Mrs Dalloway Read Free

she dramatically asserts, ‘those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.’ Speculating on the story of a ‘clean, threadbare’old lady she saw on a train, whom she calls ‘Mrs. Brown,’ Woolf imagines how the Edwardians would have advised a young writer to describe her character:
    And they said: ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe’ – But I cried ‘Stop! Stop!’ And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever.
    As her own generation of writers struggled with a new way of capturing character, Woolf warned, readers would have to get used to ‘a season of fragments or failures.’ They would have to be patient, to tolerate the ‘spasmodic, the obscure.’ But their patience would be rewarded, for, she predicted, ‘we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature.’
    It’s tempting to see Mrs. Brown as a poor relation of Mrs. Dalloway, and to read the essay as a manifesto for Woolf’s own work in progress, in which external facts are thin upon the ground (for example, we have no idea when or how Clarissa’s mother died), and consciousness is everything. It’s also striking that while Woolf omits gender from her list of the variables affecting the novelist’s point of view – ‘age, country, and temperament’ – she names both her adversaries and her allies as male novelists wielding clumsy or violent tools, while their mutual object is imagined as an obscure and enigmatic old woman. Although she does not discuss her quarrelwith the Edwardians in feminist terms, the clumsiness and incongruity of the literary conventions she deplored seem connected to the problem of representing the feminine character. In her review of Dorothy Richardson’s experimental novel,
The Tunnel
(1919), 13 Woolf had noted Richardson’s ‘genuine conviction of the discrepancy between what she has to say and the form provided by tradition for her to say it in.’ Gradually, Woolf’s aesthetic theories came to incorporate gender as well as genre, feminism as well as modernism; and in
A Room of One’s Own
(1929), she specifically addressed the problems of the woman novelist having to revise the language, syntax, sentence structure, literary conventions, and value system of the novel created by men. 14
    Not only the conventions for representing character had changed for Woolf’s generation, but also the very concept of character and personality. The human personality was not one given fixed monolithic entity, but a shifting conglomerate of impressions and emotions. Psychoanalysis was uncovering a multi-layered self, in which dreams, memories, and fantasies were as important as actions and thoughts. Philosophers were describing the self as a receiver of a tumult of sensations. Artists and painters were experimenting with versions of perception and reality. The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press began to publish Freud’s works in 1921, and although she was overtly dismissive of psychoanalysis, Woolf developed her own acute psychological method of explaining sensation, memory and repression, one which resembles Freud’s in many respects and which uses a similar model of the levels of human consciousness.
    Like Freud, Woolf believed that much in adult identity was formed in early childhood. In her novels, andespecially in
Mrs. Dalloway
, she made brilliant use of flashbacks and fragments from childhood experience, images that have stayed in a character’s