Mrs Dalloway Essays (6014 words) - English-language Films

Mrs Dalloway While writing and revising Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf was corresponding with E.M. Forster, who was working on A Passage to India. In September of 1921, she records in her diary: ``A letter from Morgan [Forster] this morning. He seems as critical of the East as of Bloomsbury, she read it and noted, ``Morgan is too restrained in his new book perhaps'' (Diary 2.304). A note of the Anglo-Indian society that dominates A Passage to India resonates in Mrs. Dalloway's background, sounded in part by returning Indian traveler, Peter Walsh, but also heard and overheard in conversations and oblique references scattered throughout the narrative. Reinforcing its literal presence in the novel, an echo of India appears in Mrs. Dalloway's narrative rhythms. Like the intricate percussion of the Indian tabla, the fabric of Woolf's narrative comprises a polyrhythmic texture that subtly undermines London's booming metronome: Big Ben. The beautiful and complex narrative of Mrs. Dalloway seems to defy readers' powers of description. David Dowling's Mapping Streams of Consciousness exemplifies a sense one must ``reconstruct'' the text in order to understand it. In a section entitled ``A Reading,'' Dowling dissects the novel into neat structural packages so the reader can easily study its anatomy. He includes maps of London showing various characters' movements and intersections, an hourly chronology of the day of Clarissa's party, character sketches condensed from details scattered in the text, and, in the appendix, a kind of ``miniature concordance'' that provides counts for some 32 words (``India'' appears 25 times). Other studies of Mrs. Dalloway are less detailed but serve as well to illustrate the difficulties of describing its narrative patterns. In ``Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ideology: Language and Perception in Mrs. Dalloway,'': Teresa L. Ebert discusses binary structures--``counterpointing...visions'' (Ebert 152)--in the novel's language. Building on Nancy Topping Bazin's Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, she explores how female and male polarities in the text are resolved in images of androgyny. Instead of metaphor and metonymy, Caroline Webb examines the ``anti-allegorical'' nature of the text (Webb 279). In ``Life After Death: The Allegorical Progress of Mrs. Dalloway,'' she argues that the narrative invites us to look for a ``hidden story,'' but ultimately frustrates our expectations (Webb 279). Focussing on the narrator as a specifically created presence in the work, Sharon Stockton refers to classical physics and phenomenology to show Woolf ``deconstructing the conventions of authoritarian representation'' (Stockton, ``Turbulence in the Text: Narrative Complexity in Mrs. Dalloway'' 51). The novel's narrative has also been described specifically in terms of its metrical effects. In ```On the Floor of the Mind': Sentence Shape and Rhythm in Mrs. Dalloway,'' Elizabeth Dodd explicates the poetic qualities of Woolf's prose. She not only points out relationships between sentence rhythm and specific characters' thought patterns, she also shows that Woolf turned to poetry for literary inspiration while revising Mrs. Dalloway. Calling the reader's attention to Woolf's June 21, 1924 diary entry--the same one in which Woolf commented on Forster's A Passage to India (above)--Dodd shows the extent to which poetry was on the writer's mind: ``I think I grow more & more poetic'' (Diary 2.304). Undoubtedly, poetry does inform Woolf's work, and Dodd's argument to that effect is convincing. While the sentences in Mrs. Dalloway are metrical, however, ``poetic'' alone does not encompass the full rhythmic force of the narrative. Ebert's term ``counterpoint'' and Stockton's metaphor of ``turbulence'' both evoke kinds of rhythmic structures as well, but in very different contexts. Indeed, Woolf consciously draws influence across diverse media in her quest to ``[throw] away the method...in use at the moment'' (Woolf, ``Character in Fiction'' 432). Robin Gail Schulze points to Woolf's use of tonal music to show how she breaks with literary tradition in her novels, but she concludes that ``Mrs. Dalloway, by Woolf's definition, remains a conventional novel'' (Schulze 8). I suggest, however, that Mrs. Dalloway's chronology, the poetic meter of its sentences, its turbulence and counterpoint, are all vectors in the intricate matrix of its polyrhythmic structure. Borrowed from the field of musicology, ``polyrhythmic'' describes a percussive structure unfamiliar to many Westerners. Because it