Published in 1925, Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, is a psychological novel. This means that the emotions and characters are more integral to understanding the novel than just the storyline. The focus lies on Mrs Dalloway and Septimus and their seemingly intertwined lives. Written using the stream of consciousness, the novel showcases life after the first World War, highlighting its aftermath. The whole novel spans one day in Clarissa Dalloway’s life and we travel from past to present to future with the unfiltered movements of her thoughts.
Important symbols
The most interesting thing about this novel for me is the use of various symbols. Nothing just is. Its presence in the novel has some meaning and that is the beauty in Woolf’s writing.
Flowers
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
The novel begins with this phrase and with the symbol of flowers. Woolf’s description of the flowers reminds the reader of her previous novel in which her mother is wearing a flower dress. This is flower dress is their first memory together.
The image of the flower also has well-known sexual connotations and is often used in Hollywood movies. Woolf also uses them in a similar manner.
Lastly, the flowers seem to be a part of her identity. She is the “perfect hostess” in the novel and the flowers are her act to develop that tangible identity.
The Big Ben and the fixation on time
In her novel Orlando, Woolf discusses the difference between clock-time and psychological time. She states that there is an
extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind.
This is why the looming figure of the Big Ben is a symbol that asks her to return to the order of the world. When Mrs Dalloway is lost in her thoughts, this phallic symbol of authority brings her narration back to the realm of the quantifiable and real. The Big Ben, in the novel, stands for chronological time.
It is also used as a narrative device by Woolf. The strike of the Big Ben divides the narrative and every hour has a connotation for the characters. This also compensates for the lack of chapter divisions as the passing of time is the marker of movement and a divider.
Apart from its representation of time, the Big Ben also is a symbol of England and its imperial power, an important symbol after the War.
Homosexuality in the novel
In her own life, in 1922, Woolf was said to have began an intimate relationship with a woman. This relationship finds its place in Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton in the novel, as they try to come to terms with their sexualities.
There are several moments in the novel where such a relationship is seen as being frivolous.
These things pass over if you let them
Richard Dalloway states this, hinting at his acceptance of the matter as a phase or an experimentation that will eventually find its rightful end. This isn’t something we haven’t heard before. In fact, for a novel written a 100 years ago, Woolf understands her society better than most of us do today.
There is also a creation of binary oppositions- of the past and the present, of the adolescent and the adult, in the novel. While in the main narrative, Clarissa is married to Richard and is the “perfect hostess”, there is also another suppressed side to her identity. Kate Haffey points out that Clarissa and Sally’s kiss is an “erotic pause” which is out of sync with the heterosexual development of the dominant narratives. In this, she comments on Woolf’s tendency to create pockets where time functions differently. The kiss is taking place in the past yet Clarissa is thinking about it in the present.
Conclusion
The novel is set in 1923 with the backdrop of the World War 1, even though the war is over. It points out the crumbling of the old establishment and the oppressive values that it stood for. An establishment where their lives where dictated by others and what was ‘proper’ and allowed. The failure that Woolf shows the characters feeling in their lives is a representation of the failure of the British Empire. English traditions are slowly being lost as well as the social order that they forcefully dictated.
The novel is slightly confusing. With its movement across time, it takes a while for the reader to really understand Woolf’s intentions. Her idea of bringing sides to a character to life. Her complex characters allow you to understand not only society in the 20th century but everything around us even now.
