Mrs. Dalloway Stream of Consciousness Analysis

Jei Woo

In her novel titled Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf writes of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class woman who lives in post-World War I London, utilizing a certain stream-of-consciousness writing style. Such a stream-of-consciousness writing style blends the thoughts and actions of a character and, at many times, with those of another character. One can analyze such a writing style while executing a close reading of a certain passage in the novel, such as the passage in which Mrs. Dalloway meets and converses with another person of high social status, Hugh Whitbread.

Mrs. Dalloway is in the middle of a walk through London when she happens upon Hugh Whitbread, whom she describes as the “admirable Hugh” (197). In the beginning, the first few lines of dialogue between Mrs. Dalloway and Mr. Whitbread are punctuated in quotation marks. However, when Evelyn Whitbread, Hugh Whitbread’s wife, is mentioned, Woolf writes, “Was Evelyn ill again?” (198). This line, however, is not in any quotations and is not shown to be one of Mrs. Dalloway’s thoughts, though it is presumably. The following line is a combination of thoughts and actions of both characters: “Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by a kind of pout or swell of his well-covered, manly, extremely handsome, perfectly upholstered body…” (198). In this quote, Woolf includes Hugh’s speech as well as a description of Hugh’s body, which has to be in the mind of Mrs. Dalloway for we know that he is a subject of her admiration. Apparently, Woolf does not bother to create the distinction between thought and action through her physical writing. The next few lines also emphasize Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing style because they follow the certain stream of thoughts that must have passed through Mrs. Dalloway’s head during her encounter with Mr. Whitbread. Her train of thought moves from her considering herself a nuisance for thinking about asking of Evelyn’s ailments, then to her thinking that her hat was not “the right hat for the early morning,” and finally to how Hugh “always made her feel…that she might be a girl of eighteen” (198).

The next passage also demonstrates Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing style not only because it blends in Mrs. Dalloway’s thoughts into the writing, but also because the writing moves back and forth between time, from memory to present. When Mrs. Dalloway remembers Peter Walsh’s contempt for Hugh Whitbread, Woolf writes in the form of mental pictures: “She could remember scene after scene at Bourton—Peter furious; Hugh not, of course, his match in any way, but still not a positive imbecile as Peter made out; not a mere barber’s block” (198). Woolf switches back from thought to action and from past to present, which follows Mrs. Dalloway’s stream of thought that is racing through her head during her meeting with Mr. Whitbread. The writing style itself is very free in nature and possesses great momentum because it flows very easily from page to page.