Eng426 20th century english literature

Modernist Features in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway



Anti- Tradition: The storyline of Mrs Dalloway happens in a single day in London, it has no action in the traditional sense of cause and effect and there is no linearity in the narration of the story. The novel has many disjointed plots and in fact it thrives on sub- plots. It has an open form, the ending being inconclusive. It is the characters’ feelings, experiences and thoughts that make up the storyline. The sense of action is provided by the passage of time, heralded by clocks chiming and Big Ben striking towards Clarissa’s party, as well as the suicide committed by Septimus. Unlike traditional novels with unified plots and situations, Mrs Dalloway has no story to tell. It is a coherent collection of myriad impressions, an exploration of the myriad tensions that have invaded the modern mind.


Subjective Realism: There is no absolute truth and no one is the custodian of knowledge, as a result, each character in Mrs. Dalloway is revealed not by actual description by the author or an omniscient (all-knowing and all-seeing) voice as is the case in many traditional novels, but by giving voice to the thoughts of characters as well as what others think of them. While Clarissa thinks of herself, Peter thinks of her from his own perspective and Sally Seton has another opinion of her. To Peter, Septimus and his wife are having a lover’s quarrel in the park, to Maisie Johnson, they look queer, to Lucrezia, Septimus is making her miserable, while Septimus thinks Lucrezia is disturbing him. The perspective of other characters like Mrs. Dempster, Lady Bruton, Richard Dalloway, Miss Brush, Miss Kilman and many others form the different voices of the novel’s storyline. The different interpretations of the crowd to the aeroplane’s sky writing, their speculations and the meaning they give it also foreground this fact. These multiple and partial views of situations are exposed to the reader through the individual perception of the characters as shown in their thoughts. This style of writing affirms modernist position
that “no single view or style of explanation could ever be adequate to the diversity of modern experience” (Matz, 59).