UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

UNIT 5:
TALES OF THE CITY.
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S MODERNIST GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MIND.

1.- PRESENTATION: WOMEN AND MODERNISM.

1.1.- Introduction to Virginia Woolf.

1.2.- The Bloomsbury Group and the Bloomsbury's aesthetics.

2.- TEXT ANALYSIS:

2.1.- A room of one's own and other essays.

2.2.- Mrs Dalloway and the Woman's sentence.

Compulsory readings:

– A room of one's own.

– Mrs Dalloway.

KEY TERMS.

ACTIVITIES.

1. PRESENTATION: WOMEN AND MODERNISM

In the period between 1910 and 1940 the attitude towards art and literature changes
radically. After the war, a group of writers (among them Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot) advocated an art
that would avoid the personal, the emotional and the mundane. This particular kind of modernism
became accepted as the most important and significant of its time. T.S. Eliot was a key figure
through his theories on impersonality, and was extremely influential during the 1920s and 1930s,
the period when Modernism became institutionalised.

Both women and men writers experimented with form and content. Male writers approached
literary modernism in the belief that art should convey a “transcendent” reality that lay outside
particular social and ideological systems. This exclusive and discriminatory form of writing
accentuated the dichotomy between high and low art. The so called popular fiction being produced
by a considerable number of women writers was then undervalued. Some feminist critics like
Sandra Gilbert, suggest that literary modernism arose as a reaction to the increasing numbers of
woman entering the literary market, that Modernism, with its exclusions and discriminations, was
a reaction against the rise of literary women.

Página nº 1 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

Modernist art maintained its avant-garde position by defining itself against mass culture,
and hence against traditional forms of female writing and reading, such as the popular romance.
There was a tension between both forms of writing. Katherine Mansfield, and other women writers
of the period, align themselves both with high art and mass culture. In her story “The Tiredness of
Rosabel” (1908), we are placed at a critical distance from popular romance, since the central
character, Rosabel, watches with distaste another girl reading a popular novel. The text points in
two directions: she is pulled towards high art critical both of romance and of feminity, towards a
masculine writing, but still speaks powerfully to female needs and pleasures in the way of the
popular romance.

The solution of this dilemma pushes modernism to the limit and attempts to deconstruct this
opposition. That is, women modernists tried to incorporate into their writing what they felt
constituted their feminity, challenging the claim of impersonality defended by male writers, and
turned to personal experience.

Central to the rise of Modernism is the development of science, and in particular of a new
medical branch called sexology. The women that would start writing after the end of the WWI
stressed not just the need for constitutional reform, but also that for a much greater personal and
sexual emancipation for women.

The great turning point was marked by Freud’s theories on the unconscious. His work
became available for translation in 1909, and what he called the “unconscious” constituted a break
from current ideas of an essential, immutable, unified self. The modern self is perceived as multiple
and fragmented because there is always an inherent part of the self that by its very definition
remains unknown.

There are five main characteristics in the modernist woman writer:

- Subjectivity and gender identity . Women tended towards the split, fragmented dispersed and
alienated subject. There was an external public vision of her self and an internal, private one.

- Myth and the dissolution of time . In their fiction past, present and future intermingle.

- Emphasis on the city . They write about urban places, because the city is perceived as offering
new possibilities.

- New visions on sexuality .

- Alliance to stream of consciousness . The novel centred on the mental process, on the thoughts,
responses and interior emotional experiences of a single central character. There were interior
monologues contrasting with the silence outside.

Página nº 2 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

1.1.- INTRODUCTION TO VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf is major figure in the Modernist movement, a complex and paradoxical
woman. She was born in London on 25 January 1882. She had 7 brothers and half- brothers, and
lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, belonging to the upper middle class. Famous visitors as Henry James or
Thomas Hardy were frequent to Hyde Park Gate. The premature death of her beloved mother when
she was 13 prompted her first nervous breakdown. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a distinguished
critic, biographer and philosopher. He was a liberal thinker and an agnostic, who had an extensive
library open to his children.

Both the site of their summer house (St. Ives) and London played an important role as the
settings of most of Woolf’s works. In some of them, like Mrs Dalloway (1925) the city plays an
important part in the development of the novel. Despite his alluring life, her father was a domestic
tyrant as recalled in Virginia Woolf’s memories “A Sketch of the Past.” Leslie Stephen died in 1904
and Virginia had a second breakdown, during which her elder sister decided to move to
Bloomsbury.

She had access to her father’s extended library, but never had a “proper” education, and
was hardly ever allowed out of the house to study. Woolf always felt this as a void in her
development, and became, especially in her most feminist essays (A Room of One’s Own and Three
Guineas) a gender topic highlighting the educational privileges afforded to her brothers and other
male peers. In October 1897 she attended classes in Greek and History in King’s College in
London, and after that she continued with private classes at home, interrupted with her father’s
death.

Her elder brother, Thoby went to Trinity College in Cambridge. He made friends there with
Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, and some others that comprised the embryo of the
“Bloomsbury Group”.

At the end of 1904, Virginia Woolf started writing reviews for papers. In 1906, her brother
Thoby died, but his “Thursday evening” meetings with his college friends continued. In August
1912, she married Leonard Woolf in the Registry Office, and moved to Sussex.

In 1908 Virginia Woolf started writing her first novel The Voyage Out (1915) but it was not
published for seven years. Her second novel, even more conventional, was Night and day, published
in 1919. She and her husband had bought a small printing press as a hobby and therapy for her,
while living in Richmond in the south west of London in 1917, and named it the “Hogarth Press”
after the house. Around 1922 it became a business, publishing the works of other modern writers
including Katherine Mansfield,

T.S. Eliot, and E. M. Forster. From 1921 onwards, except a few limited editions, Woolf
always published with the Hogarth Press.

Página nº 3 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

That year she published her first collection of short stories, Monday or Tuesday, most of
them experimental. In 1925, Mrs Dalloway was published, followed by The Lighthouse (1927) and
The Waves (1931). These three novels are generally considered her greatest contribution to
Modernism.

Her involvement with the aristocratic novelist and poet Vita Sackville led to Orlando: a
Biography (1928), a subversive fictional account of her life. Two talks given at women’s colleges at
Cambridge in 1928 led to A Room of One’s Own (1929), a discussion of women’s writing and its
historical, economic and social underpinning. In 1927 she published The Years perhaps her most
overtly political fictional work. A best seller in America, it was a painful exercise in writing, an
essay dealing with the relationship between war, masculinity, and women’s education and
employment.

In 1940 she wrote a biography for her friend Roger Fry. On 28 March 1941 she killed
herself while she was in the last revision of her final novel Between the Acts, posthumously
published by her husband Leonard Woolf.

1.2.- THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP AND BLOOMSBURY AESTHETICS

As well as Woolf’s siblings (Thoby, Virginia, Adrian and Vanessa), many other writers
formed part of the Bloomsbury Group: Katherine Mansfield, G.E. Moore, T.S. Eliot, David
Garnett, James Strachey and later Vita Sackville-West, and her husband, Harold Nicholson. After
her brother Thoby’s death, the group was continued by her other siblings and herself. What joined
the group together was a refusal to compromise with their Victorian upbringing. They were liberal
in their attitudes and allowed free range to blasphemy and bawdiness, a variety of sexualities
prevailed.

At first, Virginia saw a pretentious bunch of male students. Later on, their discussion topics
attracted her attention and even though she did not dare to participate, she enjoyed the mode of
discussion and the earnestness of these young men in pursuit of topics such as 'beauty', 'good' and
'reality'.

From the meetings she also learned a method of analysis that would very much influence
her writing and her thought. The society was a very exclusive and elitist group. There were never
more than six or seven members at one time. The Society started as an undergraduate discussion
club in 1820 and slowly developed into a semi- secret group mainly preoccupied with the
development of the intellect. G.E. Moore, a classicist, became the most influential thinker among
the members (in particular his work Principia Ethica).

Virginia Woolf describes the method of analysis of their group meetings as “piling stone
upon stone” the arguments. The interesting aspect here is not so much to arrive at a definitive
conclusion, but the method employed. In many of her essays, certainly in A Room of One's Own this
is the principle used.

Página nº 4 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

Moore’s radical philosophy appealed to Bloomsbury for its rationalism, and its elevation of
aesthetic life. They became interested in psychoanalysis, but only at a theoretical level. Freud’s
theories, particularly in relation to the unconscious and the development of the human psyche,
played an important role in her narrative and in many arguments used in her essays.

2. TEXT ANALYSIS

2.1. A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN AND OTHER ESSAYS

The study of Virgina Woolf's essays has often been neglected in favour of her fictional
writings. They have been used as complementary information to enhance the view of a particular
point in her novels. Woolf did not pay much attention to her essays.

The reasons behind Woolf's apparent disdain for her essay writing might be found in the
fact that most of her essays were commissioned and therefore written for money. In this sense,
according to Bloomsbury aesthetics, they could hardly be seen as artistic endeavours.

Woolf discusses the nature of the essay not in relation to their informative or persuasive
nature, but in terms of aesthetics which are precisely <<the features expected to go with
literature>>.

The length of the essays also varies, ranging from the short literary reviews she wrote for
journals, whose length was determined by the medium in which they were published, to book-
length pieces such as A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. Many of the longer essays dealt
with authors from the past who became subjects of essays from different sources -a new edition of
the works, a new biography, a memoir, a collection of letters. In these essays she could feel more at
easy because she had more room and a greater perspective.

Her writings about literary history show that she preferred certain periods, such as classical
Greece, the Elizabethan period, eighteenth century literature, the Romantics, or nineteenth-century
Russian fiction. Authors she favoured were Daniel Defoe, James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, Jane
Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, among
others, and had a strong inclination towards certain themes that recur in her essays, such as essay
writing itself, painting, women's lives, biography, memoirs, and letters.

The scope of the essays was not limited to the literary world and many of then were
inspired by seemingly unimportant events, such as illness, laughter or reading itself. Woolf
meditates about a wide range of topics; architecture, houses, street life, opera, travel, shops, flying,
cinema, and radio, to name but a few.

Some of these topics, woman-like, banal and unimportant as they may seem, conform to
her endeavour to find a mode of expression that would encapsulate what she saw as the task of the
artist: the recording of reality.

Página nº 5 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

We can see these topics in essays such as: Modern Fiction or Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.

She feels that fiction must reflect reality by “observing an ordinary mind on an ordinary
day”, and writers be freed of the obligation of providing a coherent plot structured in correlative
chapters. She propounds that the modern writer should be interested not so much in the outside
world but in those emotions and feelings that also form part of the reality. For her, a writer’s duty is
to present in the novel those moments where reality cannot be straightforwardly explained and that
had been silenced by the traditional novel.

In Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown she stated the famous quote “In or about December, 1910,
human character changed”. The most immediate historical relevance of this date, alluded to by
Woolf herself in The Years as a turning point, is the death of King Edward VII. His death marked
the end of the Edwardian era and the beginning of the Georgian.

In literary terms, and according to Woolf's essay, this implied the end of the Edwardian
narrative and the possibility of a new form of narrative, started by Henry James and Joseph Conrad
in the late 19th century. In 1910, what also took place was the first of two Impressionists’
exhibitions with a great cultural impact, marking the defining moment of avant-garde aesthetics.
And in February of that year she carried out the Dreadnought hoax.

The essays by Virginia Woolf mentioned in this Unit could be divided into those strictly
dealing with literature and those dealing with feminist issues. It is difficult to establish a clear
dividing line between these two major themes, which were, in any case, major preoccupations for
the writer. Modern Fiction and Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown should be seen as Modernist statements
by a Modernist writer.

On the other hand, what are already today classic feminist textbooks such as A Room of
One's Own or Three Guineas cannot be considered without acknowledging Woolf's Modernist
aesthetics.

The language and the structure of A Room of One's Own participate in those exploratory
forms ascribed by Woolf to modern fiction. In a most unconventional manner the essay begins
with a <<But>> placing an interrogation mark on the subject of <<women and fiction>>, the main
theme discussed in the text, while, at the same time, it asserts the need for making problematic
those traditional views on the subject that are held as universal truths.

But simultaneously implying doubt and assertiveness, the starting 'but' puts the reader right
from the first page in the questioning frame of mind needed when exploring the subject of the essay.
The aim of this 'but' is to introduce the unsettling aspect of the uncertainties of language and
knowledge, and to confront the reader with the discomfiting uneasiness that comes when s/he is
asked to re-evaluate preconceived ideas.

Página nº 6 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

A few lines down Woolf pushes this uneasiness further and ponders about the possible
meanings that 'women and fiction' might have. In doing so she trespasses on another line of
traditional conventions. She confesses that she will never be able to <<fulfil what is... the first duty
of a lecturer>> because, instead of providing a <<nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages
of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever>>, she will display a most unconventional
discursive practice based on her opinion that <<a woman must have money and a room of her
own is she is to write fiction>>.

The irony and witticism present in the text can be observed. the reassuring action of jotting
down some notes of 'pure truth' from a lecture, in the way we all do when attending such an event,
is mocked by the very fact that those notes will remain for ever 'on the mantelpiece'. Once more,
the ambiguity in Woolf's words may not pass unnoticed. If at first sight these words appear to mean
that this 'pure truth' will indeed be preserved, it might also be the case that the notes are placed
on the mantelpiece and are never looked at again; in this latter circumstance, she is showing the
pointlessness of ever writing them. By an expository argument of how she arrived at the
conclusion about money and a room in connection with writing and women, it is expected that the
reader will actively engage in the argument, participating intellectually, rather than simply being a
mere and passive recipient of some preconceived and opinionated assumptions. The most
interesting aspect of the essay is, perhaps, its suggestive quality, calling for as many different
responses as it has readers.

Woolf puts into practice a device that constitutes another breaking of the conventions on
essay writing. In 'The Modern Essay' she argued that: <<Almost all essays begin with a capital
I>>. The authoritative quality given to this 'I' of the 'expert' impedes any communication: instead, it
precipitates a drowsy hedonism where the reader is a mesmerised sleeper for the duration of the
text. In A Room of One's Own this 'I' is totally abandoned and its identity demystified. In the text
Woolf refuses to use the traditional phallocentric discourse by criticising the narcissistic 'I' in men's
writing:

But I am bored!... Because of the dominance of the

letter 'I' and the aridity, which, like the giant beech
tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing will grow
there.

The phallic shadow prevents the text from providing pleasure to the 'I' that is bored and that
is, as we are told in the opening lines of A Room of One's Own, <<only a convenient term for
somebody who has no real being>>. On a deeper level the 'I' who has no real existence is not
portrayed as a celebratory 'I' as some critics have claimed to see in it the determination on
formation of a women's society. The 'I' who has no real existence is an inquiring 'I' trying to solve
the enigma of the <<true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction>>.

Página nº 7 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

The inclusion of a different 'I' in the discourse challenges the notion of the unified
homogeneous identity held by patriarchal discourse. Precisely by confronting the 'I' (who bores
me) with an 'I' that (as yet) has no real existence the very notion of identity is displaced.
It is important to highlight the fact that Woolf starts challenging a monolithic notion of
identity precisely by posing, right from the beginning of her essay, the question of the possibility of
an 'unknown' 'I'. The statement of the existence of this 'unknown' 'I' is given within a textual
context in which 'I' seems obsessively present. In the opening lines of A Room of One's Own, 'I' is
scattered in sentences and intermingled with other pronouns such as 'you' and 'they'. Suddenly,
when the meaning of the title 'women and fiction' is being pondered, the rhythm is changed, by the
appearance of a series of sentences containing solely the first person singular pronoun

But when I began to consider the subject in this last

way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw
that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be
able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able
to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a
lecturer.
This use of the pronoun reaches its peak in a single sentence where it appears three times:
<<I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the
money>>. The reader is surprised when, once caught up in a web formed by the pronoun 'I', the
narrative states that this 'I' 'has no real existence'. By diminishing the importance of the name of the
narrator 'I', Woolf is minimising the importance of an authoritarian voice in the text.
It is not by chance that the name of that 'I' is 'Mary'. In Western Christian culture the name
'Mary' is immediately associated with the Virgin. This name, repeated 3 times (Mary Beton, Mary
Seton, Mary Carmichael), marks the point of departure for Woolf's examination of female identity
and the production of writing. The allusion to the figure of the Virgin through the motif of the
narrator's name is of great importance. It is a fundamental point entirely devoted to unsettling the
Establishment, represented in the text by the male audience hiding behind the curtains.

A Room of One's Own was the final version of 2 lectures delivered by the writer at the
female Oxford colleges in October 1928. She covered the topics she understands: the subject of
women and fiction. Once her hypothesis about the money and the room in each of the sections has
been stated, Woolf analyses topics such as:

 The contrast between male and female writing, university colleges and the banning
of women from public spaces in section one;
 The effect of poverty on the writing of fiction, or anger in men and its effect on
artistic production in section two;
 The obvious but previously unstudied women's exclusion from history, in contrast
with the obsessive presence of women in fiction written by men, is analysed in
section three.

Página nº 8 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

She introduces a fictional character who serves as an example to speculate about never-
acknowledged women writers. They story of Judith Shakespeare also allows the writer to ponder
about the relationship between gender and genius, thus prompting the main line of thought for the
following section. Genius needs material conditions and social recognition; most importantly,
genius needs a tradition from which to learn the craft and to master it. Woolf traces in section four, a
woman's literary tradition and is confronted with the fact that it is not an easy task. Again anger
comes to the foreground when she analyses the works of women writers. For instance, she
analyses its detrimental effect in her criticism of Charlotte Brontë who <<had more genius than
Jane Austen>> but whose rage made her writing <<deformed and twisted>>.

Most of the women writers from the 16th to the 19th century mentioned by Woolf were
in one way or another eccentrics. This section also suggests that the genres are gendered and that
the novel is young enough as to allow the voices of women to be inscribed in it. The arrival of the
professional woman writer (Alphra Behn was the first) marked a turning point in women's literary
history.

Tradition is fundamental, a generation of writers may learn from their predecessors and
also become a source of knowledge for further generations.

The conditions which made it possible for a Shakespeare to exist are that he shall have
had predecessors in his art, shall make one of a group where art is freely discussed and practised,
and shall himself have the utmost freedom of action and experience.

These conditions, according to Woolf, coincided for women writers in Sappho's Lesbos
an then never again. Woolf believes that women's writing is essentially different from men's
writing.
A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot
help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine:
the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by
feminine.

In the context of these words her apparently contradictory warning, <<It is fatal for
anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple>>
becomes significant. She is aware of the dangers of such a postulate, which can tacitly imply a sense
of biological determinism.

She perceives that patriarchy has used biologically determined theories to defend and to
justify the ideological superiority of men over women. For this reason, she places emphasis on
rejecting determinism. By questioning the meaning of 'feminine' she is hinting at the possibility that,
in fact, femininity might be a matter of representation.

Página nº 9 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

One of the most shocking ideas Woolf presents in A Room of One's Own is found in
the last chapter when she says that the ideal state of mind in which to produce art ins an
androgynous one:

If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain

must have effect; and a woman also must have
intercourse with the man in her... Perhaps a mind
that is purely masculine cannot create, any more
than a mind that is purely feminine.

Woolf's account of the androgynous mind repudiates the idea of rejecting the feminine, since it is
important to the relationship between women and fiction that androgyny be proposed as the ideal
state of mind in which to produce art. Furthermore, she explicitly expresses her fear that androgyny
can be equated to man, as in the case with Freud's theory of bisexuality. In this sense she states:
<<It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men>>
The artist rather than restricting herself to one sex, should through a state of mind that is
androgynous enhance her knowledge.
The androgynous mind has as its central and most revolutionary declaration the avowal of a
form of writing that will be unconsciously feminine. such a form of writing will create a text
characterised by a 'suggestive quality'. Both the structure of Woolf's essay and the distinctive
uses of the language it displays suppose a breakthrough. Through her experimentation with
language Woolf is searching for a form of writing capable of encompassing the 'real' world when it
is perceived from different angles.

2.2. MRS. DALLOWAY AND THE WOMAN'S SENTENCE

Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925. It broke with the pattern of the novel established at
the time, different in themes, style and method of writing. The whole work can be seen as an
attempt to disrupt the traditional way of writing, an exploration of new techniques, shifting
continuously from one character to another, from past to present, from one subject matter to another
one.

The plot of Mrs Dalloway is quite simple: one day in June in London, Clarissa Dalloway is
planning a party for the evening; Peter Walsh, her old suitor, returns to England after five years in
India; at the end of the day, Sally Seton, another old friend, shows up unexpectedly at the
party; the ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith kills himself.

When a character starts thinking about one issue, he or she does not finish with it
completely, but it is forgotten and continued in the thoughts of another character.

Página nº 10 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

Virginia Woolf designed, for this novel, universal characters. On the other hand, they are
neither plain characters nor heroes nor heroines; they are types: the housewife, the madman, the
politician, the doctor, etc.

They are also the alibi to present 'reality' through very different individual consciousnesses.
One of the linking characters in this 'web' is Sir William Bradshaw, a friend of the Dalloways and
also Septimus's doctor. This metaphorical 'web' is made up of invisible threads that connect all of
those characters, otherwise unconnected, into a common circle of experience, regardless of their
class. The clearest example occurs at the end, Clarissa Dalloway hears at the party about
Septimus's madness and death, and she notices that she feels 'like him'. This suggest and
alignment between these two characters through a moment of epiphany. At this moment Clarissa
stands side-by- side with Septimus; this is just what Woolf wanted to communicate when she
started the novel.

When one first takes the book and reads the title Mrs Dalloway, one may assume that the
story will be about the life of Clarissa Dalloway, but in this case our expectations are unfulfilled.

It might be an irony, a device Virginia Woolf uses to break the traditional pattern. It
might also be that the writer provides a clue for the understanding of the novel, because Clarissa is
the character who links all the ideas she wanted to convey and is the one who closes the narrative
circle.

Irony is also used when criticising the social system, as she uses irony as a way to keep
her anger out of the narration. Feminist issues are usually raised in an oblique manner. It is
noticeable, for instance, how Virginia Woolf prevents herself from getting angry. Instead it is the
character of Sally who <<suddenly lost her temper, flared up and told Hugh that he represented
all that was most detestable in British middle-class life. She told him she considered him
responsible for the state of 'those poor girls in Piccadilly' -Hugh, the perfect gentleman, poor Hugh!
>>. This technique allows her to criticise society without interrupting the narration.

The framework of the novel could be place in one day in the life of London, in the life of
several people, the day Clarissa Dalloway is going to give a party. But coexisting with this linear
time, other times can be identified another day of the pst is constantly being re-lived by some of the
characters (Clarissa, Sally and Peter remember a summer of their youth, Septimus the death of
Evans, his comrade, during the war). Cyclical time occurs when the past is repeated continuously,
made 'present' all along the day.

Another beautiful example of the 'invisible thread' also connecting the use of time and
consciousness remains in the importance attached to events like the appareance of a car, an
aeroplane writing in the sky, or the sound of an ambulance: all these and other elements are
presented repeatedly, cyclically, through different individual consciousnesses.

Página nº 11 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

On the other hand, the death of Septimus is not an end in itself; in a way he is present in
the party, so he has not died. He has not finished, but he seems to be eternalised by the very fact that
his situation is told at the party and Mrs Dalloway internalises his death. He has entered into
monumental time, or as Clarissa thinks during the epiphanic ending:

Death was defiance. Death as an attempt to

communicate, people feeling the impossibility of
reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them;
closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone.
There was an embrace in death.

Woolf in Mrs Dalloway shows interest in what is one of the features of Modernism; the
experimentation with temporality.

Woolf record the thoughts and remembrances of a number of consciousness; those of

Septimus, Lucrezia, Clarissa, Miss Kilman, Elizabeth, Peter and Sally among others.

Repetition and the function of the omniscient narrator are the significant aspects of this type
of narrative. The omniscient narrator can move from mind to mind and relate to the reader the
thoughts and feeling of any character. Time is used in a unique manner: the narrator relating the
story after the event has happened using the present tense. This repetition is achieved by relating
first the mind of one character and then the mind of another.

There are common images throughout the narrative, (the aeroplane), and the repetitions of
events from the past are brought up in many minds. As did Joyce in Ulysses she wanted to portray
as closely as possible the workings of the mind through a minute description of how the characters
think about their world.

It is the task of the reader to decide what is important and what is not, and not the task of the
narrator to narrate only what is important. Woolf wanted the reader to enter people’s
consciousnesses, and described them like the unrelated thoughts “normal” people think all the time,
remarking the fact that the dividing line between madness and normality is quite fine.

The recording of the workings of the mind may produce a very slow, even boring, text. This
technique receives many names (stream of consciousness or interior monologue), and she chooses
the latter, to make the reader feel as if there were some kind of headphone plugged into the
character’s mind. The narrator conveying thoughts to the reader is the “free indirect style”, and she
called it the “tunnelling process”, by which she created “caves” behind her characters. It took her a
year to search for the appropriate technique and two further years to put it into practice in Mrs.
Dalloway.

Página nº 12 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

The theme of insanity was close to Woolf’s past and present. In 1941 she committed suicide,
leaving a note explaining that she no longer wanted to live. Woolf originally planned to have
Clarissa die or commit suicide at the end of the novel, but finally she only “dies” figuratively, with
Septimus. He is clearly representative of the world of madness, slowly being killed by the lingering
effects of the war, suffering from shell- shock syndrome, which produces almost real-life memories
and a total loss of feeling. Septimus feels guilt for having survived it when so many have died. As
with many other First World War veterans, Septimus, a 'winner' and 'survivor' of the war, enjoys
none of its benefits. His Italian wife, Lucrezia, is miserable with his madness and the doctors, Dr
Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, in a very critical portrait of those that Woolf herself had
known, are unhelpful.

Paralleling the life of Septimus is that of Clarissa, a rich housewife and the web of people
surrounds her. Clarissa tries to keep thoughts of death at bay by focusing on her party, but spends
her day thinking about her past, about her old suitor Peter and her friend Sally. After many years,
they meet at the party and have time to go over their lives.

Her greatest fear is the atrophy of the heart, and when Sir William brings the news of
Septimus’s suicide to the party, bridging these two, he connects them. This is precisely what Woolf
wanted to convey with her novel: the world of the 'sane' and the 'insane' side by side in order to
show that the dividing line is very fine.<<I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity (from A
Writer’s Diary)>>. This is achieved through the alignment of Clarissa with Septimus. This phrase
is immediately followed by the words <<I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at
work at its most intense>> a reference to the post-war trauma of English people because of the war.
If the past is skilfully presented, so is the past traumatic history powerfully connected to the present
time.

Political issues are embedded within the narrative: emigration, imperialism, government
party struggles. Septimus is destroyed by the realities of the war; while society in general is in
denial of the repercussions. Lady Bruton’s proposal of forcing surplus women (spinsters and
widows) to emigrate and to populate the colonies, is presented as cruel and satirised, and the
proposal of Sir William Bradshaw, who turns Septimus into a “case”, as merely dangerous.

Woolf believed that, in order to convey 'reality' she needed to write from her body and from
her mind, to write against the heart. This is why there is so much pain in the following sentence of
the quotation: <<Of course the mad part tries me so much, makes my mind squirt so badly that I
can hardly face spending the next weeks at it>>. The pain of recollection was too strong, Woolf
suffered a serious breakdown after writing the novel because emotionally she had invested to much
in it: her husband, and close friends compared her periods of insanity to a manic depression quite
similar to the episodes experienced by Septimus.

Página nº 13 de 14
UNIDAD 5. Literatura Inglesa III: Pensamiento y creación literaria en la 1ª mitad del Siglo XX. GRADO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES.

Many critics describe Septimus as Clarissa's Doppelganger, that is, the alternate persona, a
darker, more internal personality compared to Clarissa's very social and singular outlook. Woolf's
use of the Doppelganger, Septimus, portrays a side to Clarissa's personality that becomes absorbed
by fear and broken down by society as well as a side of society that has failed to survive the War.

The novel's closing scene draws together its main arguments, as Clarissa withdraws from the
party to think about the death of a former soldier she has never met, but with whom she fells an
affinity.

KEY TERMS.

- Ambiguity - High art

- Class - Interior monologue
- Doppelganger - Low art
- Experimentalism - Modernism
- Fragmentation - Race
- Gender - Self-reflexiveness
- Genre

ACTIVITIES

1. What are the main aspects of the modernist aesthetics?

2. How do women contribute to these aesthetics?
3. Is Virginia Woolf modernist in her essay writing?
4. Briefly explain the importance of the Bloomsbury Group in Virginia
Woolf's modernism.
5. What aspects of Virginia Woolf's background are important for her
literature?
6. What is the importance of tradition for the modernist woman writer?
7. What is the role of London in Mrs Dalloway?
8. How are characters linked in Mrs Dalloway?
9. What is the relationship between Septimus and Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway?

OTHER ACTIVITIES

1. Explain the importance of the fictional character of Judith Shakespeare in A Room of

One's Own.
2. Find examples in Mrs Dalloway of how 'the invisible thread' links characters of the
novel otherwise unconnected.
3. Define 'stream of consciousness'. Give your own examples from the text to illustrate
your answer.

Página nº 14 de 14