Mrs Dolloway by Virginia Woolf

Clarissa and Septimus

“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”; this is how the novel opens, and in the following thirty pages Clarissa Dalloway is seen walking through Green Park, then up Bond Street to the flower shop. She perceives sights and sounds, thinking and remembering. Clarissa’s thoughts, impressions and words are reported by an hidden omniscient narrator who tells the story in third person eclipsing beyond the character of Clarissa.

Just before reaching the shop, Clarissa is thinking about the relationship between her seventeen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and her disagreeable history teacher – whom Mrs Dalloway feels to be her enemy. This thought arouses a feeling of hatred in her, which she calls “this brutal monster”.

As she reaches the flower shop her senses are pervaded by the fragrances and the colors of the flowers. The setting is created using language appealing to the senses, in particular to smell and sight, an high sinestetic  language, in order to make the reader smell and see as well as the character.

Through a very rich syntax, the narrator creates a climax that seems to celebrate the beauty of the scene condensed in the period “as if this beauty, this scent, this color”. a long paragraph ending with an exclamation at the apex of the crescendo.

It returns the image of the wave, a frequent metaphor chosen by V. Woolf that stands for femininity, in contraposition to that monster, metaphor for Mrs Killman.

There is a continuous shift between the external and the inner reality, from the flower shop to Clarissa’s flow of thoughts. Clarissa is looking for a balance of herself, between the external dimension, made up of her relationships, her interactions and everyday reality, and the inner dimension, made up of psychological and emotional feelings, words beliefs. Mrs Dalloway needs to find a symbiosis between external and inner reality, that continuously influence one the other.

Indeed, when she suddenly hears a roar from the street, her flow of thoughts is interrupted and her attention is captured by the sound. The repetition of the name ‘motor cars’ is functional to underline the rumble coming from the street but also to create a symmetrical composition on the level of sound.

The description of the car that caused the roar conveys the idea of mystery and importance, but nobody knew nor could see who was sitting inside. The narrator raises the reader’s attention and curiosity creating an halo of mystery around the car and its passenger, until someone says “The Prime Minister’s kyar”. Through the deformation of language the narrator conveys the distance between different social classes.

Suddenly a new character is introduced: Septimus Warren Smith. Also Septimus’ attention is captured by the car’s roar but he is in another part of the city. Right from the start there is something unusual in the man, the reader can’t focus him clearly.

The point of view shifts from Clarissa to Septimus and vice versa, they have something in common, there is something wrong inside them both: Clarissa’s monster and Septimus’ horrors that come to the surface. His deep horror comes to the surface in a very climatic moment caused by that motor car. Sentences become shorter, to conveys Septimus’ fragmented world vision. The light motive returns as a musical feature creating unity and suggesting the atmosphere.

Septimus’ reaction in front of the roar is hyperbolic, symptom of his intimate mental pathology. There is a confusion between the inner and the external reality since he thinks it is his fault, he feels victims of the external world. Even Lucrezia is ashamed and embarrassed of Septimus’ overreaction, when he brings his monster outside. How can one cope with his inner monsters? Is the universal question that Virginia Woolf poses to her readers.