Mrs. Dalloway

The plot of the novel concentrates only on one day in June, 1923, when Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway plans her evening party. All the events are actually measured by the chiming of Big Ben, striking every half an hour with a resounding voice, remembering about the flowing of time, the sense of which can be easily lost as the reader immerses into the rapid torrent of the stream of the protagonists' consciousnesses. The action of the novel is set in London but frequent reminiscences of the protagonists transport the reader back to the times of the Great War, to India or to Italy. “Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letter of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England. “ (159) The destructive impact of the War is ever-present in the story and could be well seen in the behaviour of Septimus Warren Smith as well as the general trauma that the society experienced that time: “This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright social behaviour”. (133) All this, the post-war trauma, the sense of being empty inside, the dejectedness of the 20th century man leads Peter Walsh to a certain statement: “The death of the soul.” (166). The words reflect both the gradual regression of spirituality in society and individual. “Mrs. Dalloway” was written not a long time ago after the per-existentialist Kierkegaard introduced the concept of “angst”, later developed by Heidegger. Woolf seems to be inspired by the philosophical movement, granting her protagonists with that existentialist sense of loneliness. “As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people can go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them.” (182) As all people struggle with these experiences...

One of the characters of the novel, Septimus Warren Smith, might be treated as a person who reflects the authoress' personal difficulties with sustaining mental health. He experiences the world most painfully due to his bipolar disease. He has synesthetic abilities and his sensitivity allows him to meet the reality on a higher level of perception: “The word 'time' split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thesally, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself-” (173) The state of Septimus after the War also reflects the feelings of veterans in general.

The novel features almost no dialogues, only internal monologues can be observed. The peculiar style of Virginia Woolf prolongs an instant into a longer measure of time, like it happens during the scene of the motor tire exploding on the streets of London. The authoress deals with the problem of rendering the reality in literature. Because how is it possible to portray the world using such limited, after all, means as literature? She answered to the question by moving towards the within as the subject matter is not the outside reality but that of the subconscious, the unknown – the workings of human mind. The omniscient narrator of the story stops the plot in order to hearken the gurgle of the protagonists thoughts: “As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop, there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me.” (158) . Woolf to an extent zooms the world, submerging into the complexities of human psyche, composing a mosaic of the subconsciousness of the mass, taking into consideration the sense of loneliness, isolation, lack of love, failure, mental diseases. Of course, not only does she focus on the dark side of life because happiness and the sombre beauty of life is portrayed as frequently as the aforementioned: “To love makes one solitary”, as Lucrezia Warren Smith summarizes. The characters' musings about love can be encountered very often in the novel: “ 'In love!' she said. That he at his age should be sucked under his little bow-tie by that monster! And there's no flesh on his neck; his hands are red; and he's six months older than I am! Her eye flashed back to her; but in her heart she felt, all the same; he is in love. He has that, she felt; he is in love”. (155) In addition, the narrator dips below the surface of the world, where nothing is transparent and even the voice of the narrator can be lost, if the novel is not followed fastidiously.

In “Mrs. Dalloway” the mundane object, seemingly unworthily of paying great attention to them, are turned into exquisite object of artistic value, like the plane swirling through London's skies: “It has gone; it was behind the clouds. There was no sound. The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a mission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed, and yet certainly so it was – a mission of the greatest importance.” (140) Further we read that: “Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf  at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory – away the aeroplane shot.” (144) That unseen style of slipping from the voice of the narrator into the thoughts of the protagonists had one more thing to offer the reader: it tries to show the simultaneousness of the occurrences happening in the world. It was only with the invention of the cinema that man has become able to render that unique feature of reality. Virginia Woolf tried to deal with the question in literature, which is a space quite limited compared to cinema, which can unify the visual and the sonic. But the cinema cannot introduce to the complexities of the mind in that way as literature can.

The extraordinary moments of life are yet one more issue of the novel bringing to the mind the concept of Joycean epiphany: “She felt only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated; she felt his hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their companionship. All this she saw as one sees a landscape in a flash of lightning – and Sally (never had she admired her so much!) gallantly taking her way unvanquished.” (150) Woolf displays the richness of an instant, stuffing it with thoughts flowing like a mountain brook. It is a brook, though, contaminated with the spoils of war and modern mechanized society. The novel also shows how much our thoughts and behaviours and choices are shaped by the indomitable past. With “Mrs. Dalloway”, a work of fiction became something more than merely a plot or a storyline – it has gained another level of complexity because the book portrays the labours of the human consciousness. It is thus a handbook of applied psychoanalysis, depicting the state of loneliness of man: “Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall. Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.” (249) This might be a way out of the overwhelming sense of solitude and chaos. This and the company of other human being, when simple joy arrives: “...he held her hand. Happiness is this, is this, he thought.” (203)