The stream that binds book

and mind
How are stream of consciousness techniques used in “Beloved” and “Mrs.. Dalloway” to explore
the thoughts and feelings of the characters?
 introduction
• Both Beloved by Toni Morrison and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf employ a range of narrative
techniques, shifting narrative viewpoints and perspectives, including stream of consciousness, soliloquy,
overlapping dialogue and internal monologues. However, for the most part, they are told by omniscient
narrators who describe the actions of the various characters in the third person. For the most part, these
omniscient narrators do not utilise the stream of consciousness technique as James Joyce does in the Molly
Bloom section of Ulysses, for example. However, they still clearly access the internal mental states of their
main protagonists and present these in an impressionistic manner characteristic of human thought processes
and the free association of ideas. Omniscient narrators with access to the thoughts of characters are a
common, indeed arguably the dominant, mode of narrative expression in the novel. However, most such
narrators deliver a narrative clearly driven and determined by plot lines. What makes both Beloved and Mrs.
Dalloway distinct and demarcates the use of the description stream of consciousness is that the internal
mental states of the characters are both foregrounded and drive what action there is rather than being
subservient to the needs of the plot. The consciousness of the characters is, in a very real sense, the plot of
both novels, particularly that of Mrs. Dalloway.

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 • However, the purpose of the novels differs greatly. Although it could be argued that Mrs. Dalloway and her
experiences are representative of a particular social clique of self-consciously cultured upper class English
people between the world wars, Mrs. Dalloway is essentially concerned with the experience and
consciousness of an individual. By contrast, Beloved is explicitly an exploration of the collective
consciousness of the millions of Black people enslaved in America before the American Civil War. The focus
of Mrs. Dalloway is on what has shaped the development of a privileged individual and how she operates
within her particular social milieu. The purpose of Beloved is to explore the psychological, physical,
emotional, psychic and spiritual damage the experience of being enslaved has inflicted upon millions of
people. These issues will be examined below.

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 SOC, stream of conciousness
• Before embarking on an analysis of stream of consciousness as it is utilised in Mrs. Dalloway and Beloved, it
is worth considering the nature of stream of consciousness as a literary technique (James, 151). Although it
may seem to be a prosaic and obvious point, some critics seem to miss the reality that although steam of
consciousness writing gives the appearance of accessing a character’s inner thoughts and of following their
random associations, it is as much a product of literary artifice as any other literary technique (Bowler and
Drewery, 1). It is also worth noting that it is not quite as modern and experimental, or distinctive as some
early commentators on Joyce’s Ulysses claimed (Humphrey, 1-3). At the birth of the novel as a literary form
in English, Richardson’s Clarissa and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and, indeed Fielding’s burlesque of Clarissa,
Shamela, concerned themselves explicitly with the issue of accessing the internal thought processes and
emotions of their protagonists (Keymer and Keymer, xii).

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 • One reading of Tristram Shandy is that it is a satire on Locke’s theory of the association of ideas, itself an
early contribution to the study of the nature of human thought and thought processes (Jee, 693). Moreover,
the concept of a character speaking their innermost thoughts aloud during asides and soliloquies has been part
of a dramatist’s toolkit ab ovo (Beşe, 13). Although some critics have sought to differentiate stream of
consciousness techniques from interior monologue, the distinction is hardly convincing (James, 151). The
argument is that while an interior monologue is coherent, stream of consciousness represents preconscious
thought before any structure or order is placed upon it (James, 151). However, interior monologues are not
always coherent and the apparent disorder of stream of consciousness is the conscious, structured work of an
author. The apparent distinction is a matter of authorial preference rather than of kind pace (James, 151).

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 • Notwithstanding the above, writing which employs stream of consciousness techniques is often somewhat naively
considered to be more authentic than more explicitly plot-driven writing which abjures the conceit of mirroring the
random associations of the human consciousness (James, 151). What such criticism often overlooks is that stream of
consciousness writing can only give the appearance of being an actual stream of consciousness (James, 151). It cannot
possibly be the real thing, unless it is the mere unedited transcription of a recorded monologue (Mondada, 85). As
anyone who has ever transcribed a tract of spoken discourse for linguistic analysis can attest, real speech, with its various
tropes and infelicities, only loosely resembles speech as represented for literary purposes (Mondada, 85). Stream of
consciousness is as much a product of artifice, rewriting and revision as any other form of writing (Bowler and Drewery,
1). Indeed, that, too, was part of the central joke of Tristram Shandy; insisting on recording every event and thought he
ever experienced in his life, Tristram cannot possibly write as fast as he lives and therefore his attempts at autobiography
are comically doomed from their inception (Hartvig, 13-14). Indeed, it could plausibly be argued that Tristram Shandy
satirised both stream of consciousness and its underlying assumptions centuries before the term was coined (Hartvig, 13-
14). This point is not made to denigrate the use of stream of consciousness writing as a technique (Bowler and Drewery,
1). It is simply made to foreground the inescapable reality that it is merely another form of literary expression and no
more authentic nor inauthentic a form of narration or technique that any other approach, whatever the claims to the
contrary (Bowler and Drewery, 1). This point may be taken as implicit in the remainder of this essay, even when not
explicitly stated.

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 Modernism and beyond
• However, despite what is argued above, at the time that Mrs. Dalloway was written, stream of consciousness was
widely seen as an innovative and distinctively modern technique, introduced by Joyce, especially in Ulysses
(Bowler and Drewery, 1). Woolf herself was initially impressed by Ulysses and many critics have presented Mrs.
Dalloway as a protofeminist response to Ulysses (Heffernan, 1-4). The fact that Woolf, a notorious social elitist,
later came to scorn Ulysses as the product of a lower-class, partially self-educated mind, a view perhaps tinged with
the anti-Irish prejudice towards Joyce typical of her world view and social class, certainly did not prevent her from
employing similar techniques in her novel (Heffernan, 1-4). Her final views on Joyce and Ulysses were arguably
more positive (Heffernan, 1-4). However, it can be argued that Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness techniques
was an exercise in experimentation for its own sake rather than serving any particular artistic purpose (Bowler and
Drewery, 1). It was a fashionable technique, arguably newly developed, and Woolf was apparently keen to use it
towards her own ends (Heffernan, 1-4). This is a charge that the passage of time has rendered it impossible to level
at Morrison (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 835). Stream of consciousness writing is no longer seen as novel or
experimental but rather simply one more mode of narration available to the writer (Bowler and Drewery, 1). It is
therefore possible to argue that Morrison’s use of the technique is more firmly rooted in the artistic requirements of
her narrative rather than in experimentation for the sake of experimentation (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 835).

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 • Indeed, the influence of Ulysses is obvious in Mrs. Dalloway (Heffernan, 1-4). From the opening paragraph,
which starts with a mundane decision to buy flowers, the reader is thrust straight into the internal thoughts of
a quite ordinary woman (Woolf, 9). This is a distinct echo of the mock-heroism of Ulysses, where the title
itself compares the ramblings of an ordinary Dubliner around his native capital with the classic journey of
Ulysses after the sacking of Troy (Heffernan, 1-4). Moreover, the novel begins in the middle of an
unexplained and ongoing event, like a thought being brought to mind by unexpected events (Woolf, 9). This
opening sets the tone for much of the novel, as Mrs. Dalloway’s thoughts respond to or are sparked by events,
meetings and recollections (Woolf, 9).

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 Effectiveness
• Having established the precariousness of the term stream of consciousness as a distinct technique or range of
techniques and the special claims made for the approach, perhaps a more fruitful line of enquiry would be to
consider the effectiveness with which such techniques work in revealing the internal worlds of the characters
and protagonists in Beloved and Mrs. Dalloway (Bowler and Drewery, 1). In doing so, it seems logical to
begin by evaluating the starkly different artistic intents of the two very different authors. As remarked above,
it is quite clear that Morrison is intent on using stream of consciousness to explore the collective
consciousness of generations of enslaved Black Americans, evoking at times a confusing, contrapuntal swirl
of overlapping voices (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 835). By contrast, Mrs. Dalloway, although it does
provide access to the internal thoughts of characters other than those of the eponymous central character, is
largely concerned with how those other characters impact or have impacted upon the titular character and her
development (Dahiya, 724).

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 • It is perhaps unsurprising that Virginia Woolf is largely successful in conveying the internal world of a
woman roughly her own age and from her own social, economic, cultural and political milieu (Dahiya, 724).
Indeed, when the technical and experimental aspects of the work are set aside, it would not be difficult to
argue that Mrs. Dalloway is in many ways merely a thinly disguised version of Virginia Woolf herself
(Dahiya, 724). Despite its unusual and at the time innovative narrative technique, it would not stretch reason
or credulity too much to consider Mrs. Dalloway to be in many ways no more than an autobiographical novel
(Dahiya, 724). This is not intended to be a negative criticism of itself; much of the world’s great literature,
including works by influences on Woolf like Proust and Joyce, fall into the same category (Heffernan, 1-4).
Indeed, it is no great criticism to argue that an author has merely succeeded in conveying his or her own
internal world convincingly on paper (Heffernan, 1-4). The vast majority of people can safely be assumed to
experience such an internal world but that does not suggest that they have the literary skills to render that
world into compelling literary fiction (Heffernan, 1-4). This is not to suggest that Woolf’s depictions of the
inner worlds of characters other than Mrs. Dalloway are unconvincing; it is simply to observe that their
importance within the narrative is almost always relative to their relationships with the eponymous Mrs.
Dalloway (Dahiya, 724).

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 • By contrast, Morrison is attempting to describe both individual experiences which history and social
advances have ensured she could not have personally experienced and to evoke the collective experience and
consciousness of an entire class of people numbering in the millions (Morrison, 1). While it could be argued
that Woolf is expressing a protofeminist viewpoint in Mrs. Dalloway simply by placing the character at the
centre of the narrative, it would be very hard to advance a thesis which presented Woolf as in any meaningful
way politically radical or particularly subversive of the societal norms of her time, the references in the text to
latent lesbianism notwithstanding (Dahiya, 724). Morrison, however, declares her sociological and political
purpose from the beginning (Morrison, 1). It is reasonable to suggest, therefore, that Morrison’s aims in
Beloved are considerably more ambitious than those of Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway and to attempt judgement
accordingly within the terms of that ambition (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 835).

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 Voices
• The dominant voice in Mrs. Dalloway is that of Mrs. Dalloway herself (Dahiya, 724). Viewed from the
perspective of the present, when the techniques of stream of consciousness are commonplace, it is perhaps
easier to assess how effectively Woolf gets across the thoughts and feelings of her creation to the reader
(Dahiya, 724). The answer, broadly speaking, is very effectively indeed (Dahiya, 724). The technique used
is deceptively simple; the almost casual acknowledgement that the current Mr Dalloway has access to the
memories of her younger self which intrude upon her present thoughts is so skilfully done as to appear almost
artless; “…(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…” (Woolf, 9).

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 • As Mrs. Dalloway negotiates the urban landscape of London she does not merely describe it as a traditional
omniscient narrator would do so (Woolf, 10). Instead, her consciousness interacts with both the landscape
and the people it evokes and reminds her of, in a kaleidoscope of physical descriptions of places, buildings
and people and a cascade of value judgements which impose her consciousness on the landscape (Woolf, 10).
Mrs. Dalloway’s London is precisely that; it is the city and its denizens as they appear within her
consciousness, a face of which she is herself explicitly aware; “…one sees it so, making it up, building it
round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries
sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same…” (Woolf, 10). In Mrs. Dalloway it is impossible to
not be aware of the central character’s thoughts and feelings, since they are foregrounded from the beginning
of the text and explicitly mediate the experience of reading the novel (Woolf, 10). In a very real sense, the
consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway is the nearest the novel has to a plot; indeed, it is the plot (Woolf, 10). This
remains the case even when the internal states of other characters are laid open to the reader, since ultimately
it is their interaction with the consciousness of the central character which lends them relevance (Dahiya,
724). This is particularly notable in the portrayal of Septimus Warren Smith (Woolf, 16).

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 • In one sense, the character of Septimus Warren Smith is the nearest Mrs. Dalloway comes to caricature and the
presentation of a common archetype or trope (Woolf, 16). He is a shellshocked former soldier who fought in the Great
War, a sensitive former poet permanently scarred by the loss of friends and the horrors of the fighting he has seen (Woolf,
16). He is clearly a form of composite of real life war poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, someone who
volunteered to fight for a noble, romanticised conception of patriotism and has returned home disillusioned and unable to
fit back into polite society (Woolf, 17). Yet here Woolf shows her skill in turning what could have been a caricature of a
well-known literary trope into a credible character with a tortured internal life (Woolf, 17). Woolf has the insight to
extrapolate from her own experience of how her personal consciousness mediates how she experiences the external world
to recognise how the internal mental world of Septimus Warren Smith does the same (Woolf, 17). Indeed, her recognition
that his entire experience is viewed through the prism of guilt, emotional anguish and pain is a considerable achievement;
“…this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the
surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into
flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought” (Woolf, 17). Here Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness
technique again operates with deceptively direct simplicity to give the reader access to the tortured thoughts and feelings
of the doomed Septimus (Woolf, 17). It is entirely in keeping with the centrality of Mrs. Dalloway’s feelings and
thoughts to the novel that it is her identification with the experience of the suicide of Septimus which the text valorises as
the most significant aspect of his death (Woolf, 126).

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 Black voices
• While Beloved employs a wider range of voices to more overtly political purpose than Mrs. Dalloway this
does not of itself imply a hierarchy of literary quality or worth. It could be argued that Mrs. Dalloway has no
plot (Dahiya, 724). By contrast, it could be postulated that Beloved has a multiplicity of overlapping plots in
related genre (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 835). Beloved has elements of the historical novel, of a
sociopolitical tract and a ghost story, among other characteristics (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 835).
Although Beloved has a complex structure over two timelines and employs a wide-ranging collection of
narrative voices in gradually revelatory flashbacks, the central event of the text, the one which sets the entire
plot in motion, is one gleaned from Morrison’s research into slavery (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 838).
This is the bleak story of a runaway slave mother who kills her unnamed daughter rather than allow her to
endure the horrors of slavery (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 838). This central act of brutality in the service
of mercy, which transgresses the normal role of motherhood and the bonds of mother and child, essentially
radiates from the past into the present and manifests as the sinister, possibly supernatural figure of Beloved
herself, taken by Sethe, the mother, to be the ghost or reincarnation of her dead daughter (Ghosh, Bhushan
and Kapoor, 839). It is Sethe’s voice which is central to Beloved (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 838).

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 • Sethe’s voice is perhaps encapsulated by the bleak understatement with which she describes her love for her
dead child and the savage subversion of motherly roles enforced by slavery as she prostitutes herself in return
for an engraving on her daughter’s headstone; “"No more powerful than the way I loved her," Sethe answered
and there it was again. The welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones; the one she selected to lean against on
tiptoe, her knees wide open as any grave” (Morrison, 5).

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 In Beloved, the supernatural blends seamlessly with the natural world in a way which symbolises the everyday,
unnatural savagery of slavery and the way it perverted human nature; “Counting on the stillness of her own
soul, she had forgotten the other one: the soul of her baby girl. Who would have thought that a little old baby
could harbor so much rage?” (Morrison, 6). Sethe’s apparently passive voice gives the reader access to the
deadened state of her thoughts and feelings, an internal state which has normalised the unthinkable; “…to live
out her years in a house palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut…” (Morrison, 6). Even basic morality
has been inverted, with the reality of sacrificing her dignity to the engraver more crushing than the act of killing
her own child: “…those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone… her knees wide open as
the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil”
(Morrison, 6). Here the use of stream of consciousness, with its blending of two horrific events into one
seamless experience and their projection from a ghastly past into a haunted present, works perfectly to provide
insight into Sethe’s feelings and thoughts (Morrison, 6). Moreover, they reveal the universal truth about slavery
in the specifics of two harrowing personal experiences; “”Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters
with some dead Negro's grief” (Morrison, 7).

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 • Beloved employs a range of narrative techniques, including overlapping voices in the early chapters of part
two, which are symbolic of a collective African and slave consciousness (Ghosh, Bhushan and Kapoor, 838).
However, it is Sethe’s voice which most effectively dramatises the inhumanity of slavery and how it perverts
normal human relationships (Morrison, 6). It is through her deadened internal voice that the reader
experiences both the intensely personal consequences of the experience of being enslaved and the horror of
the broader phenomenon of slavery itself (Morrison, 6). For all of its shifting perspectives, interlocking
timelines and cumulative flashbacks, the greatest strength of Beloved is in the central humanity of Sethe, and
how it endures despite the terrible things she has suffered and the almost unthinkable things she has been
forced to do (Morrison, 6). This is perfectly conveyed by the use of stream of consciousness, which gives the
reader plausible access to the thoughts and feelings of Sethe, however much this apparent veracity is the
product of Morrison’s authorial artifice and skill (Morrison, 6).

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 Conclusion
• Although they are very different texts from strikingly different cultural backgrounds, Mrs. Dalloway and
Beloved both employ stream of consciousness techniques to great effect in their narratives, giving the
impression of direct access to the innermost workings of the minds of their characters. Despite some
scepticism regarding some of the more sweeping claims made for the distinctiveness of stream of
consciousness as opposed to other forms of representation of internal monologues, it has to be conceded that
in the right hands, these techniques can succeed in providing the highly plausible illusion of eavesdropping
on the thoughts and feelings of fictional characters. In Mrs. Dalloway and Beloved, these techniques are
clearly in the right hands.

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