Exploring the Subjectivity of Perception in Mrs. Dalloway Near the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, a scene is depicted in which crowds of people observe with keen interest a particular vehicle as it makes its way through the streets of London. Here is described the scene: The violent explosion […] came from a motor car which had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s shop window. Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had just the time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dovegrey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there was nothing to be seen except a square of dove grey. (14) The identity of the personage behind the gray curtain is never revealed to the reader or to any of the novels’ characters. As the reader is told, “The face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute” (16). This brief passage implicitly reveals to the reader one of Mrs. Dalloway’s major stylistic techniques, and therefore, one of its thematic concerns: the lack of both omniscience and autonomous reality in the novel. Virginia Woolf thus presents a world in which “reality” only exists through the subjective perception of reality. Let us examine this scene more closely to understand how this absence of objectivity is revealed. The reader is given a momentary glimpse into the window of the motor car, but is not given any more information than is witnessed by the characters present in the scene. This lack of an omniscient voice is deliberate and telling, as the whole of Mrs. Dalloway lacks the voice of an omniscient extradiegetic narrator so commonly found in literature. Virginia Woolf uses various stylistic techniques to mold her novel into marvelous display of subjectivity, generally devoid of any objective narratorial commentary. Free indirect discourse reveals the inner psyches of
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various characters – most notably Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Smith, and Peter Walsh. Each character can only understand reality through his/her own perception of it, a perception which is inherently limited and subjective. For instance, Shell-shocked Septimus is convinced that he is the cause of the street traffic being caused by the captivating motor car: “It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose?” (15). Only through the perspectives of other characters in the scene, and taking into account Septimus’ mental state, do we know that Septimus is not the cause of traffic. There is no objective narrator assuring the reader, “This is not true.” Virginia Woolf portrays these subjective and partial perspectives in Mrs. Dalloway in order to capture and more truthfully represent the human experience, in which everyone in their daily lives looks at the world through their own individual lenses of perspective. Just as bystanders are given a momentary glimpse into the motor car, so too are the readers of Mrs. Dalloway given glimpses of memories and moments of passionate intensity. The image of “a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-grey upholstery” flashes by (14). It is a perfect snapshot, a brief fleeting image. When the curtain of the car window is closed, the moment is over. The view inside becomes obstructed, and is left to the imagination of the characters and the reader. Curiously, there is one part of this scene in which the voice of an omniscient narrator seems to saliently shine through. The only people who will ever know the identity of the person inside the car are, according to this narrator, “curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth” (16). Here the narrator of Mrs. Dalloway
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wonderfully warps the reader’s sense of time: the narrator projects the imagination of the reader far into the future, beyond the narrative of the novel. Woolf is constantly toying with and challenging the reader’s assumptions about temporality. In the motor car scene, the narrator slows down an occurrence in order to examine one fleeting moment under a magnifying glass, and then takes leaps and bounds over centuries in order to make an omniscient prophecy. This prophecy is a nearly unrivaled instance in Mrs. Dalloway when the future is addressed in such a way. Interestingly, the future is treated with more omniscient perception than either the past or the present. The future typically is perceived as the least “knowable” of these three temporal groupings. Woolf thus challenges the concept of an objective time, furthering her implicit argument that reality is merely our subjective perspective of it. The limits of human perception are exposed not only in this one particular scene in Mrs. Dalloway. On the contrary, subjectivity resides at the root of the entire narrative. The form of the
novel itself aligns with the novel’s thematic interest in the subjectivity of perception, particularly of the psychological relativity of time. The novel does not contain any chapters or labeled section divisions; this structure (or rather, lack of structure) is quite appropriate for a novel in which the protagonist’s consciousness is not governed by fragmentations of time. Throughout the novel there are eight space breaks, which all signal transitional switches in perspective among several characters. These transitions are jutting and discontinuous, similar to the style of cinematic montage. By juxtaposing different perspectives using occasional space breaks, instead of neatly packaged chapters, Woolf creates in her novel a reality which is subjective and malleable. If the form of Mrs. Dalloway were more “conventional” rather than “modernist,” then it is doubtful that the theme of time’s subjectivity would be so wonderfully illustrated. The novel essentially takes the form of a series of snapshots, of brief fleeting beautiful images which suddenly
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evaporate; flashbacks to memories ignited by sensory stimulation; recollections pieced together; a patchwork quilt of various consciousnesses sewn together. In the scene when a motor car has drawn the attention of various passers-by in the streets of London, the consciousnesses of these people are united in a shared (though fleeting) experience. This moment forms a sort of momentary collective consciousness, before the strangers disband and carry on with their normal routines. The interruption of routine is what has created an exquisite moment. Ultimately, “reality” in Mrs. Dalloway exists exclusively through the characters’ various perceptions of reality. The novel contains no omniscient narrator who can see through the dovegray curtain of the motor car as it makes its way through the streets of London. Is this not true also of our own lives: that there is no omniscient narrator divulging to us what is behind closed curtains? We as readers are “brushed” by the same “mystery” as the characters in the novel (14). We are temporarily treated as a part of the diegesis, as just another spectator; we are not privileged to an objective and omniscient viewpoint. The characters are the only medium through which we are able to view this scene, as well as the rest of the novel. Because of this, we have the capacity to fully immerse ourselves in the subjective consciousnesses of these characters. We become more engaged, we become more involved, because we are completely reliant upon what the characters perceive in order to grasp anything about the happenings of the novel. Virginia Woolf displays in Mrs. Dalloway her insistence upon conforming to the rhythm of thought and the subjectivity of perception. This, she asserts, is the only true depiction of the human experience. Woolf famously explained her writing philosophy wrote, “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
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consciousness.” This is exactly the approach she uses in her novel Mrs. Dalloway. Anything other mode of writing would be, as Peter Walsh would call it, “insincere.”
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