clarissa’s thought or words through different narrative techniques: direct speech, free indirect speech or reported speech, as in the opening period: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would by the flowers for herself”. As the reported speech unveils, the narrator is still present, but he is hidden, he seems to have been disappeared. In order to hide the presence of the narrator in telling the story, the writer exploits narrative devices as the brevity of syntactical links, the omission of those textual clues betraying the narrator’s intrusion.

Renouncing to the traditional argumentative links, in order to confer unity and coherence to the narration, the writer adopts the technique of light motive.  

The rhythm of Virginia Woolf’s narration recalls the poetic rhythm, rich of anaphors, cataphors, alliterations and onomatopoeias.