VIRGINIA WOOLF AND STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN MRS DALLOWAY

INTRODUCTION

The stream of consciousness is a narrative technique on which so many writers have given their views whether they are essayist, novelists etc, but the most well known is Virginia Woolf who is considered as the forerunner of this style of writing.

"Influenced by the works of French writer Marcel Proust and Irish writer James Joyce, among others, Woolf strove to create a literary form that would convey inner life. To this end, she elaborated a technique known as stream of consciousness" 

(Bouzid)

Richardson is the pioneer of the stream of consciousness technique. He is the first 20th century British author to publish a full length stream of consciousness novel Pointed Roofs.

On one side was the little grey river, on the other long wet grass repelling and depressing. Not far ahead was the roadway which led, she supposed to the farm where they were to drink new milk. She would have to walk with someone when they came on the road, and talk. She wondered whether this early morning walk would come now, every day. Her heart sank at the thought. 

(Richardson 214-5)

Faulkner who is the man of both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, used this technique of stream of consciousness to great effect in The Sound and the Fury and As I lay Dying, in which he beautifully explores the depths of different character’s inner conflict through disjointed, unpunctuated narrative. In one short paragraph the reader is at once exposed to different smells, sounds and movements.

Nonsense you look like a girl you are lots younger than can dance color in your cheeks like a girl. A face reproachful tearful an above of camphor and of tears a voice weeping standing and softly beyond the twilt door the twilight - colored smell of honey suckle, bringing empty trunks down the attic stairs they sounded like coffins … (Huang)

James Joyce, Dublin born writer used the stream-of-consciousness style in all of his novels, including Finnegan’s wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of course the 1000 pages, 265,000-words long Ulysses. If one will read A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man, he will find that it’s very easy to get lost in any paragraph in the novel, as the protagonist Stephen Dedalus guides quickly and disjointedly through his thoughts and surroundings. There is a moment when he is asking himself, "Would you go back to them?" And the next he is on Grafton streets, pondering whether to buy a pincushion while the "jingle of harnesses” sounds in his ears. Then out of the blue, he answers himself and concludes that it would be useless to go back (Huang).

Woolf always has a threat in her mind regarding the anxiety of her works. She always thinks that what would happened with her literacy works after her death, she believes that she would be forgotten and her works would be counted as nothing by time, and that threat  helped her a lot to be a polished novelist. It pushed her to be more qualified in her writings. She used much more of consciousness in her works that helped her to develop the stream of consciousness.

She focuses more on the use of her thoughts, feelings and sensations through her characters. Her novels were based on the exploration of human consciousness of feelings and thoughts of the vague emotions and sensations through the mind. It’s a revolutionary technique, difficult to handle, but in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf used it with a great success and beautifully shows its possibilities as technique for the artistic portrayal of life.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN MRS DALLOWAY

"Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Wolf Gang

In the novel the fresh morning breeze reminds Mrs. Dalloway of Peter Walsh and the mental journey that she takes into her past reveals to the reader the essential aspect of his characters later. It has been found that he was a felted lover, the looser, the unsuccessful man in life. Later on, Peter indulges in self-revelatory monologue  and broods over his relationship with Clarissa Dalloway, contrasting with her, the major's wife whom he proposes to marry, as also the prospects of this married life with the shape of thing that would have been there if Clarissa had married him.

So it can be seen that stream of consciousness is used in the novel by Woolf through the beginning itself. This was shown by the help of time from the past to the present till the near future. This is called a psychological time which deals with the internal and the external subjectivity of each character's thought and emotions in order to represent the flow of consciousness, which is interrupted by the clock.

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself"

(Woolf 7)

Woolf uses stream-of-consciousness technique by the use of free indirect style which means a style of third person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third person along with the essence of first person direct speech. She firstly uses it when she was describing Clarissa's party to her friends without giving any importance to mention who is Clarissa Dalloway and why she wants to buy the flowers.

In whole novel, Woolf focuses more on expressing her inner thoughts and feelings through her characters especially when she moves deeply into the narrative of the mind of the character without using the intrusive authorial tag such as in 'Mrs. Dalloway reflected' especially through Clarissa's thought, and Woolf said that, 

"For Lucy had her work cut out of her"

(Woolf 7)

In a novel it has been found that she moves into the analysis of Mrs. Dalloway's emotion which a questioning and exclamation way as an interior monologue in:

"What a lark! What a plunge!” 

(Woolf 7)

As the whole novel has two connected stories or it can be said that Mrs. Dalloway is a story of two different but connected stories. First of upper class woman named Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway who lives in the post world war London, In the whole novel, she is preparing herself for a party which is going to be thrown that evening only and the reason behind is, to meet people and friends from different social classes, whereas the second story deals with the veteran Septimus Warren Smith who is also supposed to come in that party, was suffering from a terrible impact of World War I, when his friend rather best friend was died in it. After that Septimus became insane, he used to hear voices and suffering of war. After that big loss he wanted to kill himself.

"Those ruffians, the Gods, shan'nt have it all their own way her nation being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death – that horrible affair". 

(Shmoop Editorial Team)

The above lines again witness the stream of consciousness by the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway. She was looking in the mirror and motivating her to be happy and get satisfied in her life which she was not in actuality. Clarissa witnessed her own sister being cursed by a tree that was an accident, apparently her father’s fault like Septimus’s reaction to the loss of his best friend Evans in World War I, Clarissa is trying to convince her to be happy by saying to herself that ‘behave like a lady’.

This shows that as always she is fluctuating from past to present and present to past in the stream of her conscious thoughts.

"She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very-very dangerous to live even one day." 

(Woolf 12)

Again Woolf goes in her consciousness while crossing the road for shopping expedition for buying the flowers, she pauses for a moment to look at the omnibuses in Picadilly, emphasizes the two sides is busyness of public life and the quiet privacy of the soul.

While walking she feels how lonely she was, she has no one to share her talks with, she still remember the kiss she had with her former suitor peter Walsh, she loved him when she was young before she married her present husband. Although she has always loved him in fact still loves him. She has ample memories regarding her love life with Peter. All these memories keep coming to her mind all through the novel. Still she rejected her love and married to Richard Dalloway. The reason because she feels that Peter's love is quite suffocating, she believes that he is very possessive.

She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible : unseen, unknown: there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond street, This being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

 (Woolf 15)

Virginia, moves from past to present sometimes regretting for her love, sometimes for her decision to marry Richard Dalloway (her present husband). She is confused and asks herself whether she has taken a correct step to marry Richard which has only given her a salutation of 'Mrs. Dalloway'. She feels that now she is aged and became invisible. Now every charm of life has gone, she is neither 'Clarissa' nor 'Clarissa Dalloway' people know her only as 'Mrs. Dalloway' wife of Richard  Dalloway nothing else. There was a psychoanalytical concept as well of stream of consciousness in Septimus mind.

So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signaling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is he could not read the language yet, but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words of languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signaling their intention to provide him, for nothing, forever, for looking merely with beauty, more beauty! Tears run down his cheeks.

  (Shmoop Editorial Team)

The above lines show the steam-of-conscious of Septimus Warren Smith who was a shell shocked veteran. He was plagued by feelings of numbness, hallucinations or his friend's death. The couple Septimus and his wife Lucrezia represent the most striking picture of human misery and sufferings. He become insane could not read the language or the words written on the sky by jet plane. He believes that those words are the code form of same crime which he has committed and now he will not be spared.