Analysis of Mrs Dalloway Book by Victoria Woolf - Essay Example

Mrs. Dalloway Many people complain that reading books by Virginia Woolf can be very difficult, especially a book like Mrs. Dalloway. Opening the book, it is easy to see why people would say this. The book doesnt read like a regular book, with a clear storyline and a strong main character. Instead, it follows the path of Clarissa Dalloway through a single day as she prepares to give a party that evening and ends with the party itself. It also tells the story of Septimus Smith as he lives through his last day, ending with his suicide. While this might seem to be a relatively straight-forward storyline, it is made complicated by the way the story is told. The first hint of difficulty is Mrs. Dalloways scattered thoughts as she moves back and forth in her mind between the present and the past. While her character is very clear, the narrative does not remain rooted on her, instead flitting back and forth between descriptions of the day and her internal reactions to them. It even takes time to drift into the minds of other people who see her or who are nearby until it finally drifts completely free to settle back down on Mr. Smith for a while. The novel is very difficult to read if you try to keep track of all the characters and details, but if you allow your mind to drift free a little bit like the narrative seems to do, then the book becomes much easier to follow. Part of what makes Mrs. Dalloway a difficult book to read is because of the way in which its written. The book is written like a constant stream of thought as it flows from one mind to another through the course of a day. Although the main action focuses mostly on Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway and Mr. Septimus Smith, there are many other characters introduced. Thats part of what makes the story so difficult. The reader has to learn how to quickly filter through which characters are important and which ones are just mentioned for the sake of moving the thought around, usually as it makes its way from Mrs. Dalloway to Septimus Smith and back to Mrs. Dalloway again. An example of this comes when Maisie Johnson asks Mr. and Mrs. Smith for directions in Regents Park. The narrative jumps into her head as she makes her way through the park until she is seen by Mrs. Dempster. Mrs. Dempster thinks about her and her likely prospects as compared to the life Mrs. Dempster has lived until she is distracted by the aeroplane in the sky, which is also seen by Mr. Bentley. The way these transitions are carried out is very smooth. As Mr. Bentley watches the plane, he thinks of it as a symbol "of a mans soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body; beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory - away the aeroplane shot. Then, while a seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag stood on the steps of St. Pauls Cathedral" (368). These kinds of smooth transitions easily confuse the reader until you learn the trick of allowing your reading to flow along like the thought of the book, replicating the kind of flowing, disjointed thoughts that dominate Septimus and Clarissas minds as they struggle to live in the present instead of in the moment of their lives that their minds keep trying to relive. The problem with reading in this way is that it is easy to lose the meaning of the book. To help explain the process we must both employ and release in order to read Mrs. Dalloway, it is helpful to have some understanding of Theory of Mind, which is explained quite well by Lisa Zunshine. Theory of mind (ToM) refers to "our ability to explain peoples behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires" (271). The idea of ToM first became necessary to understand how the autistic mind was different from other minds in its ability to make sense of other peoples behaviors. It suggests that we have some kind of cognitive architecture that makes it possible for us to learn how to read the small signals given off by other people so that we can relatively accurately "read" their minds. This mechanism is exactly what literature builds off of in order to present readers with fully sketched characters without actually spelling out every little bit of what they are doing, thinking or saying. Although it is called mind-reading, Zunshine talks about how it is really just narrowing the field of possible interpretations. "The context of the episode would then constrain our interpretations even further ... Any additional information that we would bring to bear upon our reading of the passage - biographical, sociohistorical, literary-historical - would alert us to new shades in its meaning, and could, in principle, lead us to some startling conjectures about Walshs state of mind" (275). This background knowledge is what leads different readers to different conclusions regarding characters actions. The transition from real life interpretations to interpretations of fictional characters is, seemingly, relatively seamless. According to Zunshine, "any indication that we are dealing with a self-propelled entity leads us to assume that this entity possesses thoughts, feelings, and desires, at least some of which we could intuit, interpret, and, frequently, misinterpret" (277). In other words, we depend upon our cognitive abilities to interpret behaviors in the real world in order to understand behaviors in fiction that may or may not be fully explained within the text itself. To illustrate these ideas, Zunshine introduces Steven Pinker and his reaction to Mrs. Dalloway. Referring to modernism in general, he said "in literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration and difficult prose" (cited in Zunshine, 285). He could as easily be speaking specifically about this book although Zunshine might argue with that conclusion. Woolfs book definitely includes omniscient narration since it hops very easily from one characters head to anothers and is unlimited it seems in the number of heads it jumps into, which would seem to go against Pinkers assessment of the book. However, this omniscience is sporadic, only allowing us brief glimpses into each mind and not always the mind wed most like to see. Stream of consciousness definitely describes the book, though, as the narration flits along at the level of momentary thought, now appreciating the flowers, next drifting over the traffic outside and settling in with the momentary thoughts of another character entirely. Although the story only follows the course of a single day, the events are also presented out of sequence in that Mrs. Dalloway continuously drifts back in time in her thoughts to the days at Bourton when she decided not to marry Peter Walsh and instead marry Richard Dalloway. In a similar way, Mr. Smiths thoughts drift a great deal, usually back to his time in the war when he was with his friend Evans. It can be exhausting trying to keep up with which time period is being discussed at any given point. Clearly, this type of story leads to baffling characters, such as the mentally unstable mind of Mr. Smith or the shallow, flighty mind of Mrs. Dalloway. However, where Pinker suggests that this type of writing is inaccessible to readers, conveying no clear sense and relatively meaningless, it is difficult to agree with him. After reading through Zunshines article, the strategy I used to make sense of Mrs. Dalloway seems clearer and I am able to appreciate the book more. Rather than attempting to sort through the various levels of intentionality that are used in almost every phrase of the book, I allowed the words to enter into my mind as a cohesive whole and then let my mind make its own interpretations given all these intentionalities. In other words, instead of trying to analyze each sentence or phrase consciously to trace out the various meanings, I just let them soak in and sort themselves out. As Zunshine says, "if we alert our students to the fact that Woolf tends to play this particular kind of cognitive mind game with her readers, it significantly eases their anxiety about not getting her prose and actually helps them to start enjoying her style" (282). Just knowing that the mind games are happening allows me to relax and just let the words flow, not getting my thinking too caught up in analysis and allowing other levels of thinking to make sense of the material. I think this is the tactic that Pinker missed. Although he seemed well aware of the fact that Woolf was playing mind games, he seemed incapable of letting go of his analytical awareness to allow other forms of interpretation to take hold and interpret meaning. Zunshine also talked about how knowing more about the authors history and personal worldview would help us make more accurate sense of the meanings of the book. A brief look into Virginia Woolf revealed that she struggled with mental health issues of her own, which made me think more about the madness of Mr. Smith and how other events, such as his suicide, might have been impacted by her thinking. Again, I think this is something Pinker, more comfortable in the traditional forms of storytelling as shown in his assessment of modern writing, was not considering. In the old form of writing, all of the meaning was supposed to be contained in the book; the experiences and intentions of the writer didnt matter. The idea that the author might have had an intention or that the authors experiences necessarily shaped his or her interpretations of character behavior were concepts that came into play only with the modern era which Pinker was struggling to understand. I dont pretend to fully understand Mrs. Dalloway, but it would be a lie to say I found the book impossible to enjoy. Works Cited Woolf, Victoria. Mrs. Dalloway. South Australia: University of Adelaide, 2010. Kindle ebook. Zunshine, Lisa. "Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness." Narrative. Vol. 11, N. 3, (October 2003): 270-291. Print. Read More