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Virginia Woolf, a famous British novelist, is associated with the modernist movement in English literature. Experiments in narrative techniques, language and the treatment of time characterize her writing style. Virginia Woolf, in her personal life, faced many traumas, including the death of her mother. The conditions and experiences of her life influenced her creative writing. She had a natural inclination towards writing and went on to compose iconic modernist novels, including Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), as well as essays like A Room of One’s Own (1929). In addition to being a renowned novelist, she was also an essayist and art critic. Through her novels, essays, relationships, and involvement with the Bloomsbury group, Woolf considerably influenced the art world. Her unique writing style made her one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century. Woolf is best known for fractured narratives and writing in a stream-of-consciousness prose style, in which characters are depicted through their interior monologue. M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham write: “Stream of consciousness was a phrase used by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, memories, thoughts and feelings in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction” (293–94). The term’ stream-of-consciousness signifies that human thinking never remains constant. It always goes back and forth in time, from the present to the past and from the past to the present. The same happens in the case of place; in one moment, consciousness is present at the actual place where one lives, and in another moment, one shifts attention from that place to the one he/she visited in the past. The word ‘stream’ signifies this flow of thoughts, specifically. In Mrs Dalloway, the focus on the stream of consciousness will enable us to understand the internal processes of the characters’ minds.

1. About the importance of the stream of consciousness technique in the novels of Virginia Woolf, Robert Humphrey writes: “Virginia Woolf wanted to formulate the possibilities and processes of inner realization of truth - a truth she reckoned to be inexpressible; hence only on a level of the mind that is not expressed could she find this process of realization functioning. At least, this is true with her three stream-of-consciousness novels. The first two of these, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, can be considered together, since they illustrate in only slightly different ways the same achievement” (12).

2. Molly Hoff analyzed the narrative structure of Mrs Dalloway and argued thus: “Narrative in the double perspective of free indirect discourse reveals the novel forming the narrator’s grumbling satire as subtle social criticism, a metatheatrical display of indirect discourse in which the words of narrator as ‘talking head’ represent the focalizations of the character which cautions against overestimating sincerity. All the characters are meditated by free indirect discourse; yet leans heavily on irony in the form of expressing two equally coherent yet simultaneously incompatible readings; the narrator expects the fictive audience to be attentive to the comic nuances” (6).

3. Jane Goldman Writes: “Woolf’s narrative methods are subtle and elliptical, and shift between the parallel strands, using a number of the day’s passing events held in common as points of transition between them. Her free-indirect technique allows the narrative subtly to shift interior focus between characters, creating a collective discursive continuum” (54).

4. AjdaBastan observes: In this novel (Mrs Dalloway), Woolf takes a day from morning to evening in the life of the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway and builds up her story through the events of this short time. Woolf created her novel both with the depth and intensity of the minds of the heroine Clarissa Dalloway through the successful use of the Stream-of-consciousness technique” (99).

Textual Analysis:

Virginia Woolf rejected the traditional techniques of writing novels, and in an essay Modern Fiction, she attacked some novelists for the methods they had adopted for writing their novels. The method of narration and the plot structure adopted by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway are entirely different from the conventional style of writing novels. It is interesting to note that there is no plot, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style in Mrs Dalloway. Michael Whitworth observed: “Without a plot in the conventional sense, and without chapter divisions, it lacks the conventional scaffolding of the novel as it was then understood; this, and the richness of its prose, allow readers great freedom about where to place the emphasis” (1). Woolf believed that life is chaotic and the human mind keeps swinging from one end of the pendulum to another, which makes no coherent sense. As a novelist, she decided to portray this chaos in all its facets. The human mind keeps on working ceaselessly and there is a ceaseless flow of thoughts going on through the consciousness of every human being. The flow of thoughts has been given the technical name of ‘stream-of-consciousness’ and Woolf used this particular technique in her novel. Woolf was also aware of the fact that every human being talks to himself/herself. This way of interaction with the self is technically called ‘the interior monologue.’ These technical devices help Woolf in capturing the complexities of human thought, experience and the inner workings of the human mind.

In Mrs Dalloway, most of the events and happenings occur in the characters’ minds. There is internal, mental or psychological action rather than physical or external action. The novelist mainly tells what happens in the mind of a character. We know that the thoughts can never be in order. The human mind operates randomly. The thoughts are not necessarily inter-connected. The mind often jumps from one thought to another without any connection between the two thoughts. The thoughts also shift from the present to the past and vice-versa. In this way, the action is not just about a single thought or place. The time of one action differs from the time of another, and it happens exactly as it occurs in a character’s mind. The character is at one place in the present moment, but he/she also travels to the past and future, not physically but mentally or psychologically. Thus, the story of the novel is not told in a linear way. About this method of writing novels, Ronald Carter and John McRae state: “Writers no longer simply wrote ‘he said’ or ‘she recalled.’ Or ‘this reminded him of,’ or ‘she decided in future too….’ Time was not a series of separate chronological moments, and consciousness was seen as a continuous flow, with past and present merging” (362-63). The author at one time tells us what goes on in the mind of Clarissa Dalloway; then, we are taken into the mind of Peter Walsh. There is no continuity or sequence in the characters’ thoughts and no coherence or sequence in the narration of the events. The whole thing is arbitrary, and shifts in the portrayal of the characters and time are sudden and unexpected. The same thing happens in real life. That is why the technique employed by Virginia Wool in Mrs Dalloway is more realistic than the traditional mode of narration.

The stream-of-consciousness technique becomes an instrument in the portrayal of characters in a convincing manner. In the novel, a character is presented through his/her own stream of consciousness and then we see him/her through the stream of consciousness of other characters. The reader notices that the flow of consciousness waves backwards and forward in time. It enables us to see the character at crucial moments of his/her life, which has moulded or shaped his/her personality. In this way, a round character is built up. Mrs Clarissa is also a round character whose character is revealed by his own words and thoughts. Her thoughts make us understand her past, present as well as future plans. In the opening line, she is presented thus:

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself (3).

At the very outset, we are taken into her mind. Through her thoughts or memory lane, she tells us the story of her past life, childhood dreams and aspirations and her love for Peter Walsh. She suddenly thinks of her past lover Peter Walsh who is expected to return from India:

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?- some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness… they came back in the middle of St. Jame’s park on a fine morning- indeed they did…. It was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her….” (9).

She recalls his eyes, his pocket knife and his smile. Suddenly, Big-Ben strikes the hour and its sound brings her back to the present time in the middle of June. On the way, she happens to meet Hugh Whitbread and starts thinking of his ailing wife. Her thoughts again take her to the past and she justifies her decision of not marrying Peter Walsh:

So she would still find herself arguing in St. Jame’s Park, still making out that she had been right- and she had too- not to marry him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him…. But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into” (10).

Then she thinks of her habit of organising parties. She feels that her parties serve a social purpose because people get combined in such gatherings. Then she becomes philosophical and thinks of death. Next, she thinks of Miss Doris  Kilman, whom she hates. She also discusses with herself the role of religion and love in life. For Clarissa, both are destructive and destroy the privacy of the human soul. In this way, Clarissa’s character is revealed by her own thoughts. However, the complete picture of her character is possible only if we analyse the thoughts of other characters about her. For example, the thoughts of Peter Walsh make us know that she is a worldly kind of woman and likes to have famous people around her.

Virginia Woolf also skilfully uses the technique of Parallel Narratives. This technique stands for a simultaneous depiction of interconnected storylines and perspectives. The novel primarily deals with the two main characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. The use of parallel narrative enables Virginia Woolf to alternate between their respective experiences and thoughts, showing the sharp contrast between their lives and mental states. While Clarissa is busy in buying flowers for her evening party and reflecting on her life, Septimus is troubled and tormented by his war memories. He is seen struggling with his deteriorating mental health. His thoughts reveal his suffering when Mrs Septimus’s wife wants him to see an aeroplane flying in the sky, the smoke of which writes some letters in the air:

So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet, but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another….Tears ran down his cheeks” (31).

Woolf also incorporates the thoughts and perspectives of other characters, including Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, to provide insight into the characters’ inner thoughts, lives and relationships. By using parallel narrative, Woolf moves away from conventional linear storytelling and captures the inner workings and complexities of human consciousness.

In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf also employs the literary technique known as ‘free indirect discourse.’ This method further helps the novelist to provide insight into the characters’ feelings and thoughts by removing the distinction between the narrator’s voice and the character’s thoughts and perspectives. Free indirect discourse is a narrative technique that allows the reader to indirectly experience the characters’ inner emotions and thoughts without using clear quotation marks. The use of this technique enables the novelist merge the third-person narration with the characters’ inner feelings, thoughts and emotions. It helps in describing the character’s subjective approach and experiences and presenting a multifaceted depiction of reality. The following passage is an example of Free Indirect Discourse in Mrs Dalloway:

She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary” (11).

In the above lines, the narrative voice merges with Clarissa Dalloway’s perspective, conveying her feelings, emotions, thoughts and sensations. The narrative voice says that “she sliced like a knife through everything,” (11) whereas the description of “out, out, far out to sea and alone” (11) and the feeling of the danger of living every day is the result of the internal experience of Clarissa.

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