Mrs Dalloway Read Free Page B

constructing a three-dimensional story. 16 Such transitional devices would have been familiar to her readers, who were flocking to the new cinema houses and seeing the latest American silent films. In
Mrs. Dalloway
, the cinema is one of the post-war developments that has altered the relation between the classes, and acted as a leveller. Everyone goes to the cinema, whereas the traditional entertainments of the music hall and the opera drew very different groups. At the party, the young socialites Lord Gayton and Nancy Blow are talking about the movies, but Peter Walsh also thinks how the young city workers will have ‘two hours at the pictures’ before it gets dark.
    Surprisingly, there are only a few scattered references to the movies in all Woolf’s vast correspondence and journals. In the index to volume three of her letters, for example, spanning the years 1923 to 1928, under the entry for ‘recreations and habits’ we find opera, concerts, theatre, woolwork, embroidery, stencilling, marionettes, polo, cricket, gardening, car-driving, walking, and cooking; but no movies. Nonetheless, in 1926, just afterpublishing
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf wrote a brief but brilliant essay on ‘The cinema’ which suggests how significant an impact this new medium was having on her work. She referred specifically to
Anna Karenina
and
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
as well as to newsreels and documentaries which poignantly recalled life before the war:
    We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves . . . The war sprung its chasm at the feet of all this innocence and ignorance but it was thus that we danced and pirouetted, toiled and desired, thus that the sun shone and the clouds scudded up to the very end.
    These metaphors of a lost Atlantis echoed images of the war she had used in
Mrs. Dalloway
. Woolf was also struck by the narrative possibilities the camera offered in adaptations of novels. ‘The past,’ she observed, ‘could be unrolled, distances annihilated, and the gulfs which dislocate novels (when, for instance, Tolstoy has to pass from Levin to Anna and in doing so jars his story and wrenches and arrests our sympathies) could by the sameness of the background, by the repetition of some scene, be smoothed away.’ 17 Yet the cinema had not yet, in her opinion, begun to make the most of its ‘picture-making power,’ its potential for symbolization and ‘visual emotion.’
    The historically meaningful and symbolically apt transitional devices of
Mrs. Dalloway
show how effectively Woolf used the lessons she had learned from the cinematic medium. Urban life, she believed, was made for cinematic representation: ‘We get intimations only in the chaos of the streets, perhaps, when some momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement suggests that here is a scene waiting a new art to be transfixed.’ 18 In theopening pages of the novel, an elegant closed motor car going up Bond Street provides a visual object upon which many people project their fantasies, allowing Woolf to pan from mind to mind with great economy and directness, and to capture the chaos in an image.
    One of the most cinematic linking devices in
Mrs. Dalloway
is the sky-writing plane which is seen by the crowd around Buckingham Palace, and also by Septimus and Rezia in Regent’s Park. Clarissa hears its ‘strange high singing’ right after she leaves her house when she crosses Victoria Street, but never sees it; when she returns home, she asks the maid what people are looking at.
    The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Every one looked up (pp. 21–2).
    The plane is advertising something mysterious and modern, Glaxo or Kreemo, or possibly toffee. To Septimus, however, the ‘smoke words languishing and