Narrative Style in Mrs. Dalloway

            Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway follows several characters through a single day in London in June of 1923. It being set shortly after the end of the First World War, its characters all represent a post-war society bent on reflection and reminiscence. We are made aware of this, however, not through the plot of action—for as far as action goes, not much occurs—but through Woolf’s style of narration through the characters’ “stream of consciousness,” or narration of their thoughts and memories as they occur.

            Mrs. Dalloway is told through an omniscient third-person narration—one which delves deeply into the characters through a combination on dialogue, interior monologue, and free indirect discourse. The novel begins,

                        Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

            For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach (3).

While the first line is presented in the third person, the sense of being plunged into this character’s day, without introduction gives us the sense that we are plunging directly into Clarissa’s mind. The second line is in the free indirect style— giving us Clarissa’s thought without any narratorial indication such as “she thought”—which continues through the third line. The fourth pulls the narration back out a step, by assuming an authorial presence, giving us Clarissa’s full name, and telling us what she thought.

            Without even leaving this first page, the next paragraph takes us into another powerful aspect of Mrs. Dalloway’s narration: memory. It continues,

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen (3).

Without any indication, Woolf has taken shifted us in this scene from Clarissa’s present to her past—just as a mind shifts on a morning that reminds one of a past morning—where she muses on days spent at a place called Bourton during her eighteenth year.

            We later find out what Bourton is, and what went on during Clarissa’s time spent there. We learn of it through the presentation of her memories—such as the one presented above, unannounced, streamed—as well as through those of characters who share them, mainly Peter Walsh (who was madly in love with Clarissa at the time).

            Another striking aspect of Woolf’s style is her sentences. They grow long by what seems their own accord, whirling up like breezes and creating not only tones but entire scenes, entire characters, entire worlds. One example from early on in the novel occurs as Clarissa walks through bustling London on her way to the flower shop:

And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were now taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party (5).

This sentence describes the scene before Clarissa, while—in its seemingly infinite run—also creating the very sense of it all, the endless impressions and turns of walking through a city and seeing all the bustle at once and more broadly about being alive on a morning such as this one. We also get in this sentence not only a description or impression of her surroundings but from within Clarissa herself—her reminder to herself to “economise” and not impulse buy for her daughter, her sense of pride over the history of her family’s royal proximity, and ultimately it leads back to the party—the essence of Clarissa’s purpose and part in it all.

            Woolf’s style in Mrs. Dalloway shifts endlessly in a masterful manner. Her ability to convey her characters’ thoughts and impressions so seamlessly and honestly requires a knowledge of them that lingers above the narrative, an existence from which to pull that I hope to be able to formulate and convey.