Product Description

The events of this novel occupy a single June day in central London. Clarissa Dalloway, the wealthy and fashionable wife of a Member of Parliament, is preparing for a party she is to hold that evening.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #514989 in Books
• Published on: 1992-01-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

A myriad impressions
If you are looking for a novel packed with exciting events, a story that will keep you thinking 'What'll happen next?' then this is not the book for you. "Mrs Dalloway" does not have an exhilarating plot. It is not an eventful story. Neither is it peopled with unusual characters. It is, perhaps, a medium through which you might experience a 'moment of being', the sudden revelation central to Virginia Woolf's writing at its finest.

'Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day', suggests Virginia Woolf in "The Common Reader", 'The mind receives a myriad impressions....is it not the task of the novelist to convey this?' In "Mrs Dalloway" the cause-and-effect narrative of the realist tradition is abandoned. The 'scaffolding' of the realist plot is taken down; there is 'scarcely a brick to be seen' in this critique of social convention. Instead, Woolf's reader follows an apparently random chain of external happening and thought-processes that comprise a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway.

Consider the two-page section in which Mrs Dalloway has left her long-anticipated party in search of privacy. Woolf's use of free indirect interior monologue grants the reader access to the protagonist's mind as the principal chain-of-events is halted, the narrative infused with a sort of psychoanalytical free-association, as memories of Boughton and the past merge into London and the present: 'It held...something of her own in it...this sky above Westminster'. Woolf's prose concentrates on minor events and descriptive details that are insignificant in the context of linear progression, unable to be twisted into the 'realist' tradition of a causal plot. Look at how Mrs Dalloway's thought-process is snapped by a sudden interjection ('Oh, but how surprising!') as the old lady in the house opposite glances across. The emotional flux of Woolf's narrative refocuses Mrs Dalloway's outlook as the old lady's quiet independence is contrasted with the pseudo-vitality of the party. Moreover, the motif of the striking clock is placed in immediate juxtaposition, representing not only the passing of the years for Mrs Dalloway but contributing to the unity of the novel. The sound of the clock striking evokes an earlier narrative event as Mrs Dalloway recalls the suicide of Septimus and strives to connect her own experience with that of others: 'The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two three, she did not pity him with all this going on'.

Woolf, like many of her contemporaries, employs self-conscious literary allusion as a means of unifying a text. For the schizophrenic Septimus, incessant mental echoes of a refrain from Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" ('Fear no more the heat of the sun') had indicated a terror of life and the ultimate social defiance of his death. The same refrain drifts across Mrs Dalloway's mind as, having defied the social whirl of the party, she recognizes in this 'moment of being' her parallel with the insane youth she never met: 'But what an extraordinary night! She felt glad that he had done it'. However, Mrs Dalloway's sense of exaltation is paralleled by recognition of her essential difference to the schizophrenic, her capacity for life, her ability to transcend social convention, and to survive 'the heat of the sun'. 'The clock was striking': the image recalls the power of chronology that continues to dominate the tradition of the realist novel. Nevertheless, the dissolution of its 'leaden circles' emphasizes Woolf' s concern with time as much more than a linear structure, as an inter-weaving of past and present containing a multiplicity of potential futures. Whereas Septimus's mind fell apart, Mrs Dalloway 'must assemble' and become 'Clarissa', become herself, a point of being.

This is a beautiful novel, scripted out of what its author called 'incantation and mystery', in which a social message is communicated via rhythmic repetition, metaphor, 'moments of being'.

Readers seeking to deepen their understanding of Virginia Woolf, her novels, and wider literary world would do well to invest in Hermione Lee's superb critical biography.