Dalloway Day

In keeping with today’s first ever Dalloway Day, honouring Virginia Woolf and her work, I offer a short text below. This is adapted from a section of my article “On Not Knowing Text”: Towards Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,” originally published in Left Out: Texts and Ur-Texts (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2009). Extensive thanks to the IDEA Editorial Board and the Reading Committee for all their help. They are named here https://idea-udl.org/recent-books-by-idea-members-ouvrages-recentes-didea/ and also here https://jsbak.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/lo-front_matter.pdf

Happy Dalloway Day!

Mrs Dalloway has often been considered to be a parody of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both books have lead protagonists that, like Odysseus, travel in single-day time frames.* As Ralph Freedman noted, Mrs Dalloway is “an ‘anti-novel’ in the true sense of the term because its portrayal of the act of knowledge subverts the conventionally accepted qualities of the novel which are focused on the intercourse between men [sic] and worlds.”**

We find, for example, Einstein and Mendelian theory named early in the novel (page 24)*** in conjunction with an airplane being watched by a crowd of people—“a symbol” the novel tells us “of man’s (sic) soul.”

Woolf’s use of allusions and quotations in Mrs Dalloway (Modernism loved intertextuality) is already well developed in her short story collection Monday or Tuesday (1919). And she refers to the development of her experimental techniques in a 1920 diary entry: “Conceive,” the Diary invites its implied readers, “Mark on the Wall, K[ew] G[ardens] and Unwritten Novel (sic) taking hands and dancing in unity.” And later in the same entry Woolf notes: “I must still grope and experiment but this afternoon I had a gleam of light” (Diary II, 14).

Woolf is apparently referring here to the use of parody or intertextuality, clearly seeking some novelistic gain in depth or texture. In “Kew Gardens” for example we find an emphasis on the microcosm/macrocosm duality as fragments from the conversations of different characters are presented while the external narrative voice of the story ekphrastically registers changes in the intensity of the natural daylight, sometimes through the imagined perception of a snail.

Woolf’s modern attitudes toward science and nature were influenced not only by people like Roger Fry and Bertrand Russell but also by such publications as The Athenaeum and The Times Literary Supplement, as Michael Whitworth has noted.**** The other two stories mentioned above similarly play with perception/cognition. And while it is true that none of the devices used in these avant-textes is new, Woolf’s handling of them demonstrates an extremely high technical ability.

As this ability grew, similar invocations of scientific understandings of luminance and color perception like that found in “Kew Gardens” would continue to be used. Both Mrs Dalloway and pre-textual “Kew Gardens” mark major literary turning points.

*See Molly Hoff, “The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs Dalloway,” Twentieth Century Literature 45:2, Summer 1999.

**Freedman, R. The Lyrical Novel… Princeton UP, 1971.

***Woolf, V. Mrs Dalloway. London, Penguin, 1969.

****Whitworth, M.H.  In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2000, 146-63.