Conscious Streams of Consciousness

From an objective point of view, life on Earth is but a web of interconnected parts of people’s lives. Virginia Woolf makes good use of this perspective in her novel Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1995. The lives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith are linked in this story by the very flimsy mention of the latter’s suicide at a party that Mrs. Dalloway hosts. As the very anxious reader, I was waiting for the dramatic punch-line, the sentence or two in which Woolf would reveal that the two were long-lost siblings, or something equally cliché. But even halfheartedly expecting this was silly of me; upon turning to the first page of Woolf’s piece, I knew she was unlike most of the writers I had read before. Upon reflection, is it a great thing that Woolf did not stoop to the temptation of a stereotypical twist plot, for a stronger bond between her dual main characters would have muddied the contrast between the stark, somber life of traumatized veteran Smith and the busy, high-end life of social butterfly Clarissa. 

As I’m sure many of my classmates have not failed to point out, a central characteristic to Woolf’s writing is the subgenre in which she writes Mrs. Dalloway. The stream-of-consciousness style is one that I am much used to, and one that I enjoy writing in. I find something exciting about being able to be in a character’s head, even in the third person point of view, which many would complain is a rather detached point of view (though I would disagree). I also like the idea of being able to switch from one character to another. When this is done in the first person, I often have difficulty maintaining the respective voices of the characters throughout the story, especially if, as I have often seen, said characters are deeply engaged with each other as the story progresses. Woolf’s novel, however, takes stream-of-consciousness to a whole new level. In my writing I often give a mere tease of the character’s thoughts, often sharing general feelings my character is experiencing, but only rewarding them with the exact thoughts they have once in a while. With Mrs. Dalloway, one is constantly reading the thoughts of a character.

This allows for us to see the obvious differences between the four characters she lets us live this June day (along with a few flashbacks) through. As I find Clarissa and Septimus to be the essential main characters of Woolf’s story, I will describe how reading of them felt like. Scenes with Clarissa, though rather lively yet easy to follow, were laden with nostalgic moods, especially as she remembers Peter Walsh, a former lover. Even in other, more trivial undertakings, she helps us paint a picture of her past, such as when she “paus[es] for a moment at the window of a glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves” (8). Septimus, on the other hand, has to be read differently as a shell-shocked survivor of the Great War. As expected of a suicidal character, his thoughts circle on the terror he was witnessed as a soldier, oozing the gloom and morbidity of his past. This supposed contrast between “the sane and the insane” is a striking product of Woolf’s that I would hope to be able to imitate in the future.