The Narrative Technique in Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway was written written by Virginia Woolf, and was published in 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post-World War I England. The day is 13th June 1923, and the events are shown through the eyes of several Londoners. Mrs. Dalloway is a psychological novel, which means that it focuses on the reactions and inner thoughts, feelings, emotions of the characters, and not on their actions. The technique used is called the stream of consciousness, or interior monologue, which gives the reader the impression that they are in the minds of the characters. According to the Glossary of Literary Terms by Abrams, ”stream of consciousness is the name applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator's intervention, the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character's mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations”. The aim of stream of consciousness is to evoke the character’s interior life, and to depict subjective and objective reality. It represents a mental activity that is very close to the actual thoughts of the character. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf relied mostly on direct interior monologues, which means that the author is not present, the characters’ thoughts are presented directly to the reader. The novel is told from the viewpoint of an omniscient and invisible narrator. The omniscient narrator, i.e. the author (in this case Woolf) moves from character to character, place to place, and episode to episode with complete freedom, giving herself access to her characters’ characters’ thoughts and feelings whenever she chooses and providing information whenever she wishes. When Clarissa, and afterwards Peter Walsh, take a walk in the park, their thoughts are interrupted by the author, who then shows us the mind of random people thinking about their everyday troubles. In the novel, the sentences vary between quite short and rather long. The short ones are used in dialogues, while the long ones tell us the thoughts and actions of the characters. However, it is a bit confusing to identify the speaker in the maze of long sentences, so the short ones bring us back to reality in the objective time sense. In order to prevent us from getting lost, the writer inserted ”signposts”, fragments such as ”Clarissa thought” or ”Peter said”. Woolf applies another modernist method, the difference between psyhological (subjective) and clock time (objective). Objective time is the natural flow of time measured by hours. It is represented by the Big Ben which shows us and the characters the passage of objective time. It interrupts the narration, and helps the reader to keep track of time, and returns the characters into their present. Subjective time, on the other hand, erases the boundary between present and past, it is flexible, and measured by the intensity of the emotions. Subjective time passes as quickly as the characters feel it, it allows them to think ab out the past, the present, and also about a hypothetical present based on a different past. It means that they try to envision a different present which would be the result of a different past, i.e. the “what if”-questions. if”-questions. Their thoughts move on the free association principle, which enables jumping from the past to the future without chronological order. It means that the thinking processes are discontinuous since the thought or sight of a random thing reminds the characters of the past or future. A good example of this is when Clarissa experiences the sunny June morning, and starts to remember her youth.
Another device used is called cinematic technique. It includes ways of handling space and time relationships that are similar to montage. For example there is the scene in the novel where the car appears with the mysterious passenger, and all the spectators try to identify them. Here time remains static but a cross-section view of London is given, how different people in the city see and react to the same event. This scene is of key importance, because it shows us that the narrator is not an objective omniscient one, since the identity of the passanger is not known to them either, the narrator only knows things that are seen through the eyes of the characters. Another good example of this is the plane skywriting an advertisement for a brand of caramel. Time montage refers to the fact that the characters are in the present but their minds often wander back to the past. The Leitmotif of the novel is a couple of lines from Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s tragedies: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun Nor the furious winter’s rages.“ These few lines are quoted throughout the book, and they mean a lot to Clarissa, because they represent her wish to die. In the first version of the novel, she actually commits suicide in the end, but Virginia Woolf later changed the plot-line, and included the character of Septimus to die instead of Clarissa. When she receives news about Septimus's suicide, she is overwhelmed, but the sight of the old lady preparing for bed gives her hope and strength about the future, so the lines change their meaning.
