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Unit 30: Virginia Woolf — Mrs. Dalloway: Themes and Characterization

Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs. Dalloway is commonly thought to be a Notes
response to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a text that is often considered one of the greatest novels of
the twentieth century (though Woolf herself, writing in 1928, apparently denied this). In her
essay ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf praised James Joyce’s Ulysses, saying of the scene in the cemetery,
“on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece”. The Hogarth Press,
run by her and her husband Leonard, had to turn down the chance to publish the novel in
1919, because of the obscenity law in England, as well as the practical issues regarding publishing
such a substantial text.
Woolf laid out some of her literary goals with the characters of Mrs. Dalloway while still
working on the novel. A year before its publication, she gave a talk at Cambridge University
called “Character in Fiction,” revised and retitled later that year as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown.”

30.3.1 Virginia Woolf’s Narrative Style in Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf possesses the ability to create a work of fiction that evokes a pleasant reading
experience for the reader without utilizing a central plot. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf chooses to
explore the narrative possibilities of bringing several characters through one single day in
time. This narrative technique works well in a text that mainly focuses on Mrs. Dalloway’s
worldview, her inner workings, and her exploration and sensory experience of the world
surrounding her.
Mrs. Dalloway does not tell an exciting story; very little happens to the characters. We, as the
reader does not suffer an urgent desire to know what happens next. In a sense, Mrs. Dalloway
is a novel without a plot. In the conventional novel, a sequence of events leads up to a climax
and then a denouement provided a framework within which the whole resolution is contained.
Every event in the novel is a logical outcome of the preceeding element. This logically connected
pattern is absent in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. For example, the novel does tell us about long-
standing problems (should Clarissa have married Peter Walsh? Does Peter Walsh have a
flawed character?). But at the end of the novel, these problems are just as unresolved as they
were at the beginning. It could be said that the other main story in the novel, that of Septimus
Warren Smith’s struggle with his madness and with his doctors, does have a culmination; it
ends in Septimus’s death and defeat. But even this apparently definitive ending, the ending
of his life does not have the quality of traditional novel endings with a clear moral attached
that we are expected to learn. Many questions remain unanswered at the end of the book and
many areas of ambiguity remain unresolved.
Divided into parts, rather than chapters, the novel’s structure highlights the finely interwoven
texture of the character’ thoughts. The interest in Mrs. Dalloway, then, is not so much on the
action rather more emphasis is laid on various characters’ movements of consciousness
(or streams of consciousness). As they move about London, meeting each other and performing
their tasks, they are all living very complex subjective lives with streams of memories, fantasies,
fears, excitements, fluctuating moods and changeable feelings.

Notes In other words, plot in Mrs. Dalloway is essentially internal. Woolf wanted to
express a point of view, not a plot. There is not a single story in the novel rather
stories of individuals.

Another technique that Virginia Woolf employs to develop the story of the novel is her treatment
of time. Apparently the time of action is only a single day in the lives of Clarissa Dalloway

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