Stream of Consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway

Extended Essay – English A

Research Question

In Mrs. Dalloway, how does Virginia Woolf use the stream of consciousness narrative technique to convey the duality between the public and private spheres of life?

Word Count: 3993

Name: Siyuan Sonia Qin

School: Colonel By Secondary School 000953

Supervisor’s Name: Ms. L. Waddell

Examination Session: May 2015

Candidate Number: 0080

Abstract

This essay seeks to explore one of the many accomplishments of Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness narrative style in her novel Mrs. Dalloway, by examining the question ‘In Mrs. Dalloway, how does Virginia Woolf use the stream of consciousness narrative technique to convey the duality between the public and private spheres of life?’ The scope of this essay includes the narration style employed by Virginia Woolf and the methods through which she portrays the public and private spheres. The public sphere is the objective, shared, outer world, and the private sphere is the subjective, personal, inner world. A variety of secondary sources have been used to support the claims in this essay.

Woolf’s stream of consciousness narration style employs mostly indirect interior monologue, which is when a character’s thoughts and feelings are expressed, but with the guidance of an omniscient narrator.^[1] Woolf’s strength has always been isolation – writing about the incongruous movements of an individual’s thoughts and feelings.^[2] However, she was also fascinated by communities: family, friends, nation, and history.^[3] This juxtaposition constitutes the core of her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, in which the need for a certain autonomy is set alongside the need to find a creative standpoint which will be less preoccupied with private relationships.^[4] In this novel, Woolf suggests that simply being alive on the same day in London is a deeper bond among the characters than any of the individual choices of love and friendship which narrative fiction normally privileges.^[5] What is interesting about Mrs. Dalloway is that Woolf succeeds in portraying London not as a monotonous, two-dimensional city whose only purpose is to act as a public setting for a novel.^[6] Instead, she uses the stream of consciousness narrative technique to sculpt the city as the intersection of empirical fact and personal interpretation and response.^[7]

Words: 300

Table of Contents

Title Page        1

Abstract        2

Table of Contents        4

Introduction        5

Depiction of Public Sphere        8

Depiction of Private Sphere        12

Uniqueness of Stream of Consciousness        16

Conclusion        18

Bibliography        20

Introduction

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the author employs a unique modernist writing style, formally called the “stream of consciousness” narration technique. As critic David Dowling writes, “a great advantage of the stream-of-consciousness style [is it] allows the narrator to slide in and out of a character’s mind without interrupting the narrative flow.”^[8] He argues that “Woolf chose to inhabit this blurred mental landscape between soliloquy and omniscience to produce contradictory rhythms: the seamless flow of the grammar of the prose versus the abrupt shifts in perspective from one character to another.”^[9] Woolf uses physical and psychological connections to jump from one character’s thoughts to another.^[10]

Woolf’s believed the business of a novelist is the exploration of character, ultimately leading to insight into human nature and the meaning of life.^[11] Hence, in this novel, she investigates the dualism between the two “spheres” of life: the public and the private. The public sphere encompasses the unity and connectivity between humans – as everyone experiences past, present, future, as well as “shared” public events that people in the same location may experience simultaneously. The “public” is concerned with the spatial aspect of life. The private sphere encompasses the uniqueness of each person’s selfhood, spirit, or soul – as everyone experiences different thoughts and consciousnesses. The “private” is concerned with the temporal aspect of life. Woolf portrays the dualism of life: it is at once public and private, eternal and ephemeral.^[12] Although there exists in each person a desire to live and a passion for life, there also exists a wish for extinction and death – a yearning to disappear from the world.

At first glance the novel is strung together effortlessly by fluid transitions and a smooth, flowing narrative style, but beneath the surface lurks a sense of disconnectedness and discontinuity. Woolf employs this disjointedness to show the realities of human isolation, while at the same time pointing out that there is “an overriding, almost mythical unity existing not only between human beings, but between human beings and the non-human world.”^[13] Although all humans exist in the same stream of “linear” time – past, present, and future – they are all actually unknown to each other, and hence, isolated and alone.^[14]

Woolf’s main perspectives on this dualism are best conveyed through the characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. In the first draft of Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus was not included as a character and it was Clarissa who was supposed to die or commit suicide.^[15] However, Woolf changed her mind and in the final draft, Septimus was created as the “double” of Clarissa.^[16] Many of Clarissa’s original nihilistic characteristics were passed over to Septimus, so he represents the part of her that is more concerned with criticizing the realities of society, and worshiping the idea of death as liberation.

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