Woolf and the Stream of Conscious Style

The Mrs. Dalloway Reader is a modernist classic by Virginia Woolf that follows the day of 53 year old Mrs. Dalloway as she goes about her quotidian schedule, preparing for a party later that evening. Virginia Woolf was a prominent figure in 20^th century literature for her particular style of writing and the skill that she possessed in using it to delve deep into the minds of her subjects and captivates the audience. What is very particular is that she takes the stream of consciousness writing, a very fluid style of narration, pioneered by the likes of James Joyce and completely turns it on its head by making the conscious overwhelmingly apparent.

               Throughout the novel, there is little indication or adherence to grammatical rules that would otherwise mark pauses in the narration. Rather, Woolf excludes quotations marks, allows for excessive run on sentences and transitions from phrase to phrase with little or no clarity. That is not to say that Woolf does not make transitions clear, but they only make sense in the context of the thought. Take for instance, “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so […] love life”, where Mrs. Dalloway is processing the environment and circumstance around her as she makes her way to purchase flowers in the morning. There are three successive phrases that are highly unorthodox when taken by themselves, for they are clauses that could easily be conjoined and would not compromise literary or comprehensive merit. If anything, they make less sense as disjoint thoughts. These are ideas that are interrupted by another thought, but are somehow expected to adhere to the prior and following, and so we are victim to Mrs. Dalloway’s untrained flow of thought and perhaps are even led to question, as readers, the stability of her own mind. The stream of consciousness, in Woolf’s repertoire, enhances profundity and character rather than comprehension, because the processes of each character differ slightly and there is the constant conceit of a fading or false interpretation to an event. Woolf’s work is very Freudian and very cognitive and from there has much strength in creating a rich world that is based on perception.

               One very clear example of how the stream of consciousness narrative style runs amok with perception is the liquid presence of time that never stays present in a continuous sense. From the very beginning, when she introduces the story, we are given this excerpt, “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course […] the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn […] until Peter Walsh sid “musing among the vegetables?”-was that it?-“I prefer men to cauliflowers”-was that it? […] He would be back from India one of these days, June or July [...].” First off, there is so much to consume in just that one sentence that it boggles the mind that she makes it comprehensible, and even better one must question there exactly how long the thought takes her. What is interesting about the style is that plot actually does take a backseat because one of the most essential qualities of any plot is the sequence of events in a given time. However, time here is so utterly subjective and at the whims of the character’s thoughts that it seems almost illusory as Mrs. Dalloway and others will jump back and forth between flashbacks and the present without even warning. We are given a glimpse to the truest sense of a process of random thought that everything in the world becomes dependent on that alone. Events, time, perception are supplanted by subjective reality in the eye and thoughts of characters. This is why the book is very difficult to comprehend, but it is still a rich read.