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Narrative Techniques in Mrs. Dalloway

1. Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, 1919

...the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we
suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the
customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being "like this". Examine for a moment
an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial,
fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come,
an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into
the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of
importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if
he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own
feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love
interest or catastrophe in the accepted style... Life is not a series of gig lamps
symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding
us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to
convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or
complexity it may display...Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order
in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in
appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.

2. Mrs. Dalloway - "glimpse into the effects of socialization” (Margaret Blanchard,

‘Socialization in Mrs Dalloway”, College English, 34, 2, 287-307, Nov., 1972).
3. Mrs Dalloway is highly political in the sense that it expresses the social creation and
imposition of identity on a consciousness that is fluid. (Ban Wang, ’I:’ on the Run:
Crisis of Identity in Mrs. Dalloway”, Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 1,
Spring 1992, pp. 177-191.)
4. The main characters are created in relation to two axes - synchronically, by seeking
self- definition while expressing a desire to communicate with other individuals;
diachronically, by oscillating between the time of the diegesis and a past recalled by
constant memories. (Cristina Garcia, ‘Decentring Discourse, Self-Centred Politics:
Radicalism and the Self in Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway"’, Atlantis, Vol. 32, No. 1
(Junio 2010), pp. 15-28.)
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5. “The novel appears a seamless account (there are no chapters but there are 12 sections
separated by spacing) of one June day in London 1923 charting the parallel
experiences of two figures, Clarissa Dalloway, society hostess and politician’s wife
and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell shocked young war veteran.” Jane Goldman, The
Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf, 2006
6. Part 1: From the opening scene, in which Clarissa sets out to buy flowers, to her
return home. Early morning–11:00 a.m.

 Part 2: From Clarissa's return from the shops through Peter Walsh's visit. 11:00 a.m.–
11:30 a.m.

 Part 3: From Peter leaving Clarissa's house through his memory of being rejected by
Clarissa. 11:30 a.m.–11:45 a.m.

 Part 4: From little Elise Mitchell running into Rezia's legs to the Smiths' arrival on
Harley Street. 11:45 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

 Part 5: From Septimus's appointment with Sir William Bradshaw to lunchtime at half-
past one. 12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.

 Part 6: From Hugh Whitbread examining socks and shoes in a shop window before
lunching with Lady Bruton through Clarissa resting on the sofa after Richard has left
for the House of Commons. 1:30 p.m.–3:00 p.m.

 Part 7: From Elizabeth telling her mother she is going shopping with Miss Kilman
through Elizabeth boarding an omnibus to return home to her mother's party. 3:00
p.m.–late afternoon

 Part 8: From Septimus observing dancing sunlight in his home while Rezia works on
a hat through Septimus's suicide. Late afternoon–6:00 p.m.

 Part 9: From Peter Walsh hearing the sound of an ambulance siren to his opening his
knife before entering Clarissa's party. 6:00 p.m.–early night

 Part 10: From servants making last- minute party preparations through the end of the
party and the appearance of Clarissa. Early night–3:00 a.m.
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7. Woolf conceived of her method as a tunneling process whereby she ‘digs out
beautiful caves behind my characters’ with the idea that ‘the caves shall connect and
each comes to daylight at the present moment.’ The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol II
(1920-24), Published 1980.
8. “Mrs. D has the form of an All Soul’s Day in which Peter Walsh, Sally Seton and the
rest rise from the dead to come to Clarissa’s Party.” J. Hillis Miller. Fiction and
Repetition:Seven English Novels, Harvard University Press: Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1982.
9. “The intersections of the past and the present, the public and private and the uncanny
palimpsests of colony and the metropole are central to her novel’s landscape.” Mia
Carter, "Fading Light: Imperial Exhaustion in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and
To the Lighthouse." Illuminations: New Readings of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Carol Merli.
New Delhi: Macmillan, 2004. 103-121.
10. “’Mrs Dalloway’s experimental form- its intersecting of time frames, the repetitive
and cyclic forms of its plotting, its refusal of character as a distinct consciousness or
perspective-distinguish it from the traditions of the realist novel, including the latter’s
reification of heterosexuality…The novel’s stream of consciousness style greases the
almost imperceptible slide between the present and the past, between description and
recollection….the novel of stream of consciousness enable memory, the act of
recollection, to stand as the naturalizing figure for the narrative’s crosshatching of the
present and the past.” Annamarie Jagose, “Remembering and Forgetting” In Carol
Merli (Eds.), Illuminations: New Readings of Virginia Woolf, (pp. 205-231). India:
Macmillan Press.2004.