Mrs Dalloway Read Free Page A

consciousness, preserved and frozen like photographs or snapshots, and that come up in unexpected contexts. Clarissa, for example, when she feels most deserted, jealous, and excluded, climbs the stairs to her room and thinks of herself as ‘a child exploring a tower’ (p. 33). Later, the reader learns that this odd image, with its Freudian hint of the little girl’s discovery of sexuality and the phallic, comes from an incident of Clarissa’s childhood:
    She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in the sun. The door had shut, and there among the dust of fallen plaster and the litter of birds’ nests how distant the view had looked, and the sounds came thin and chill (once on Leith Hill, she remembered) (p. 51).
    The passage is one of great emotional subtlety: Woolf does not intervene with narrative explanations, but leaves the memory itself to resonate for us, with its echoes of fairy-tale princesses locked in towers, as well as with the more symbolic nuances of a Yeatsian winding tower of age, and of human isolation and loneliness. For the attentive reader, these memories or dreams can deepen our understanding and compassion for Woolf’s characters in the way an Edwardian omniscient narration might not achieve. Even the domineering, obtuse Lady Bruton becomes more human when we enter her dreams, in which she is eternally a bedraggled little tomboy jumping the brooks in Devonshire on her pony, completely the equal of her brothers.
    Woolf’s psychological notation also reflected thethinking of modernist philosophers. In
Time and Free Will
(1888), for example, Henri Bergson had dealt with the difference between historical time, which is external, linear, and measured in terms of the spatial distance travelled by a pendulum or the hands of a clock; and psychological time, which is internal, subjective, and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment. Bergson had also given guidance to writers seeking to capture the effects of emotional relativity, for he had suggested that a thought or feeling could be measured in terms of the number of perceptions, memories, and associations attached to it. For Woolf, the external event is significant primarily for the way it triggers and releases the inner life. While an exterior incident or perception may be only a brief flash of chronological time, its impact upon the individual consciousness may have a much greater duration and meaning. Like other modernist writers experimenting with the representation of consciousness, Woolf was interested in capturing the flux of random associations. In addition, she wanted to understand how half-buried memories and interpretations created mood.
    Another major concern which Woolf shared with modernist thinkers and artists was the importance of perspective. Even concrete objects, the Cubists demonstrated, could only be partially represented from a single fixed perspective in the vocabulary of a realistic, mimetic painting. A Cubist painting attempted to render the object simultaneously from several points of view, and at several moments in time, combining these multiple perspectives in a kind of collage on the two-dimensional canvas plane. In the novel too, Proust had noted, there could be not only a two-dimensional ‘plane psychology,’but also a depth ‘psychology in space and time.’ People are the product of their past as well as their present, the sum of multiple perspectives upon them, the ways that a variety of others perceive them. Thus it can be said that in trying to show us her characters from a variety of embedded viewpoints rather than from the fixed perspective of the omniscient narrator, Woolf ‘breaks up the narrative plane . . . as the Cubists broke up the visual plane.’ 15
    In addition, the narrative technique of
Mrs. Dalloway
is very cinematic. Woolf makes use of such devices as montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts in