Olga Grabowska
THE JOHN PAUL II CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF LUBLIN
Scientific Supervisor: PhD, Aleksander Bernacki
THE VERBAL REPRESENTATION OF CLARISSA DALLOWAY’S THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is an excellent example of the representation of the stream of consciousness technique in a Modernist novel. The focus of this paper is on the ways the consciousness of Clarissa Dalloway is represented in the novel.
Keywords: modernism, modernist novel, protagonist, stream of consciousness technique, interior monologue.
Virginia Woolf is among other famous writers, who master and develop the stream of consciousness technique in their works. The entirety of the novel Mrs Dalloway takes place within a single day in mid-June, 1923, and in one single place, the prosperous neighbourhood of Westminster.
Yassine Benhmeida states that Mrs Dalloway is a Flâneur novel. He considers that Clarissa Dalloway is a prototype of an urban modernist flâneur character who is contemporary and stylish, who walks in the streets of the modern city, with all of its “complexity” and “confusion” (Benhmeida 2015, 36).
Two protagonists whose stream of consciousness is stimulated by the vividness of urbanisation are Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. The plot of the story is not written chronologically. The book is written by using a literary narrative technique called Media Res and with the third person narrative. Woolf starts the story in the middle of the action and continues to follow the movement of thought retrospections, interior monologues and other disclosure devices of the characters. The aim of this paper is to discuss the verbal means by which Clarissa Dalloway’s stream of consciousness is represented in the text of the novel.
Woolf interlaces the stream of consciousness technique and interior monologues in the narration of Mrs Dalloway. William Harmon, Clarence Hugh Holman and William Flint Thrall in their A Handbook to Literature, give the following definition of the interior monologue: “It [interior monologue] records the internal, emotional experience of the character on any one level or on combinations of several levels of consciousness, reaching downward to the nonverbalised level where images must be used to represent nonverbalised sensations or emotions” (Harmon W, Holman C. and Flint W. 1992, 273).
The narrative of the novel is extraordinary. In the very beginning the readers are plunged into Clarissa’s mind, inside her thoughts, as if they could hear her inner voice when reading clauses: “What a lark!” and “What a plunge!” It does not require a chronological presentation of the main protagonist’s life. Still, the narration looks like a collage of different images. It seems to be a mosaic consisting of the pieces of Clarissa’s present and past, which are embedded in one ordinary day in which nothing unusual happens, only shopping for flowers and hosting a party.
The story starts with an instance of stream of consciousness of the main heroine Clarissa Dalloway. She begins her morning by going out shopping for flowers that are going to be the chief adornment of her party that evening. The freshness of the morning air and the vibration of the modern city plunge her deeply in her memories, at the time of living in Bourton. Those memories make her consider her life choices. She perpetually askes herself how it would be if she chose her former true love Peter Walsh. Her thought process is immediately described as wondering to vivid memories of beautiful and independent Sally, Clarissa’s girlish admiration. As a consequence, the stream of consciousness technique takes the reader back in time and space to uncover Clarissa’s intrinsic thoughts and feelings, memories and associations, connected with the present time: “How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning […]” (Woolf 2016, 1). The use of the present tense is an important marker of the direct access to the thoughts of a character at the very moment they are thinking and a grammatical marker of stream of consciousness.
According to Robert Humphrey, Woolf uses the stream of consciousness technique in Mrs Dalloway more ‘‘boldly’’ than other writers. That is because her interior monologue consists of ‘‘guidance of the author’’ (Humphrey 1954, 71). The author is hidden by the narration, which is provided by the third-person omniscient narrator. Throughout the use of associations, Woolf notifies the reader to the perception of place, time and the way of narrative. The author’s guidance makes it easier for the reader to follow the thoughts and the changes in the direction between the characters’ real lives and the past. Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Smith, and Peter Walsh’s interior monologues are continuously shifted between the past and the present and from one character to another.
To achieve a quick transition from one character to another, Woolf uses the literary technique called free indirect speech. It means that she uses some characteristics of third-person along with the essential first-person direct speech. In Mrs Dalloway Woolf captures character’s thoughts and uses them to tell the story. According to Peter Verdonk, on the one hand, in the first passage Woolf creates a double-edged effect which means that in the opening lines the narrator creates a distance from the character. On the other hand, the reader is given the possibility to feel the closeness to the characters’ thoughts (Verdonk 2002, 34).
This effect is achieved by creating a free indirect discourse between the omniscient narrator and the character. The reader gets to know about the presence of the narrator in the reporting clause “Mrs Dalloway said’’ in the first sentence and in the presentation of Clarissa’s internal thoughts and feelings in the phrase – “thought Clarissa Dalloway’’. The reader might feel like listening to Clarissa’s inner voice when reading the clauses: “What a lark!” and “What a plunge!” It means that the reader is plunged directly into her stream of thoughts and memories (Benhmeida 2015, 36).
Another technique that Woolf uses heavily in her novel is focalisation. The main focalizer in the novel, besides the narrator, is Clarissa, because the events in the story are narrated mainly through her stream of thoughts and memories. Peter, Septimus, Sally, Lucrezia are also points of focalisation in the novel.
To conclude, in Mrs Dalloway Woolf uses the stream of consciousness technique extraordinarily. This use is characterised by the free indirect discourse application. The reader moves inside Mrs Dalloway’s mind which transfers from London to her girlhood times in a small town of Bourton. The stream of consciousness technique helps the reader to be very close to her inner thoughts and feelings, although she thinks about a myriad of things at the same time. The grammatical means, such as the use of present tenses, as well as stylistic means, most notably the use of ellipses and repetition, create the flow of thoughts. Due to the technique, the reader has a unique possibility to get to know what the characters think about themselves and other people.
References
- Abrams, Meyer (Mike) Howard. 1993. A Glossary Of Literary Terms. Boston: Heinle &Heinle. https://krusamarnh.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/a-dictionary-of-literary-andthematic-terms.pdf
- Benhmeida, Mohamed Yassine. “Stream of Consciousness in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.” MA thesis., Mohammed Kheider University – Biskra, 2015.
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337010423_Stream_of_consciousness_in_James Joyce%27s_A_Portrait_of_the_Artist_as_a_Young_Man_and_Virginia_Woolf%27s_Mrs_Dalloway
- Humphrey, Robert. 1954. Stream of consciousness in the Modern Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Harmon, William, Clarence Hugh Holman and William Flint Thrall. 1992. A Handbook to Literature. 6th edition, Macmillan.
- Woolf, Virginia. 2016. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin Random House UK.