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Prelude

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo,

a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from beginning of consciousness

to the end. –Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ 154.

My study of Virginia Woolf began four years ago when I was a senior in high school

unofficially auditing an advanced writing course that I was unable to take due to scheduling

conflicts. Early in the school year, alongside class-wide assignments, each student was to

take another text to examine and present on their own. My assigned text was A Room of

One’s Own. Immediately, Woolf’s voice and ideas grabbed me. The vitality, phrasing and

sentences of Room lit my thoughts, as her speech for gender equality and space for the

female writer came at a time in which I was beginning to feel a permanent call to the power

and nuance of words.

Three years and three Woolf novels later, I idled in a used bookstore, skimming the

“Literature” shelves for something new to read. My eyes swished the Qs, the Rs and then the

Ws, finally resting on “Woolf.” I bent down and saw Night and Day and The Voyage Out. I

picked up the novels and weighed their back cover promises and physical heft in my palms,

deciding after a time to purchase Night and Day.

I expected to read something like Mrs. Dalloway or perhaps something more like

“The Death of the Moth.” Yet from the first page, I found that Night and Day did not sound

like Woolf. The sentences felt too straight except in a few spots. The narrative was large.

Woolf’s name was on the novel’s cover and spine, but I could not believe that she was

writing in her own voice. Something wavered on the page. Wondering if her first novel

would show me a text closer to her later works, I returned to the bookstore for The Voyage

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Out. There I felt more undiscovered authenticity in the narrative. Woolf’s apprentice novels

revealed a writer with immense potential but without an appropriate medium. I could not

help but wonder what was getting in her way. Holding the novels in my mind, I turned the

pieces against one another and realized: Woolf had been working in the wrong form.

Woolf had been working in the shadow of a man’s shape and in the three-volume

nineteenth-century novel, which did not allow for a narrative to move by a means other than

linear plot and authoritative omniscience. In a 1908 letter, Woolf wrote that she thought of

“how I shall re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose

the whole, & shape infinite strange shapes” (Woolf, Letters I 356). She was in the midst of

writing what would become The Voyage Out and already knew she wanted to change what

she had been given by creating her own shapes to capture life better. At the same time,

however, Woolf also wrote that she longed for “the old decorums and env[ied]… the

indolence of [her]… ancestors,” the Victorians (“Mr Bennett” 85). She was caught between

revering past forms and content and desiring her own forms for contemporary content. Yet

as a woman born into a changing social sphere, her attempts to depict gender inequalities in

early twentieth century British society clashed with an admiration for the “male form” of the

realist novel. She needed to create her own form to write her narratives.

The questions of gendered form arise from Woolf’s struggles. To say that the realist

form is “male” and thereby unsuited to Woolf implies that form is based in the body, a

dichotomous identity that dictates an underlying imprint or “signature” as Monique Wittig

and other feminist critics would argue (67). Gendered form can also be looked at as a

cultural construct that affects not only personal identity, outward behavior and appearance

but also the internal self which is the basis for every voicing and thus every shape that

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appears on the page. The latter consideration is perhaps more useful when considering the

female element in writing that shows itself in Woolf’s work as she evolves in her approach to

writing.

Woolf seemed to have realized that the path to a form of one’s own is a process that

cannot happen the instant the writer decides he or she needs it. First, old ways must be

unlearned, thrown off. New forms must be tried on, bits of those forms are taken and altered

or taken and placed on a closet hanger to await further alterations or fittings. New techniques

are created. Those too hang in the closet, open, waiting. When the wardrobe has been filled

to the writer’s liking, the combinations may be tried on, first awkwardly, then tweaked and

finally all at once in a manner appropriate to the writer.

In the interests of catching Woolf as she developed different narrative techniques, I

will trace her developing narratives and evolving forms through her initial novel, The Voyage

Out, to her second, Night and Day, and a selection of her short stories before her arrival at

Mrs. Dalloway, her emergent “master” work. I am intentionally omitting examination of

Jacob’s Room to allow a sampling of her growing repertoire of techniques for form seen

through her various short stories of the same period. I have also chosen to eliminate the

consideration of To the Lighthouse’s narrative shape to reduced redundancy. As Mrs.

Dalloway is the first site of a “Woolf form,” To the Lighthouse is a continuation of Woolf’s

display of craft. My approach to Woolf’s texts outlined in my choices of inclusion and

exclusion, engages in a close reading of her work through the methods of a scholar and the

aesthetics of a writer. My training as a writer, couched with its own biases through extensive

reading, involvement in literary groups and workshops as well as practice in different genres,

has led to this examination of Woolf’s work on a structural narrative level. It is my hope that

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this cross-pollinated examination of Woolf’s development will open other discussions on the

relations between form, content and gender in both writerly and scholarly fields. Above all,

“Cut adrift from the eternal tea-table” is the culmination of a year’s apprenticeship to Woolf,

an homage to the style, structure and innovation that has affected not only the way that

writers tackle narrative, but also the way that readers and scholars approach the novel with

the emergence of a “female form.”

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Inheritance

Woolf began her education as a writer under her father, Leslie Stephen, who saw her

as his literary successor (Hill 351). When Woolf was eleven, he wrote to his wife, Julia, that

to be an author “is a thing for ladies and Ginia will do well in that line” (qtd. in 351).

Woolf’s diaries reveal Stephen’s tutelage: a diet of history, biography and literature, all

chosen from his library. Her guided reading grounded her literary development in the art of

biography, as Stephen himself was editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (353). Yet

while this training gave Woolf an immense background in her world and in sketching

character, she reflected in A Room of One’s Own and in letters that she did not receive an

education like her brothers as she was not sent to Oxbridge.

…think how I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my

father’s books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools

throwing balls; ragging: slang; vulgarity; scene; jealousies –only rages with

my half brothers, and being walked off my legs round the Serpentine by my

father. This is an excuse. I am often conscious of the lack of jolly vulgarity…

(Woolf, Letters III, 247)

The letter displays a consciousness of missing more of a social education than of a book-

based one and yet it also comments on the exclusion of women from the classical education

and experience afforded to men. While women were being admitted to study at universities

by the time Woolf would have been eligible to do so, neither she nor her sister, Vanessa,

were sent, which made her feel as if she was shut out of the male academic community (361)

which admitted her brothers, a practice that was “a matter of course for upper-middle-class

English boys” (Bowlby xx-xxi). This education created the backdrop for the glorification of

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ancient Greek culture and a “divisive and one-sided” view built on wealth, continued in a

man’s education and writing(xxi; Woolf, “Leaning” 166), in the building of structures not

only physical but mental. The “tower” in which a man sat “decide[d]… his angle of vision; it

affect[ed]… his power of communication” (166). “…[I]f you look closely,” Woolf adds,

“almost every writer who has practiced his art successfully has been taught” from such a

nurturing or even self-serving view (166). The view was bolstered by the training given by

the education provided a method to organize, allowing thought, or as she states in A Room of

One’s Own, a question to “run …into …an answer as a sheep runs into its pen” (28). The

ability to put thought into a “pen” implies a sanctioned order created by the education,

imprinted in and giving structure to the works of men.

Evidence of the order can be seen in the literary world Woolf entered. Mostly male

dominated, the “Victorian Canon” included men such as Anthony Trollope, George

Meredith, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray

and George Robert Gissing (Wheeler xi). Their novels, mostly written under the influence of

the “leaning tower,” strove to include as much of the world as possible and to contextualize

that world for its audience. Woolf admired some of the authors like James, Gissing and

Charles De Quincey, though De Quincey was admittedly not of that era, for the techniques of

the time. She remarked that James was “still toiling to say all he means, to leave nothing

unsaid that can by any possibility complete the picture” and that Gissing went “about the

world seeing squares and circles where the ordinary person… [saw] mere snowdrift. The

wildest extravagance of life in the moon can be complete, or the most shattered fragment.

When a book has this quality it seems unsinkable” (“Henry James” 22, “Novels” 361). She

enjoyed the canvas upon which they worked, found Charles De Quincy’s writing strong

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because in it, “it is not the actual sight or sound that matters, but the reverberations it makes

as it travels through our minds” (qtd. in Shaw 232). Yet while she admired all these writers,

she came to sense that what she had been born into was faulted in its form and was not useful

for her as a woman.

Her dissatisfaction with their writing, the novels of Hardy, for example, came from

the novels lacking shape (“Mr Howell” 326). The three-volume Victorian novel, which

Henry James terms as “loose baggy monsters” or “monstrous bags into which almost

anything could be crammed” as Michael Wheeler re-terms them (2), tried to integrate all

experience into three volumes or more, not to capture the truth of experience as the

individual saw it but to “afford amusement” (Walter Besant qtd. in Wheeler 174). As Besant

also said, the novel was to

convert… abstract ideas into living models; it gives ideas, it strengthens faith,

it preaches a higher morality than is seen in the actual world; it commands the

emotions of pity, admiration, and terror; it creates and keeps alive the sense of

sympathy; it is the universal teacher… (qtd. in 174)

This realist novel was given an authority that allowed it to depict life values. It provided for

its reader a scene, an ordered sense of time and space dictated by dominant standards, a

portrayal of the ambitions of the growing middle class and above all, a leisure activity in the

hope of being a part of a “‘great tradition’ … ‘alive’ to its time,” according to Paul Cobley

(F. R. Leavis qtd in 89). The narrative sought contemporality and longevity simultaneously,

so that contemporary society could be forever seen in all its gradations (89-90). What

allowed the narrative to contextualize a “large canvas… minutely detailed to give a sense of

richness: with moralistic tones and omniscient narration to take huge issues, such as history

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and politics, to the personal and individual level (Cobley 89, 93, 97), was the omniscient

narrator, who required the authoritative voice to maintain a consistent and continuous

narrative.

The establishment of such a voice tried to create a hierarchical relationship between

the reader and writer and was believed to give unity to the work (Whitcomb in Friedman

138), despite the different locales, characters or planes of the novel due to serialization or

other plot constraints. Omniscience, one of several options for the narrator, was highly

valued as it allowed the narrator to be everywhere, to know everything and to show the

events of the novel like history, in a “broadly progressive sweep towards an enlightened

present” (Wheeler 6). Gradations of the omniscient narrator were revealed through intrusion

or distance. The “editorial” or “intrusive” omniscient narrator criticizes actions and appears

as an “I” or “we” in the text (Friedman 145; Prince 10). The “neutral” narrator speaks in the

third person and is imbued with the author’s “voice’ (Friedman 148). There is also the first

person narration, a limited view, which may be used, or the more complex “multiple

selective” in which the author or narrator does not directly appear but exists within the

guidance of which characters are seen and when (152).

There was also another element holding many Victorian novels together, which was

the “male plot,” otherwise known as “linear design,” key in structuring the entire narrative.

Linear design is based on what is also known as the Freitag triangle, in which the narrative

arc is broken into five parts along the legs of a triangle, beginning with an inciting incident at

the left-most point, increasing in tension with the rising action in the first leg, climaxing at

the greatest point of tension in the angle and then quickly dropping off as falling action into

the conclusion, also known as the resolution, in the other leg (Bell 27). At its barest level,

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the male structure works in the linear because it is inseparable from time and temporal order

(29), modeled after the pattern of the male orgasm. While this is not the only “male form” if

one were ascribing form to the body, it is when “male form” is defined as a dominant or all-

encasing pattern, one in which there was little room for ambiguity or alternative points of

view that would undermine patriarchal authority. On a grander structural scale, the Victorian

novel used Freitag triangles on smaller scales or narrative arcs within the larger scope of the

text to serve the serialized form. Serialization, particularly popular in the 1830s with Charles

Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (Wheeler 4), required each section of the novel to build suspense

and for each arc in the magazine issue to finish with “a moment of tension or rest” to

encourage further reading (4). The novel would be ideally broken through the practice of

serialization into several levels. First, the overall arc of the novel over three volumes, which

likely did not form a cohesive Freitag triangle; then the arc of each volume; further, the arcs

within a volume made from the serializations and finally the arc of each chapter. The shape

of each was rendered by the sentence in relation to the word choice of the author. Most

important was the beginning and end of each arc, as needed for suspense in serialization,

which are “decisive moments of any narration,” giving “frame…, perspective… and …[a]

field of possibility” to each work (Moretti 123), ultimately giving the shape and impression

the reader carries when thinking of the novel.

Woolf would later write that these forms had a tendency to put “emphasis on all the

wrong places, …throwing fragments together at random” (Woolf, “Mr Howell” 326) and

thus not achieving the united effect the novelist meant to project. Her perception of

beginning with the wrong forms entered through her own writing, sensing that unlike an

ordered painting, she “attain[ed] a different kind of beauty, achieve[d] a symmetry by means

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of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the minds passage through the world; & achieve

in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments” (Passionate 393). She had

developed a sense of her own writing as different from that of her male predecessors. For

though she had female writers of the Victorian Canon like Mary Gaskell and George Eliot

(Wheeler 1) to look to for a “female form,” Woolf found that few female writers wrote “as

women write, not as men write” (Woolf, Room 74-5) because of the influence of a male

model. Even a writer like Eliot, used the narrative of authority in Adam Bede (1859), The

Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861), which Woolf found faulty. She thought

the writing of Elizabeth Robins, for example, is that of a man’s, for it had “the kind of bare

brevity which marks the talk even of undergraduates. The idea may be commonplace, the

knowledge superficial, but it stands unpalliated by superfluous phrases” (“Mills” 228).

Robins and Eliot had mimicked the works of male writers, which Woolf thought “is useless”

for the female writer (Room 76). She comes to find that “the weight, the pace, the stride of a

man’s mind are too unlike” a woman’s (76), for their writing to be a useful model.

The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but

to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the

exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success

prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success. (76)

She mimics a straight tone that falls staccato in clear progression, bullet after bullet to pin

down meaning and an expression in an entirely logic-based system designed to capture

existence. Built by the male sentence Woolf models, “behind [which] one can see Johnson,

Gibbon and the rest” (76), the sentence projects of the overall narrative structure of a novel

with a large form, as each structure depends on the shape of its parts. Woolf called novels

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constructed from that model “books … [made with] so many sentences absolutely struck

with an axe out of crystal” (Diary III 219). She implies that the books were created out of a

sentence unit made of a fine material, but a material that has been hacked at, worked at by a

hand that is given the gift of writing wielded through an often destructive but powerful tool.

Woolf’s prior imitation of what she perceived to be the male voice proves to be keen when

viewing Thackeray’s eulogy for Charlotte Brontë, in which he writes,

Of the multitude that has read her books, who has not known and deplored the

tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate? Which of her

readers has not become her friend? Who has not known her books has not

admired the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the

pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman?

What a story is that of the family of poets in their solitude yonder on the

gloomy northern moors! (qtd. in Wheeler 62)

The prose runs grandiose and lofty. His claim that Brontë’s work was imbued with “the

burning love of truth” speaks both as an oversaturated and dramatic line and as a claimant

over Brontë and her writing. He folds her into his values by way of his sentence and phrase,

reshaping Brontë to fit into what is considered the proper form for the female body: small,

emotional and of good effort against the male: large, hulking and all-encompassing pinnacle

of artistic achievement.

Woolf felt the female need to write against such a sentence. Though George Eliot

appropriated a tone like Thackeray’s, likely because she was writing “as a man,” using the

tone to be “a thinker: meditative, moral and philosophical” (133), she did so to subvert the

dominant style much like female authors from the eighteenth century tradition when the

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novel was actually “novel,” prior to the establishment of the novel industry. Female authors

of the eighteenth century wrote of domestic and social issues, taking on the genre forms of

the gothic and epistolary novel. They also wrote in their own “voice,” according to Susan

Lanser (25). Jane Austen, for example, focused on social commentary and subjects deemed

trivial by men, depicting not “football and sport,” but “the worship of fashion, the buying of

clothes” (Woolf, Room 73). Yet though women’s voices were allowed and an audience for

such concerns existed, female writers began to “disappear … behind the men,” relegated to

sign their works as a class of “lady authors” (Lanser 36). Susan Lanser claims for example,

that women wrote in “a female voice that imitates a man’s imitation of a female voice,”

speaking much as Woolf does of female writers (38). Even prior to the perceived clash of

forms in the writing of the female Victorian novelist, Woolf and Lanser both wrote that Jane

Austen concealed her identity; most of her works are written “by a lady” or “by the author

of” any one of her prior texts. She too succumbed to patriarchal pressure to conceal her

identity as fitting her gender. Yet Austen, according to Woolf, took the male sentence and

“laughed at it and developed a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and

never departed from it” (Room 77). She drew upon a tradition of personal authority that

existed from 1780 to 1815 in which prefaces to female writing did not apologize for the

writing due to gender but celebrated being analyzed on the basis of talent alone (Lanser 64).

By this time, however, the celebration of female writing was on the decline as the novel came

to be viewed as a professional and not as a domestic endeavor with the increasing

profitability and industrialization of fiction (88). The female writer, separated from the

profession, ventured into that sphere only with apologies. Her voice was constantly

“admitting that she was ‘only a woman,’ or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man,’”

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which, according to Woolf, created a blemish in the book’s center when created under such

strain (Room 74). The female writer taking up her pen after such a time faced a conflict of

voice and form which Woolf would later address in the figure of Mary Carmichael who had

“something …not quite in order” in her novel (80). The pattern in her sentences is

“interrupted” (80). Though Woolf sees Carmichael’s torn narrative arising from a self-

consciousness, she also sees a much larger reason for the jolts:

Mary is tampering with the expected sequence. First she has broken the

sentence; now she has broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to

do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the

sake of creating. (81)

Woolf’s portrayal of the female novelist “tampering with the expected sequence” reflects the

battle of the female writer that Woolf went through with tradition looming around her. She

came to see the sentence as the basis for form, noting the importance of watching a writer

like Carmichael so as to “catch those unrecorded gestures” made of the “unsaid … when

women are alone, unlit by the capriciousness and the coloured light of the other sex” (84).

Woolf is recognizing the female fledgling writer needing a space to write in and speak about

what had not been before. For when the pen was previously in a man’s hand, even when it

was taken up by a woman, the shape assumed was that of a man’s or an expected “male

form.” What the female writer needed was a narrative form that would allow her to speak on

her own.

Woolf’s own narrative battle between the preference for the authoritative narrator and

the declining female novel tradition began as soon as she began writing. However, she was

also caught with a limited access to the male world through her father’s tutelage which

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allowed a critical view created from a simultaneous insider and outsider perspective. Also

through Stephen, Woolf believed that a “critic of the self-conscious historical vision ought to

be a sympathetic reader of experiments in new literary forms” (Hill 354-5), which fostered an

openness to the new alongside an admiration of the old. These views, as well as a basis in

biography, the framer of character through words, began Woolf’s writing and continued

shaping her sensibilities in criticism and in practice with the novel. As irregular as her

education was, Woolf’s background formed her own sense of shape; her training in writing

essays, “the quintessential genre for ‘views and opinions,’” (Lanser 109) and her father’s

belief in the suitability of the profession of writing for women, giving her a belief in the

worth of her own writing, especially through the authority and “unity of author and

narrative” of biography over a figure and subject (Cobley 118). Since Woolf was surrounded

by the male structure in narration and plot and an apologetic female tradition, her first

venture into the world of fiction would engage the narratives and shapes of realism according

to her gender and her desire for innovation. Her form would begin to emerge from what she

had been given and what she had been denied.

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Apprenticeship

As Woolf continued the education her father had begun, she embarked on her

“apprentice” period of writing in January of 1897 with the seeds of the novel that would

become her first, The Voyage Out. Her training worked through the arts of fiction and non-

fiction in short stories and essays (Leaska xv and xlviii). But the apprenticeship was not

easy. Her diaries attest to many struggles as she “screwed out a page” or had a page

“strangled in the birth” (Letters I 340, 345). She once “wasted all… [her] time trying to

begin things & taking up different points of view, & dropping them & grinding out the

dullest stuff, which …[made her] blood run thick” (315-6). She tussled with her work; she

was constantly insecure. In a dream, she saw herself showing her work to Leslie Stephen,

now deceased. Upon seeing the manuscript, he “snorted, & dropped it onto a table” which

Woolf said made her “melancholy & [so she] read it … [that] morning, & thought it bad”

(325). She reports wondering if she “shall ever dare print” her pages after she completed her

first draft (367; Lee 232). Her “boldness terrifie[d]…” her in her writing (Woolf, Letters I

383). She constantly feared negative review, which was “as difficult as to ignore the opinion

of probable readers” (383). At the same time, that which fed her writing, her feminism, was

said to come out too much. A review from Clive Bell, for example, pointed out that her

“prejudice against men ... [made her] didactic,” an opinion she rebutted with the claim that

she “never meant to preach” (383). Yet under the circumstances, one would find it

impossible for her writing not to take on such a “slant.” She wrote of what concerned her

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deeply. The Voyage Out, which began as Melymbrosia, “Honey-ambrosia,” is ultimately

concerned with the balance of inter-gender relations and roles in Georgian society.

Structurally, she intended for the work to run for three volumes (Letters II 82) and

found after writing one hundred pages that there was “something of a structure in it …though

there are such lapses that I almost fall wide awake” (Letters I 343). She had “wanted …to

give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various & disorderly as possible” in a sort of

pattern which was “cut short for a moment by” Rachel Vinrace’s death (Letters II 82). The

narrative cut highlights the negotiations between forms in Voyage, which both rebels against

and uses prevailing techniques, narrative structure and voice of the period. Yet due to

Woolf’s concerns, Voyage is didactic, grinding against a form she works in, the text in a state

of partial-metamorphosis.

Voyage can be broken into five sections. The first four are actual narrative arcs. The

last is not, lacking a true conclusion. In detail, each section contains small arcs which are

separated into blocks as they fall stagnant between chapters. The first section, for example,

uses Chapter One as a prologue; Chapter Two as a scene and character setter; Chapters Three

to Six to introduce the major action, the Bildungsroman theme and the Dalloway section.

Chapter Seven serves as a quick falling action. From there, the second section settles the

Ambroses and Rachel within the island and a British colonial exploratory mode which

positions Rachel for the major thrust of the novel of the third section, which pursues

courtship and further social education. The conclusions of this third section are cemented by

the fourth, but before a final conclusion can follow Rachel and Terence’s engagement, Woolf

sabotages her own novel with Rachel’s illness in Chapter Twenty-five. The last section is

only a response to that sudden change. After the announcement, the plot stagnates. The

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aftermath of Rachel’s death becomes not a denouement but a series of plunging and falling

lines tracing the characters’ lives just before they disembark.

The novel can also be divided between the time leading up to Rachel’s engagement

and the decline after, allowing one to look at the novel as divided in half between plots: the

female Bildungsroman and Woolf’s reaction to that form. As the novel begins, Woolf

establishes the narrative authority.

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it

is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers’ clerks

will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes

unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very

tall, to wear a blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand. (Woolf,

Voyage 9)

The reader is held at a distance by those first lines. The novelist takes her role as a moral

compass, her authority is established on the direct address of readers as “you” and the advice

dispensed in the clause “it is better not to” (9). The lines evoke Jane Austen’s Pride and

Prejudice, in which she states “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in

possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen 3). Austen’s starting line

establishes authoritative distance that is maintained throughout, echoed in Woolf’s Voyage.

The initial sentence tints the rest of the reader’s experience, indicating the framework and

tone.

Set within a classical tradition, Voyage primarily works through the structure of the

Bildungsroman, one of the first established stories that may be seen in portions of the first

form of the “novel,” The Odyssey and The Iliad, narratives considered to be the basis for the

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Western narrative tradition (Cobley 41). Woolf’s title and subject directly draws on The

Odyssey, which featured the Bildungsroman of Telemachus path as a complimenting

narrative to Odysseus’ homebound journey. Rachel’s story, however, cannot follow that of

Telemachus, who like his successors, is shown to develop through a society that allows him

to move from “ignorance and innocence to wisdom and maturity” (Voyage In 6). Most

literary definitions of the Bildungsroman in fact, do not acknowledge the possibility of a

heroine, noting only male examples (Beckson and Ganz 26) or that the tale usually applies to

a hero rather than heroine (Brownstein 82). The conclusions of these definitions reflect a

bias of the form towards the male. For if Telemachus had been female, say named

Telemachia, “end-maker,” she would have married someone to end the threat to her mother,

rather than join her father in slaughtering the suitors threatening Ithaca. The epic as known

to the contemporary world ends in a reaffirmation of the old order where Telemachus is

allowed to discover his personal identity, but a Telemachia would fade into that world’s

narrative’s threads, becoming “static …[and] ahistorical” (Hirsch 23). There is more at stake

in the female narrative because the female protagonist needs to negotiate claiming individual

identity in sexuality, independence and breaking with society or assuming a submerged

sexuality, dependence and acceptance of what was usually a diminutive role, “sacrificing

integrity and work” through marriage (Voyage In 6). The path to such a decision begins in

personal development, in which the protagonist is prepared for marriage through an

education. The development or “awakening,” which is not as linear as the male

Bildungsroman (11), occurs for the express purpose of passing into a new social sphere.

“One either marries, or, in one way or another, must leave social life,” either in the form of

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voluntary expulsion or death, as in the case of Rachel Vinrace (Brownstein 23). The latter

fate was far more common in a nineteenth century Bildungsroman (Stimpson 192).

Woolf’s use of a female protagonist forces her to contend with the restrictions of the

female Bildungsroman that Jane Austen’s narratives engaged. Such a novel developed

within a setting where a woman’s inheritance always indicated “her proper rank in the

marriage market,” but “special beauty and social charm” could increase her desirability

(Wheeler 26). Austen places her work in what can be considered “the woman’s sphere”

taken from the epistolary tradition. Charles Dickens, in comparison, set many novels in

motion, in journeys by railroad and coach (26). Though both were equally aware of social

and political changes, the contrast reveals the limits of their worlds as prescribed to them by

their gender (26). The limits are not only of an expected end, but of an entire range of

possible movements. The male coming of age story at the end of the nineteenth century

allowed the character to travel out of his milieu, breaking away from social convention and

his old society to create one of his own, culminating in his successful independence and new

livelihood. He may or may not get married in the end; such an ingredient is not necessary to

the recipe. A female coming of age story, however, did not allow the subject to break away

from her family quite so much. She may go traveling, but will do so chaperoned. Guided

and initiated by an elder character, as Rachel is by Helen Ambrose, St. John Hirst and

Terence Hewet, she breaks away from her own family and old milieu through marriage but is

folded into a new familial structure, following the ancient historical model of the Athenian

woman’s path from the rear rooms of her father’s household to the rear rooms of her

husband’s household, never to the outside, unless she lost her station as a lady. The cycle

Eliades 20

continued with her daughters and their female offspring just as Woolf continued with this

mold for her first novel.

The biggest conflict between Voyage and the Bildungsroman is that the content tries

to give proper attention to women’s rights, gender relations, gender inequality and gender

roles but within a structure meant to affirm concepts of progress and patriarchal structure.

The subversion of form, for example, schisms the work in the aftermath of Rachel’s death as

if Woolf could not bear to sacrifice her protagonist. From the beginning, Willoughby

Vinrace wishes for Rachel to be educated to aid him in his posturing for politicians of

Parliament, a “Tory hostess,” fitting with traditional gender roles (Woolf, Voyage 86).

Attempts to remove Rachel from this life by Helen, Rachel’s savior, educator and aunt occur

through nearly needing “to promise a complete course of instruction in the feminine graces”

(86). Any deviations form a standard female role must be done under the auspices of the

expected form. As long as Rachel appears to follow the model, she is allowed to escape.

This commentary mirrors the structural issues of Voyage, which also commented on the

unsuitability of the male structure on a closer level. When Rachel is introduced to Edward

Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by St. John Hirst, she is

not “able to grasp the meaning with her mind. ‘It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil

cloth,’ she hazarded. … ‘Ugly in body, repulsive in mind’” thought Hirst says Gibbon’s

work written in “‘the most perfect style…that’s ever been invented…Every sentence is

practically perfect…’” (201). Rachel’s interpretation of the book’s shape reveals the reaction

of the female to the male shape and subject. The volumes Woolf chose to use represent the

classical male education and his “tower,” from which Hirst, the insider, cannot see out of.

The sentences are “practically perfect” (201) to Hirst because they fit his “pace” and “stride”

Eliades 21

(Room 76). His education and background, afforded to him by his gender, allows him to find

the structure in line with his own, while Rachel cannot deal with those patterns because they

are not her own. The incident works within the dominant form to critique the male world.

Yet Woolf’s didacticism does not always run so smoothly. When Hewet is actively seen

writing a book on the sexes in his post-engagement phase, Woolf’s opinions come out of his

mouth. In pausing, he says to Rachel,

‘The respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for

men,’ he went on. ‘I believe we must have some sort of power over you that

we’re said to have over horses. They see us three times as big as we are or

they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll

ever do anything even when you have the vote. …It’ll take at least six

generations before you’re sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law-courts and

business offices. Consider what a bully the ordinary man is… (Voyage 212)

Woolf’s own beliefs on the male sentence via the authoritative narrative which calls for one

to “‘do something’” as she would later say, “‘take steps or write a check,’” a system she will

come to say is “imperfect” (qtd. in Friedman 77), come directly in the passage. She uses the

dialogue to tell and not to show the reader the inequality she wishes to fight against, that

which she outlines in “The Leaning Tower.” Yet the form of dialogue and the novel is not

that of the essay where opinion may be expressed. Dialogue, according to Woolf, set the

writer “in a different state of mind from that in which you describe… [the character]

indirectly” (Letters V 334). It is the site of the character’s genesis, as “all the great

Victorians, …Dickens, Trollope, to some extent Hardy all …created their characters through

dialogue,” according to Woolf (334). If the character is not his or her own voice but that of

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the author’s, the chance to create a character is lost. For there are things “that can’t be said

by the character himself” (334) such as direct opinion. The problem comes form a basis in a

materialism of the English novel which Woolf writes looks too much to the physical

elements or appearance of life rather than to the spiritual or “the flickering of that innermost

flame which flashes its myriad messages through the brain” (“Modern Novels” 34). The

materialism furthermore does not transcend the physical due to its reliance on the linear plot,

which concerns itself with finding the solutions to characters’ problems and mapping their

growth (Welty 26).

As much as Woolf is hampered by her attachment to the realist or materialist form,

she begins to try to capture the experiences and occurrences of life with that form in Voyage.

The storm depicted in Chapter Five, for example, is framed by the lines of the second

paragraph:

Even at tea the floor rose beneath their feet and pitched too low again, and at

dinner the ship seemed to groan and strain as though a lash were descending.

She who had been a broad-backed dray-horse, upon whose hind-quarters

pierrots might waltz, became a colt in the field. The plates slanted away from

the knives, and Mrs. Dalloway’s face blanched for a second as she helped

herself and saw the potatoes roll this way and that. Willoughby, of course,

extolled the virtues of his ship, and quoted what had been said of her by

experts and distinguished passengers, for he loved his own possessions.

(Woolf, Voyage 70)

The narration takes care to note its occupants and uses them as a projection of the outer

climate. Selective in its gaze, the narrative views the somersaults of the ship in the physical

Eliades 23

effects on the characters and objects. In the storm’s abatement, for example, “Wind and

space were banished; the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of men, which

had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to the old beliefs” (72). The storm gives

Woolf the perfect opportunity to concern herself not with the perspective or figures of the

characters in their plot-view, but as breathing people, not ventriloquist’s dolls but human

beings. The focus on the image, with “nothing that need not be there” (“‘Mrs Gaskell’” 341),

allows a shifting in the narrative gaze, an alternative view that could make way for the more

“tentative outlines of belief” (“Howell” 324). The whole of Chapter Twenty in fact allows

the gaze to run further, as Woolf takes advantage of dialogue in Terence and Rachel’s

encounter to leave out what is not useful in portraying male-female relations:

She repeated ‘I like it.’ She was waling fast, and

holding herself more erect than usual.

‘You like being with me?’ Terence asked.

‘Yes, with you,’ she replied.

He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have

fallen upon the world.

‘This is what I have felt ever since I knew you,’ he

replied. ‘We are happy together.’ He did not seem to be speaking, or she to

be hearing.

‘Very happy,’ she answered.

They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their

steps unconsciously quickened.

‘We love each other,’ Terence said.

Eliades 24

‘We love each other,’ she repeated.

The silence was then broken by their voices which

joined in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. Faster

and faster they walked; simultaneously they stopped, clasped each other in

their arms, then, releasing themselves, dropped to the earth. They sat side by

side. Sounds stood out from the background making a bridge across their

silence; they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a remote

world. (Voyage 271)

The passage does not note what Rachel or Terence are wearing, nor the expressions on their

faces but sound. Description only enters when necessary; Rachel becomes only a figure or a

reflection of Terence as the scene progresses. Even from the excerpts initiation, Rachel is

represented on the page as “she,” the universal female pronoun, rather than “Rachel,” the

individual female. As soon as she admits her feelings for Terence, she ceases to be a distinct

figure, disappearing into Terence himself with the pronoun “they.” Though Terence emerges

from the union intact, Rachel vanishes from the novel entirely with her death, revealing

Woolf’s views of the effects of the female role in the heterosexual romantic couple in

Victorian society on women. Under Woolf’s control, the sentences wind around the

characters without pretension or pedantry at this pivot and final ebbing of plot before the

crash, the takeover of illness and the second plot, the post-Edenic aftermath not portrayed in

the marriage plot which so willingly devours the female figure.

From the aftermath of the union, the narrative style changes. Though Woolf had

shifted from one character to the other in a distanced third person, chapter Twenty-five finds

her at times much closer to her characters. Rachel’s sickness, which was not attached to the

Eliades 25

projected path of the novel’s first four sections, comes as a movement outside of the plot,

enabling Woolf to narrate without depicting the motions required for the social interactions

that lead to marriage. She may instead portray the world through one character:

The glassy, cool, translucent wave was almost visible before her, curling up at

the end of the bed, and as it was refreshingly cool she tried to keep her mind

fixed upon it. Helen was here, and Helen was there all day long; sometimes

she said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was teatime; but by the

next day all landmarks were obliterated, and the outer world was so far away

that the different sounds, such as the sounds of people passing on the stairs,

and the sounds of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their

cause by a great effort of memory. (329-30)

Rachel’s illness comes in portrayals of impressions. Very slowly, she is removed from the

structures of the world through her illness. The meals which divide the day only exist when

Helen tells Rachel they occur and the movement of the people only makes sense when

Rachel’s memory supplies the reason for their steps. The structures are not natural. If they

were, Rachel would not strain to remember them, nor would she need to be told of them.

The structures are imposed and composed by her society, as much as gender, the marriage

plot and the male form are imposed constructs with value only within their own contexts.

Thus Voyage, once rid of the original structure, enables Woolf to get closer to her “spiritual”

view of the world (“Modern Novels” 34).

Though it can be said that The Voyage Out, Woolf’s “eerily conventional first novel”

(Brownstein 277), is disjointed due to negotiations between narrative forms, Woolf’s delving

into such forms in her first long work begins her battle with old assumptions and old forms.

Eliades 26

Rachel’s illness and death jettisons the original plot to begin to work in a new form that

engaged Woolf’s subject and personal view of the world more than the elder form which

assumed that all lives may be shown in its portrayal alone, a built-in assumption that could

not to mate with Woolf’s content.

Woolf began negotiating with the demands of linear form in “Phyllis and Rosamond”

(1906) through the narrative of authority. The distanced, omniscient and moralizing tone

works through an interfering authorial narrative. Woolf tries on that narrating voice in three

preambles before launching into the main story, much as Voyage did in its vague focus of the

first lines which eventually attach height and cloak to Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose. In “Phyllis,”

she writes, “In this very curious age, when we are beginning to require pictures of people,

their minds and their coats, a faithful outline, drawn with no skill but veracity, may possibly

have some value” (17). The line establishes authority through its inclusion of the reader in

the collective pronoun “we” which also assumes the reader “require[s] pictures of people,

their minds and their coats” (17). Simultaneously, the sentence adopts a self-consciousness

that undoes its authority to maintain modesty and social acceptance, mimicking the prefaces

by other women of the late nineteenth century, signaling a subjective narrator (Friedman

134). The opening sentence is a site for Woolf’s negotiations with form through the

narrative. Though the piece is united in the authoritative voice, the retracting phrase, “drawn

with no skill but veracity” (17), and other phrases in the story, come from Woolf’s

consciousness of her gender and the old female model she tries to follow, further discussed

within the story itself. The narrator continuously writes to justify her subject, noting that the

audience and narrator are to “investigate” the scene, that the girls “seem indigenous to the

drawing-room” and that they are “condemned to be what in the slang of the century is called

Eliades 27

‘the daughters at home’” (18). The attention is drawn so that the audience may “calculate the

values of those impressions” (18). The language becomes scientific to establish authority,

creating sentences and apologies that are not of Woolf’s making. Her narrative of

detachment delays the true beginning of the story until the end of the fifth paragraph, as the

characters are established. Only then does the omniscient narrator describe the situation

further:

You must be in a position to follow those young ladies home… You must be

by them when they wake next morning; and you must attend their progress

throughout the day. (18)

She demands that the reader listen through her use of the imperative “You must” (18) as

emphasized through its placement at the beginning of each clause. Her establishment of

authority as a female writer occurs through brandishing details and the totality of experience

on the narrative. As the narrator is the chosen viewpoint of the author, the details and

movement reveal that Woolf is not comfortable enough with the narration she has chosen to

tell her story (Friedman 137). She is negotiating with a female identity, much as she would

continue to do in Voyage. From the beginning, according to Rachel Bowlby, her female

identity forces her to take on a “phantom identity …an essence impossibly held within

quotation marks, of whom” writing is always trying to grasp (xviii-xix). This is the earliest

cohesive example of Woolf in realism’s form, one which limits the full effect of the

hopelessness of her protagonists’ situation and stiffens the portrayal. Both Woolf and her

characters, Phyllis and Rosamond, who were only “‘educated for marriage,’” rock back and

forth between forms they cannot fit in and those they long after. With the Hibbard sisters,

this is embodied in the content of the story as they enter the Bloomsbury home of the writer,

Eliades 28

Sylvia Tristram (22), social commentary which works very well within this structure, but

lacks the vitality needed for full effect. Woolf is allowed to gather near her characters as

narrator in dialogue, but that effect is also stilted, despite how “authentic” her portrayal of the

speech is. In the two full pages of the sisters’ dialogue, their opinions spur the story; there is

hope of movement, but as their situation does not change, the narration drags.

Woolf’s longer work, “The Journal of Mistress Martyn” (1906), works less off of a

single line of plot and more on a dual line. The form is split in half due to two distinct

narrators. Both are in the first person, but the former, Miss Rosamond Merridew, is an

omniscient character narrator and the latter, Mistress Joan Martyn, is a limited first person

narrator arising from a journal. Each represents a shift in Woolf’s narration, a “trying on” of

narrative distance and tone. Miss Merridew greets the reader:

My readers know perhaps, who I am. Therefore, although such a practice is

unusual and unnatural –for we know how modest writers are –I will not

hesitate to explain that I am Miss Rosamond Merridew, aged forty-five –my

frankness is consistent! –and that I have won considerable fame among my

profession for the researches I have made into the system of land tenure in

mediaeval England. (“Journal” 33)

Once again, Woolf sets up the narrator, but immediately narrows the site of narration through

the first person. Yet Miss Merridew’s giggles both knock down and set up her authority in

the phrase “for we know how modest writers are,” an almost conscious mockery of the

“modesty” of the female writer (33). Her narrative begins to feel like a secondary fabrication

when Joan Martyn begins narrating in her journal. “The state of times,” Joan starts, “which

my mother tells me, is less safe and less happy than when she was a girl, makes it necessary

Eliades 29

for us to keep much within our own lands” (45). Her introduction does not give an

immediate historical context but launches the reader into her concerns. Her narrative is

written for itself and thus imbues its own authority on its speech, without concern for “the

critics …[who] threaten… with two rods” that Miss Merridew must be conscious of due to

her position as a female academic (35). Since Joan’s narrative does not shrink due to a

potential audience, it allows Woolf to get closer to the thoughts of her character, more vital

than that of Miss Merridew, who wraps around the journal and does not return when the

journal is finished. Miss Merridew’s final absence signals that though she was set up the

authoritative framework guiding the reader to the journal, her authoritative narration is not

valued above the limited narration. In fact, since the length of the journal exceeds the frame

narrative, one might say that Woolf valued the former more because of its proximity.

Though she took on the distant, moralizing and omnipotent narrative to assure the reader that

despite trauma possibly experienced during the story, the conclusion will reaffirm the life and

social cycle of their society.

More importantly, the structure of “Journal” anticipates Voyage. Since Joan’s

narrative ends with marriage, the end for the heroine of the Bildungsroman, she represents

the desire and issues Woolf went at in her novel in a smaller scope. Moreover, the outer shell

of Miss Merridew’s narrative imposed onto Joan’s more life-like journal reveals that the dead

figure is more alive than her discoverer, blocked by her own flesh and circumstance but also

by narrative convention. Joan makes no excuses for her narrative, she proudly awaits an

audience. As Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa, “the truth is we are too intimate for letter

writing; style dissolves as though in a furnace; all the blood and bones come through; now, to

write well there should be a perfect balance” (Letters I 343). An established form did not

Eliades 30

help Woolf or her narrators; she needed that new form to work, to give balance. What she

began to work with in “Journal” in narrative voice and structure passed on to Voyage and her

future novel attempts.

Woolf’s negotiations with form and narrative in The Voyage Out and her early stories

reveal her neophyte issues of traversing the accepted role of female authority in narrative and

that of patriarchal authority and its established forms. As Woolf pushes through adopted

paths and narratives, she begins to work through the “volume in sleek, yellow calf, which had

a directly sedative effect” (Woolf, Night 104), into a more engaging, more flexible and

balanced narrative of shifting polyphony encountered in her next novel attempt, Night and

Day.

Eliades 31

Continuing Education

When Woolf wrote Night and Day from 1916 to 1918, she found that the effect of her

writing was “complicated by the form which must sit too tight, … perhaps …too tight” in

Night and Day “as it was too loose in The Voyage Out” (Woolf, Letters II 400). The new

novel rocked between Victorian and Modernist forms in greater intensity than Voyage,

compressing the three-volume Victorian novel into three movements swung by location, a

city-country-city formation which shapes the narrative arcs. Some critics refer to this

structure as circular and align it with a comic, operatic form or see it as purely fantastical

(Marcus 40, 18). Woolf uses this structure, though, due to the work’s expansiveness. She

thought that “a novelist …is bound to build up his structure with much very perishable

material, which begins by lending it reality, and ends by cumbering its form” (Woolf,

“Charlotte Brontë” 27). The material held within her narrative form owed itself to her form

and she continued “thinking of different ways to manage… scenes; conceiving endless

possibilities;” to take “life as…an immense opaque block of material” and express it in “its

equivalent of language” as she wrote Night and Day (Diary I 214). She was trying to depict

a body of life on the scale of the material held in The Voyage Out, but wanted to manage it

closer so as to capture life more accurately through attention to the structural unit of the

chapter, multiple protagonists and subversions of established narrative techniques.

The map of Night and Day places the arcs in different locations to call upon the

tradition of place to dictate tone and to manage each character, social concerns and the fall

Eliades 32

and completion of the chapter within the arc. She became more attuned to the mechanics of

the unit of the chapter, not only as a break of space, physically and temporally, but also as an

artificial quantifier of human experience into separate sections. Her attention to the chapter

as a building block led her to the greater narrative arc, but also to the chapter arcs, a search

“to know what it is that gives the period to the clause, that ends the ‘fiddling’ at some point”

(Lohafer 25).

On several occasions, Woolf’s chapter endings, or closings as they would be better

termed, are abrupt. Her “breath-span” or maintenance of the narrative seems to be short.

Chapter Two, for example, ends “Katherine Hilbery, he thought, would condemn it off-hand”

(35), after riding entirely in Ralph Denham’s mind from the beginning of his exit out of the

Hilbery residence through his journey home. Since the narrative so quickly shuts with

mention of Katherine, it is allowed to move immediately into discussing the genealogical

history of her family in the following chapter. The narration shifts from a close third person

to a distanced and omnipotent third person after the break. Likewise, Chapter Four ends:

“She left with Rodney” (63), which seems determined to detach from Ralph not to give a

genealogy but to firm the narrative after many shifts to a close third person narration for

several characters in Mary Datchett’s space. Both chapters and their endings cut action to

move into the next projected sections. The practice is a new means of organizing her

narrative, one which kept with the conventional unit of the chapter and arc, within which

Woolf also began to work through line breaks to change scene without breaking the sequence

(Room 81). Thrice Woolf employs the line break: first to introduce the letter that confirms

Katherine’s engagement to Rodney (Night 142), then to allow Aunt Cecilia to perform the act

of gossip that propels the conclusion just after Katherine explains her plan for Rodney and

Eliades 33

Cassandra to Cassandra (404) and finally to re-introduce Ralph into the plot after his exile

from the Hilbery residence and the novel’s world (485). In each there is an overcoming of

space and time in a way that is possible with the chapter, but not possible in those particular

spaces. Though Woolf’s line breaks are uneven, they serve to allow a transcendence of space

in a way that chapters do not, eliminating the projected need for narrative arabesques or

abrupt endings. Her breaks begin to allow her to have a more elegant and subtle handling of

an otherwise “clumsy & half extinct monster” (Letters III 391). But these line breaks do not

come frequently as Woolf is still working in the nineteenth century form. “Strings” of her

hand are still visible despite her new use of the chapter and arc units as she maneuvers

Cassandra Otway into the plot. Cassandra’s existence allows for two untraditional ends to

occur: Katherine’s pairing with Ralph without marriage and Mary’s life alone. Cassandra

acts as a foil and appeasement, so she must be introduced without merely appearing in the

last portion of the book to marry Rodney and allow the other characters to realize their

unconventional ends. For this to happen, Woolf mentions Cassandra’s family as early as

Chapter One, she frames Cassandra’s world in Chapter Twenty-six and places the Otway

family within that world in Chapter Fifteen. Each mention of her name or patronymic

motions her closer to the main action of the novel. By the last section, Cassandra enters

Rodney’s consciousness (280) through her relationship to Katherine herself until the final

pairings can be made by the goddess-like hands of Mrs. Hilbery, whose carriage ride with

Ralph conveniently passes Rodney and Cassandra in the chapter just next to the last. The

maneuvers bring attention to the novelist and her structure, removing the reader from the

reality created by the novel. Additionally, Woolf still negotiates with the use of dialogue yet

Eliades 34

tries to frame internal narration to capture character motivation, as seen when Katherine first

meets Ralph:

Here she stopped for a moment, wondering why it was that Mr. Denham said

nothing. Her feeling that he was antagonistic to her, which had lapsed while

she thought of her family possessions, returned so keenly that she stopped in

the middle of her catalog and looked at him. (16)

The inclusion of “feeling,” the sense of Ralph’s attitude toward Katherine, tries to give

access to the emotional basis of the situation and overcome the barrier of the body to move

along the piece and allow the writer to move the plot with those tones. Yet the method of

exposition, necessary to the realist novel which Woolf may be mocking in that passage, is

among what marks the form as incongruous to her aim and cause.

However, at the end of the novel, Woolf depicts Mary’s figure alone to convey her

own relationship and conclusion without accessing how Mary “feels” through the omniscient

narrator. She writes that Ralph “had waited some time before a figure detached itself from a

doorway and came across the road, slowly and reluctantly, to where she stood” (506). The

method is impressionistic. There is no “Mary” present as a voice or eyes, ears and nose but

as a shape, her representation lingering at the novel’s edge. The use of the technique trains

the reader to approach writing like music, a constant process of interpretation to render life in

its truest state. This edge use where Woolf works “at the twilight and on the thresholds of

lighted rooms and darkened streets” (Marcus 23), signals the beginnings of a new form.

As the form of Voyage, comments on its culture and emerging art forms with the

texture and movement of a realist novel, so too does Night and Day. Particularly, this novel

employs the Bildungsroman for its plot but has several characters negotiating the path to self-

Eliades 35

realization against the limits of gender and prescribed endings. Like the “fifty thousand

young men” seeking their fortune in that narrative (Moretti 147), Katherine is positioned as

one of many young women in London, “in common with many other young ladies of her

class …pouring out tea” for her mother’s afternoon gathering (Woolf, Night 9). The

universality of the occasion and the occurrence is implied in the first sentence, as the novel

begins with the day, time and month, “a Sunday evening in October,” and moves to grouping

a certain type of woman on a leisure day before moving very specifically to one woman on

whom the narrative will focus. The use of the Bildungsroman technique in the narratives of

Katherine, Ralph and Mary allows Night and Day to work through a narrative voice similar

to that of Voyage, indicating Woolf’s “impulse to retain the kind of voice …associated with

the realist novel of the nineteenth century” (Lanser 113). That type of voice is necessary in

navigating the world of “Phyllis and Rosamond” in which the novel is set, marked by a large

frame and scale negotiable with an omniscient and authoritative narrator.

Woolf’s management of this “totalizing” scope allows her to make a “broad outline”

without erasing “crucial realities of lived experience,” already tinkering with the “systemic

representation of social life” (Anderson 4, 45) through engaging the distance as a membrane.

Unlike in Mrs. Dalloway, the flow from character to character is not used to facilitate an

entire jump from head to head but to give a larger sense of the protagonist’s world,

broadening what is possible, making anything likely. Any meeting and any situation may

occur through Woolf’s narrative movement in which she begins to avoid presenting “a shop

keepers view of literature; …with the rudiments, covered over with fat & prosperity & the

desire for hideous Empire furniture” (Woolf, Diary IV 16). She criticizes excess which she

tries to pare down in the opening scene through controlling her narrative frame:

Eliades 36

A single glance was enough to show that Mrs. Hilbery was so rich in the gifts

which make tea-parties of elderly distinguished people successful, that she

scarcely needed any help from her daughter, provided that the tiresome

business of teacups and bread and butter was discharged for her. (Night 9)

The first and second clauses of this sentence border the practice of omniscience, flicking off

what occurs in the scene. The end sets up a spreading of the narrator as omniscient, as the

tea scene was established without need for a specific view, which also allows Woolf to use

the city and its meandering scope to let her characters and narrative likewise meander,

reflecting the city novel tradition Charles Dickens most uses, an act that infringes upon male

pathways as much as it enforces them. Her reliance on a strong sense of place, implicit in the

realist novel and on the contrast between city and country action enables action.

Night and Day’s representation of outposts of action plays upon the external as

barometer of internal climate and new modes in scene changes. Different codes and symbols

are projected in each outpost’s identity, working on an awareness of social class. The

outposts include the Hilbery residence in Chelsea, the Denham residence in Highgate, Mary’s

apartment, Rodney’s apartment, the Strand, the Suffragette office, Kew Gardens in London

and the Otway residence as well as the Datchett home in the country. Overall, London serves

as the most important site for the workings of the characters for its many possibilities and

transfer points between its center, the Hilbery home and the many streets that enable

character contact. The locations emphasize social stratification along the Embankment and

the streets which sit between the established homes, each mini-sites of social class and the

resulting gender codes. The symbolism of place engages the use of “signs” by the novelist to

convey the intricate change of inner action associated with each place. The Hilbery house, as

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noted before, is an established home of the old order. There are distinct zones within the

house, such as the servants’ room downstairs, the dining room and Katherine’s room, each

with their own connotations. In contrast, there is Mary’s flat. Without multiple stories,

relatives or servants, Mary’s home is an equalizing haven, representing the new.

Likewise Woolf draws attention to the conventions of action in a novel, noting a time

in which Katherine forgets to pour tea while holding out her cup, which “because they had

glanced, [made] her position …impossible. If one forgot to pour out a cup of tea, they rushed

to the conclusion that she was engaged to Ralph Denham” (438). Motion or action was tied

to a specific reading within the realist tradition as Katherine’ status is slotted, regardless of

actual validity. The standard renders the novel “capable of being read” (“Re-reading Novels”

342), giving the reader what is expected to move the plot. Katherine’s irritation with the

symbols reveals Woolf’s issues with convention as a means of reading. The convention

formed a tyranny of symbols that Woolf learned to work with in Night and Day’s symbol-

layered structure, writing which “taught certain elements of composition” (Letters IV 231),

“what to leave out: by putting it all in” (Letters VI 216), the entire novel a training ground

for concision. Her training is not unlike George Meredith’s writing in The Egoist in which

the protagonist

…doted on her cheek, her ear, and the softly dusky nape of her neck where

this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running truant

from the comb and the knot-curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets,

wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps – waved or fell,

waved over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form

of small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading,

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cunninger than long round locks of gold to trick the heart. (qtd. in Wheeler

165)

The passage stretches eight lines as if afraid of missing some light particle of Clara

Middleton’s hair, carried on by commas, adjectives and conjunctions to re-enforce its own

significance. The attention to appearance reveals little of the inner self save the interest of

one figure in another, the tresses taking over consciousness without connection, the

character’s gaze possessing the image of Clara without penetrating her character, likening her

to a series of animals hunted and ruled over by man. The coding of her figure in the

inclusion of that much detail does not give way to new readings.

Woolf’s “exercise in the conventional style” (Letters IV 231) allowed her to step into

those conventions and gazes built in the male narrative and begin bending them toward her

own conceptions and purposes, a necessary re-shaping which permitted her to criticize

binding conventions, her own voice slipping onto the page. Her focus moved to technique

and imagery to explore and mock conventions, placing the drawing of meaning from her

presentation of a “tense interplay of multiple plots, making … [the novel] the basis of self-

conscious formal experimentation” (Voyage In 17). By the third paragraph of Night and

Day, she indicates that her narrative will not solely trail a single character as the focus moves

from Katherine to Ralph Denham. Though the first sentence the novel seemed to indicate

Katherine would be the only protagonist, the shift shows that the novel holds at least one, if

not more characters of equal importance in the narrative’s thrust.

The narrative moves according to the lives of its five central figures. Katherine

Hilbery, Ralph Denham, Mary Datchett, William Rodney and Cassandra Otway and their

romantic intentions displace the traditional omniscient narrator, proposing that the world is

Eliades 39

driven by the actions and consciousnesses of many. Her departure from monomania as locus

and central causation is not new, but the change yields narrative freedom. Dorothy

Richardson, for example, began to move away from a focalized authoritative narrative in

1915 with her twelve volume work, Pilgrimage, in the first use of the “stream of

consciousness” technique in English literature, a technique Woolf would later use in her own

way. Though Richardson’s use of the method ran much closer to her subjects than Woolf’s

eventual and initial uses, her work represented a shift into subverting the male narrative

tradition (Lanser 106 and 102). As Woolf said, “to go to … men [such as H. G. Wells,

Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, “the most prominent and successful novelists in the

year 1910”] and ask them to teach you how to create characters that are real is precisely like

going to a bootmaker and asking him to teach you how to make a watch” (“Mr Bennet” 76).

The exercise is pointless: their forms, however well executed, will not work for Woolf as

they are so unlike. Thus she uses their patterns “only to disrupt them or reveal their

significance” (Abel 161) in the narrative interpretation of character and setting.

Though Woolf largely employed the outposts of residence to stake connotations of

character’s moods, potential actions and social stratifications, she also used it to mark the

effects of setting on the plot. While in the country, the plot rests, drops off into a steady

holiday mood, whereas in the city, the plot mimics the constant movement of its characters,

the energy the characters dash around with. The motion works alongside an awareness of the

artifice of setting and perhaps as much as an awareness of or appearance of the unreality of

real settings, like “the City of London, which wore, at this moment, the appearance of a town

cut out of gray-blue cardboard, and pasted flat against the sky, which was of a deeper blue”

(Woolf, Night 72). The view momentarily reduces the city so that it is not large but rather

Eliades 40

small, capable of being held by any individual. Simultaneously, Woolf shows the city with

its uncontrolled elements. Its effect is best captured in a walk of Katherine’s, in which

The great torrent of vans and carts was sweeping down Kingsway; pedestrians

were streaming in two currents along the pavements… The deep roar filled

her ears; the changing tumult had the inexpressible fascination of varied life

pouring ceaselessly with a purpose which, as she looked, seemed to her,

somehow, the normal purpose to which life is framed; its complete

indifference to the individuals, whom it swallowed up and rolled onwards,

filled her with at least a temporary exaltation. The blend of daylight and of

lamplight made her an invisible spectator, just as it gave people who passed

her a semi-transparent quality, and left the faces pale ivory ovals in which the

eyes alone were dark. They tended the enormous rush of the current –the

great flow, the deep stream, the unquenchable tide. She stood unobserved and

absorbed, glorying openly in the rapture that had run subterraneously all day.

(439)

Though the action is impersonal and detailed, it is not arbitrarily so. The city is a framework,

as much as art and its methods serve as a framework and legitimate expression of emotion.

The faces of people are not organized into sexes, occupations or classes but as “Pale ivory

ovals” marked only by eyes (439). Rather than describing all of the characters’ backgrounds

and placements, which would require Woolf “to manufacture a three-volume novel” about a

character such as Mrs Brown of “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” about her offspring, her

occupation, her entire past, which appears to be among “the most dreary, irrelevant and

humbugging affairs in the world” (Woolf 82), she begins to work through setting as canvas.

Eliades 41

Objects are no longer materials just implications of her characters’ occupations, pasts and

moods. As Mary gazes at the Elgin marbles, for example, the “shapes of stone” seemed to

make her “life at once become solemn and beautiful…. The presence of this immense and

enduring beauty made her almost alarmingly conscious of her desire” (82). Her life is

transformed and transfigured through art, captured by its encasement. The outer conjures the

inner, as impressionism “represented one thing at a given moment in time, a effect of light

and colour” created by “the artist’s eye and the sensuous efficiency of his brushstrokes,

knitting their pattern swiftly across the canvas” (Hughes 113). Mary’s mood transformed by

the stone represents Woolf trying to approach Meredith’s depiction of a tea party, where “he

will begin by destroying everything which it is easy to recognize a tea party –chairs, tables,

cups, and the rest; he will represent the scene merely by a ring on a finger and a plume

passing the window” (Woolf, “Re-reading” 274). Woolf’s play with this technique bestows

motion in her sentences. Early in the novel, Katherine’s mind playfully “leapt over the little

barrier of the day” (Night 9), depicting thought as a transcendent and flightful animal given

to overcoming solid objects. Later, as servants “had brushed away sixty years or so with the

first flick of their damp dusters” (428), time is imagined in layers, as past and present at once

even though the real image is the servants cleaning the house. With its “first flick” the

sentence moves around the reader like a breath of steam from a tea cup, light but with the tips

of scent reaching the nostrils, indicating the taste of the rest of the brew in a molecule,

conveyable only through the workings of a bare sentence.

The representation of much in little is part of a new current of the novel, which also

moves via a play on color. While Woolf engages in the “signs” through associating certain

colors with certain characters as used in the realist novel to guide the reader, functioning as

Eliades 42

leitmotifs of opera in a work in association with one setting, personage or theme to indicate

importance, character or eventual fate, she also inverts that standard. Katherine’s yellow, for

example, is associated with neither male nor female. While she enjoys mathematics and is

not particularly feminine, she must write biography. Though yellow is seen in “the old

yellow-tinted lace for ornament” and her yellow scarf (13, 82), it is also used with Rodney,

removing “light yellow gloves and …slapping his knees with them” (172) to strike the reader

as feminine and soft. Yet the dominant mention of yellow conjures the character of

Katherine, who is seen by Ralph

not …in the body; he seemed curiously to see her as a shape of light, the light

itself; he seemed, simplified and exhausted as he was, to be like one of those

lost birds fascinated by the lighthouse and held to the glass by the splendor of

the blaze. (395)

The narrative gaze through Ralph looks at Katherine in relation to her parts, not as the parts

head, shoulder or neck but as the parts of shadow and light, blur and association with objects

and creatures far removed from that scene itself. He sees her as “a shape of light” which is

frequently yellow. The imagery does for the novel what language does for the human being,

making visible non-present objects or ideas. Rodney’s red, for example, the symbol of

passion, is contrary to his temperament. He becomes flustered and passive rather than

enraged and active. The color is employed ironically. Lastly, Mary’s multi-colors evidence

her position as a character of the new. She cannot be defined in one role but remains flexible

and undefined through the end in which her future is left open. She does not marry, does not

become folded into a new family but stands in the frame of a door, a “figure” rather than eyes

Eliades 43

or lips or skirt-covered leg. The use of color as symbol makes up the fabric of the novel in a

way that places it within the realist tradition even as that tradition is subverted.

Woolf’s other uses of the artistic to break conventional structure are reinforced

through the characters and the events themselves. For instance, when Mr. Hilbery discovers

the unusual love plot his daughter and niece have involved themselves in, he states,

“Civilization had been very profoundly and unpleasantly overthrown that evening… His

house was in a state of revolution…his meals would be poisoned for days to come” (477).

Woolf’s depiction of Hilbery’s reaction directly states how he feels with a tickle of laughter.

The narrative is on the edge of omnipotence. It curls around Hilbery, lets the reader hear

Hilbery pacing about as he turns his thoughts and give access to his character through

phrasing which is channeled through the narrative. Though Woolf is battling the

authoritative narrative, its “rules” allow Woolf to portray Hilbery’s thoughts, “confer[ing]

dignity and order upon their subject; they admit her to a place in civilized society; they prove

that she is worthy of consideration” (Woolf qtd. in Bowlby xxx). The very system she is

demolishing enables her own commentary, allows her to show the plotting of the young

while engaging the reaction of the old through omniscience, which also enables her to

comment on the state of literature. For example,

The Hilberys subscribed to a library, which delivered books on Tuesdays and

Fridays, and Katherine did her best to interest her parents in the works of

living and highly respectable authors; but Mrs. Hilbery was perturbed by the

very look of the light, gold-wreathed volumes, and would make little faces as

if she tasted something bitter as the reading went on; while Mr. Hilbery would

treat the moderns with a curious elaborate banter such as one might apply to

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the antics of a promising child. So this evening, after five pages or so of one

of these masters, Mrs. Hilbery protested that it was all too clever and cheap

and nasty for words.

‘Please, Katherine, read us something real.’

Katherine had to go to the bookcase and choose a portly volume in

sleek, yellow calf, which had directly a sedative effect upon both her parents.

But the delivery of the evening post broke in upon periods of Henry Fielding,

and Katharine found that her letters needed all her attention. (Night 104)

The passage evokes the volumes in Rachel’s education but also Cassandra’s education by

Rodney with Lord Macaulay’s History of England, a huge volume of a “dull red color”

(429), red invoked again as not passion but tradition. The passage and examples above tip to

Woolf’s literary lineage, background and criticism of the works through the adjectives

“portly,” “dark, yellow calf” and “sedative” (104), displaying the effects of their length

though their appearance. Though the works are esteemed, the preference of the elder

generation for such polished-looking but large writings instead of the “light gold-wreathed

volumes” by contemporary authors remarks on the resistance to the novel without large

frames. Likewise, the techniques of the elder authors themselves and their penchant for

unnecessary detail for commentary are seen through the figure of the novelist, Mr. Fortescue,

for example. In the middle of Mrs. Hilbery’s tea party, his narration seems ironic:

‘In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katherine decidedly hits the

mark,’ he said, and lying back in his chair….he depicted, first the horrors of

the streets of Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts

of the town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live, and

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then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to the more

strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit her, and how her

appearance would change by degrees, and how she would fly to London, and

how Katherine would have to lead her about, as one leads an eager dog on a

chain, past rows of clamorous butchers’ shops, poor dear creature. (11-2)

He accuses Katherine of exaggeration, but then allows his imagination to embellish the

space, all from one off-hand comment of Katherine’s on the lack of conversation partners in

Manchester, which marks how the realist author, represented in the speaker, is prone to

exaggeration himself, creating “rounded structure[s] of words” (12), one of Woolf’s many

acidic statements on that style. The tendency towards detail was a criticism of the female

writer as the male writer loomed over the female author. There is something of a man’s

manner or writing, Woolf seems to claim, that wants to make detail relevant if only to

capture everything. Yet wrapped in his way of declaring “football and sport… ‘important’;

the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial,’” (Room 73-4), the emphasis is placed

not in all objects, but those valued by the male narrative gaze. The capture of sport players’

blurs do not seem to require detail, but the clothing, objects which function without motion

may be more readily scrutinized. A slight irregularity in a seam can be the difference

between a well-made garment and rubbish, whereas a slight fumble in a game of American

football will not matter if the carrier runs into the end zone untouched. The male writer

Woolf portrays seems to forget the necessity of detail as soon as it leaves the areas he is used

to categorizing.

Mary is later accused by Ralph of the “crime of detail” which makes the great writer.

The ability to make much of detail, to be aware of the ramifications of each word upon the

Eliades 46

next and the proper or unusual relations invoked in an entire sentence by the alteration or

inclusion of a word, should be necessary to writing and even to life. Mary, however, as

symbol of the female writer battling against the world and even herself, faces criticism and

interruption. Both make her “smooth… down the sheet of blotting-paper over the

manuscript” (Woolf, Night 268), like Woolf’s imagining of Austen, who wrote

in the common sitting room…. ‘careful that her occupation should not be

suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party,

…’ hid[ing] her manuscripts or cover[ing]… them with a piece of blotting

paper. (Room 66-7, James Edward Austen-Leigh qtd.)

Though Mary has her own space in London, separate from her family, she is still prone to

interruptions, self-consciousness and the difficulties of language as it is constructed. Ralph

tells her that “she couldn’t write English” (267), a direct comment on the unsuitability of

men’s language and form, which is accepted to be “English,” for the female writer, as well as

his other comment that she has “the feminine habit of making too much of details” (133) and

thus dwells in the significance of what makes up an object or even a word in all of its

nuances. In the midst of her difficulties,

She half held a vision; the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished she had a

pencil and a piece of paper to help her to give a form to this conception which

composed itself as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. But if she

talked to any one, the conception might escape her. Her vision seemed to lay

out the lines of her life until death in a way which satisfied her sense of

harmony. (Night 259-60)

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Her writing is a means of solidification, produced by wandering in London, this strong sense

of place that she must capture in words, in the intangible, that ultimate challenge faced by the

writer herself. So many interruptions and barriers sat in the female writer’s way, Woolf’s

text says in its examples and heft. The shape and pace of the vision was still unrealized.

Woolf’s continued work with the structure of the novel of authority and its three-

arced narrative in Night and Day gave her another turn at fitting her writing into those

structures. Yet, she found that form “too tight” as she negotiated with the conventional uses

of color, character and setting in a layered effort to depicting life in its enormity (Letters II

400; Diary I 214). These negotiations would lead to further work to subvert the form and

sentence, but in shorter stretches as she entered the next phase of her writing, marked by

experimentation built on elements of fiction already moved by Night and Day.

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Experimenter

After writing Night and Day, Woolf began drafting Jacob’s Room and many short

stories, entering the most changeling part of her path to master form. In her work, she came

to “see immense possibilities in the form …[she] hit upon more or less by chance” seeking a

shape “pliant & rich enough to provide a wall” for her narrative (Woolf, Diary II 14). She

came to believe that fiction did not have a singular correct form, content or means of

expression. “‘The proper stuff’ of fiction does not exist;” she wrote, “everything is the

proper stuff of fiction; whatever one honestly thinks, whatever one honestly feels” (Woolf,

“Modern Novels” 36). Playing with fiction allows for its future to remain relevant and

pliable, “perpetually renewed” (36), extending not only to its content, but also to the forms.

Woolf began to play with fiction’s forms and content in short stories during two distinct

periods. The first stretched from 1917 to 1920 beginning with “The Mark on the Wall,”

making use of a writing impressionism which focused on color, narrative shifts and

detachments as well as polyphony to construct social commentary. Woolf’s second short

story period began in 1921 near the completion of Jacob’s Room and lasted until just before

the conception of Mrs. Dalloway in 1922. The latter period turned the focus on color into

one on sound as well to gradually shatter the absolute narrative and displace character and

plot, finally ridding Woolf of the tyranny of the authoritative narrative.

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Woolf created her stories from sketches she filed away until she needed a rest from

working on a novel (Leonard Woolf qtd. in Beer 329). Her labor on the short stories

concentrated on maintaining unity, the hallmark of the short form. Unlike the novel, which

required an endurance of effort which seemed to slip from her, Woolf found the shorts to be

easier to work with. “Novels,” she wrote, “are frightfully clumsy and overpowering” (Woolf

qtd. in Shaw 22). She wished to “get hold of them,” but “the creative power which bubbles

so pleasantly on beginning …quiets down after a time, & one gets on more steadily” (22;

Diary II 35). Yet she kept writing due to “the sense of an impending shape” (35) which

bound her text. Since the novel is by definition longer than the short story, Woolf found the

maintenance of such a shape difficult. In the short story, however, she was able to sketch

narrative for a brief span, creating a flicker to capture one feeling or a singular instance that

may act as a prism for larger ideas and situations as she had begun to do in Night and Day.

The morphic nature of the short work also allowed any tale to be told, whether of first love or

death, driven with plot or without it (Lohafer 7), but the length demands intensity, requiring

the same attention to language that a poem calls for: Every word is important, none may be

wasted else the writer risks losing momentum and valuable page space by meandering

elements not important to the text or “falsify life as it feels, the inner life, and character” as

the realists did (Brownstein 278). Furthermore, Woolf wanted fiction to reach a higher level

of acuteness to life. She even renamed the writer “an artist who sits with a sheet of paper in

front of him trying to copy what he sees” without the still models afforded to painters or

illustrators (Woolf, “Leaning” 159).

As Woolf began the first period of short story experiments, she was well into working

on Night and Day. “The Mark on the Wall” published in July of 1917 by the Hogarth Press

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(Dick 240), however, was an escape from the demands of the larger work. The tone and

shape of “Mark” is like that of an essay, which is unsurprising considering Woolf’s training

as a biographer and essayist and the flexibility of that form. The essay is known for its

“openness to any subject at all [which] brings it close to the capaciousness and adaptability

associated with the novel” (Bowlby xii). The mutability of the essay and its name literally

binds it to “trials or attempts at new kinds of style” (xii) and its detached narrative allows

great motion. “Mark” begins, “Perhaps it was the middle of January in the middle of the

present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is

necessary to remember what one saw” (Woolf, “Mark” 78). Though the narrator has a

personality revealed through the phrasing shown in the close first-person narration, he or she

is also distant from the object in view, not reporting on the emotion felt at that time or

engaging with it, which is what Woolf believes creates a well-written essay: a “blend of

detachment & individuality” (Shaw 227). The narrator also barely appears in body

throughout the story; the reader never views his or her face and does not get definite

indications of gender. The physical is only revealed in the smoking of a cigarette and the

taking of tea. This detached, disembodied narrator allows Woolf to follow the thoughts that

emerge from viewing the mark, which propels the entire story, the pondering which gives the

story its shape. “Mark” moves according to its narrator’s turns of mind in multiple ways, as

it says, “for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number” (Woolf,

“Mark” 79). The focus on perception follows the mark as a possible nail hole, dry leaf,

protruding object and nail. Resulting thoughts from those changes in perception allow the

distracted mind to make associations beyond the physical object. Take for example Woolf’s

third turn at the mark:

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In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall.

Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible

shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would,

at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like

those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or

camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like

most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the

bones stretched beneath the turf.… There must be some book about it. (80)

Woolf begins the narrative so that the reader is located in the narrator’s physical space before

she lets the sentence follow the conjectured physical space and leap into the space beyond

her, imagined space which gives way to thoughts that are fulcrums for new and seemingly

unrelated thoughts shown through the ellipses. The development of these turns eventually

leads to the narrative transfers that shape the work. The narratory movement is wide and

rambling to hold in as many impressions as possible, to try to catch the world in a short span

but with shorter strokes, those that will enable movement. For Woolf senses that there is

much to be included in a story, much that she wishes to include as

there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in

bedrooms, in ships, on the pavements, living rooms, where men and women

sit after tea, smoking cigarettes.… I should like to take each one separately –

but something is getting in the way. …Where was I? What has it all been

about? …I can’t remember a thing. Everything’s moving, falling, slipping,

vanishing…There is a vast upheaval of matter. (83)

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The narrator constantly slips from place to place, attention point to attention point because

she is trying to follow thought and life which do not stay still. Since the writer is an artist

who must capture movement (“Leaning” 159), Woolf’s essay form brush lets her weave “a

spell with the first word” which allows the reader “to wake, refreshed, with its last”

(“Modern Essay” 40). The shape is made through the narrative starting in a camera haze that

rapidly focuses in three sentences. The reader sees “the mark on the wall” at the end of the

first sentence and is given a driving point not based in what Norman Friedman defines as a

plot of circumstance, character or thought, a series of “incidents… [this] gives rise to, plus

the moving powers of this action” (75) but in the turning of thought itself, a mystery of

images and possible realities that turns into a solid reality: a snail, once the narrator is

compelled to see it in this way due to an outer character. In the end, her impressionism, once

knocked away by dialogue, congeals. The narrator is jolted to the present, to the body of her

self and her companion. “’All the same,” the disembodied voice says, “I don’t see why we

should have a snail on our wall.’ Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail” the narrator says,

closing the narration (Woolf, “Mark” 83). Once the item has been defined by the dialogue, it

can no longer change. The impressionism Woolf employs to grab at the human experience

finally holds life still if only for the moments captured on the page.

Woolf knew she was working against formal depictions of life and commonly-held

literary assumptions as seen in realist novels. If the novelist, she wrote,

cut adrift from the eternal tea-table and the plausible and preposterous

formulas which are supposed to represent the whole of our human

adventure…the story might wobble; the plot might crumble; ruin might seize

Eliades 53

upon characters. The novel in short might become a work of art. (Woolf,

“Art of Fiction” 125)

She envisioned a fully aesthetic story that might contain life not through “preposterous

formulas” which ape all experiences (125), but one that captures it without plot. She begins

exploring the story as a work of art in “Kew Gardens” (August 1917), employing the

techniques used in visual art as an alternative presentation of reality. Primarily, she begins to

use color, not as symbol but as fulcrum, tone-maker and narration-enabler, freeing it from

traditional interpretation. Objects serve as fulcrums of character focus, allowing Woolf to

jump from person to person, group to group in Kew. The shifts are what give shape to the

story. The narration begins

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks

spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and

unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour

raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat

emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end.

The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and

when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed over the other,

staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate

colour. (Woolf, “Kew” 84, emphasis mine)

The dense layering of color emphasizes the visual element of experience designed to give “an

impressionistic effect” of sensory information as perceived by Woolf while simultaneously

presenting the process by which this information assembles itself into distinctive shapes and

patterns (Shaw 13). Focusing on color rather than character personalities and histories

Eliades 54

destabilizes the notion of the story as plot- and character-centric. The shapes surrounding the

human figures and not the figures themselves are the prime focus of “Kew.” But though

Woolf destabilizes the plot and character in the story, she does so to get closer to characters,

who are never fully absent from the narrative. They are actually the aim of the shifting focus

directed by passing over the flower bed, above which:

the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women

who walk in Kew Gardens in July.

The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed

with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue

butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. (84)

The focus may seem detached and distracted by the butterflies, which are given more detail

than the men and women, but Woolf gives the men and women more attention through her

indirect approach. The men and women at first merely “walk.” The verb is neutral, it says

very little. Then they “straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement.”

“Straggled” is certainly more interesting than “walk,” giving texture and specific motion to

the figures. The final detail is added when she writes that they were like “the white and blue

butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights.” Now the reader sees the men and women

with blue suits, white dresses, or with white suits, blue dresses strolling haphazardly through

the park. There are two images to interpret as the focus is drawn on the human figures and

not the colors, insects or plants that cover the text. The inversion is a means of drawing

attention to the human, a use of metaphor that does not alter the texture of the narrative.

Woolf’s work is also built out of a melding of poetry and prose due to her “belief that

the distinction …was being made too strenuously” (Shaw 231). The non-plot centric stories

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use imagery to harbor many characters and voices and also as line breaks. As the third group

passes by the bed,

the heavy woman came to a stand-still… and ceased even to pretend to listen

to what the other woman was saying. She stood there letting the words fall

over her, swaying the top of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking

at the flowers…

The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his

goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. …He had just

inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof

and was getting to the cool brown light when the two other people came past

outside the turf. (Woolf, “Kew” 87-8)

Now the focus goes to these characters, delving into their dialogue and immediate thoughts

but not into their histories. The reader does not know where they have been before now, but

can glean from their relationship from the immediate images and thoughts Woolf presents.

Here she begins to use color in an image-driven, rather than symbolism-driven way by giving

the reader the primary colors in different groupings and separations. The pink, white and

crimson in the couple’s section in the end hints to innocence and a hint of passion, much like

the pure red of the first couple’s section, impressing the reader with a tone without stating

“he longed ardently for her” or “she desired him.” Woolf’s color undertones in the scenes

evade the reader’s awareness until closer examination of the items manipulating language

creating unconscious interpretation. Likewise, the conclusion bursts away from the couple,

back into viewing the passing pairs and individuals as anonymous and indistinct, as the

largest mention of color erupts in the last paragraph,

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Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men,

women and children, were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then,

seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought

shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green

atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue. (89, emphasis mine)

The color riot launches the piece into the world, dissipating its impressions not so suddenly

into the air, allowing the words and the body of the story to disappear like notes dispersing

into particles, the tone and feeling remembered but the actual voice and solidity gone.

The view given by the detached narrator is continued in the anonymous “figures of

men and women” (84) of “Kew Gardens” to the very specific man and woman named Simon

and Eleanor strolling with their two children. Once the quad leaves the range of the

flowerbed, the narrator looks again to the bed itself, to the snail. From the snail the narrator

deals with two men, then a woman’s “purple black” dress, which swings the narration slowly

to two women, then back to the snail again for a paragraph longer than the first before resting

with the last figures, a young couple, reflecting the married couple without their younger

duplicates. As the beginning is born from a ball of the primary wheel, the rest of “Kew”

follows as strands of color in character to character, the groups mirror gendered people: first

a married couple with two children and two men, followed by two women and an unmarried

couple, each rendered with enough variation so as to seem unique. Their end comes as a

tassel of color binding color, people and nature together, with nature as the unseen fulcrum

Woolf weaves with her impressionist perambulations. Her work rendered on color without

an “account of the sequential events leading up to these visual events,” where “reason and

rhapsody were assimilated rather than set at variance,” a blend of poetry and prose to picture

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reality in a sharper and more concrete way than possible through realism (Shaw 13, 231).

Impressionism allowed her to fulfill her “demand” for indirection in art by depending on the

consciously wrought quality of its prose-style for unity rather than on the stated presence of a

“narrating consciousness” (231). She had tossed out the authoritative narrative.

Yet prose is not poetry or painting and the physical tools it works with are the pen or

typewriter on paper and not the brush on canvas. Woolf returned to the close and bodied first

person narrator and a more concentrated attempt at mind jumps in “An Unwritten Novel”

(January 1920). The focus again was character with “Minnie Marsh” as a historical body that

did not “drag in so many dull facts” (Woolf qtd. in Shaw 119) of novels listing the entire

genealogy of a character before getting to what they were actually doing in the present of the

story (Woolf, “Mr Bennet”). To avoid this, Woolf places the narration within a bodied

narrator who cannot possibly know the character’s history. Removing the omniscience

through the narrator a body forced Woolf to work with the cues of the actual setting. As the

essay is rendered by the physical body of the narrator, so too is “Unwritten,” garbed in a

body, one which Susan Lanser calls “explicitly female” (111), if only due to her knowledge

of the domestic and her often breathy exclamations, ending with “it’s you, unknown figures,

you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me –adorable world!”

(Woolf, “Unwritten” 115), which helps avoid absolutism. Again, the reader is reminded of

the story’s purpose: to focus on the possibility of character and the narrative voice in fiction.

“An Unwritten Novel” begins to shift its use of Woolf’s prior techniques.

The draper’s window looped with violet – that’ll do; a little cheap perhaps, a

little commonplace – since one has a choice of crimes, but then so many (let

me peep across again – still sleeping, or pretending sleep! white, worn, the

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mouth closed – a touch of obstinacy, more than one would think – no hint of

sex) – so many crimes aren’t your crime; your crime was cheap; only the

retribution solemn; for now the church door opens, the hard wooden pew

receives her; on the brown tiles she kneels; every day, winter, summer, dusk,

dawn (here she’s at it) prays. (110)

The impressionism based on color as well as the symbolism associated with such broad

strokes is largely gone: the work of a late Monet. The very abstract image of “A Mark on the

Wall” has vanished. What remains is another type of impressionism and imagining, born out

of realism’s attention to detail but tempered with sparing lines, a concentration on such

details to hold meaning without the guiding authoritative narration to lock in a reader’s

interpretation of the text. Here the reader is forced to piece together what Woolf’s narrator

provides. The opinions are largely relegated to the parenthesis which speak like Mistress

Merridew but phrase themselves without completion, almost as if they were plopped onto

page directly from the narrator’s mind, sans the filters of syntax and grammar. The

parenthesis, much like asides, allow Woolf to jump quickly from one style of narration to

another, from one narrative voice to another, without consequence, in a way that intuitively

shapes the narrative.

Down they get (Bob and Barbara), hold out hands stiffly; back again to their

chairs, staring between the resumed mouthfuls. [But this we’ll skip;

ornaments, curtains, trefoil kitchen plate, yellow oblongs of cheese, white

squares of biscuit… (108)

With “(Bob and Barbara),” she brings the act of the writer to the reader’s attention, the act of

artifice and construction made visible with the brackets which are the interrupting comments

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of the narrator’s personal self, subjective rather than objective. The construct allows Woolf

to skim over the material rather than spend pages on as her predecessors would have, but also

allows her to subvert the narrative and draw in detail amore detached narrator might leave

out. “Unwritten” uses slight shifts of Marsh’s body to shift the narrator’s imaginings of her

life. It moves in relation to Marsh’s potential inner self and “The Mark on the Wall” moves

in relation to the possible outer object which depends on shifts in perception. “But here’s a

jerk,” for example, moves the narrator’s speech from hairdressers and shops to eggs and

timeliness for lunch (110-1). All this work showed Woolf “in one second…how I could

embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it” (Letters IV 231). She began to

take different angles, combinations of her skills to build a slightly longer work and approach

the problem of depicting character without using prior forms.

Woolf’s first stage of short story experiments at that point did not try to engage plot

as The Voyage Out and Night and Day had. “A Society” (September 1920) however,

depended on plot for structure and criticized patriarchal society while encountering many

characters with distinct voices. The key to the power of “A Society” is in the bodied first

person narrator able to take on a plural first person to include not only the immediate story

but also the four side-narratives of the women’s ventures into the world, each channeling a

slightly different voice. “This is how it all came about,” she lays the story flat, smoothing it

like a map in her first sentence before defining the players, “Six or seven of us” in the

domestic sphere of a London home, indicated by the women “idly occupied in building little

towers of sugar upon the edge of a tea tray” (“A Society” 118). The number of women

expands to fifteen in named persons. The characters inhabiting the piece itself multiply in

the personal narratives of the characters. Though “A Society” is reminiscent of the world

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and style of Night and Day, it expands into greater polyphony and spread of characters. The

plot rests not on their personal outcomes but on that of the world and its status to dictate

pace, grounded in the First World War breaking the end and causing the women to abandon

their search.

The shape coils around gender so that the story serves to allow the questioning of the

common order without death or stiffness. The work is certain of itself. It is also a revision of

Woolf’s use of dialogue, turning away from prior attempts to “catch & consolidate &

consummate …those splashes” of the painters so as to depart from “the falsity of the past”

Woolf says was created by Bennett, Galsworthy and others who “ adhere to a formal railway

line of sentence” (Woolf, Letters III 135-6). That “male” sentence does not allow the more

natural depiction of character she wishes to engage. In viewing Woolf’s dialogue, one can

see her trying to pull the writing closer to gendered experience. In the end of “A Society,”

the narrator, Cassandra, and one of the women, Castalia, discuss the future of Castalia’s

daughter after not being able to find, among all their questions and explorations in the men’s

world, what the point to life was.

“…How can I bring my daughter up to believe in nothing?” … [Castalia]

demanded.

“Surely you could teach her to believe that a man’s intellect is, and

always will be, fundamentally superior to a woman’s?” I suggested. She

brightened at this and began to turn over our old minutes again. “Yes,” she

said, “think of their discoveries, their mathematics, their science, their

philosophy, their scholarship –” and then she began to laugh, “I shall never

forget old Hobkin and the hairpin,” she said, and went on reading and

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laughing and I thought she was quite happy, when suddenly she threw the

book from her and burst out, “Oh, Cassandra, why do you torment me? Don’t

you know that our belief in man’s intellect is the greatest fallacy of them all?”

“What?” I exclaimed. “Ask any journalist, schoolmaster, politician or public

house keeper in the land and they will tell you that men are much more

cleverer than women.” “As if I doubted it,” she said scornfully. “How could

they help it? Haven’t we bred them and fed and kept them in comfort since

the beginning of time so that they may be clever even if they’re nothing else?

It’s all our doing!” she cried. “We insisted upon having intellect and now

we’ve got it. And it’s intellect,” she continued, “that’s at the bottom of it…”

(Woolf, “Society 128-9)

Each character has a view, however contrary to Woolf’s own, that reveals itself as real.

There is no hint of falsehood. The reader may watch Castalia change her mind, rage and

rethink, drawing the dialogue closer to Woolf’s art. The plot-driven but polyphonic text of

“A Society” points out that “England is under the rule of a patriarchy” maintained by the

upkeep of the idea of men’s superiority to women (Room 33), enabled through her own

length and mode. The characters’ exclamations drive the conclusion, the shape metered by

their speech which is only occasionally interrupted by minimal notes by the narrator, who

does not intrude but catches the ends of the speech sentences through what she notices as a

character. The limited narrator avoids the male sentence by engaging with the women’s

voices directly. Emphasis is placed not on their surroundings but on themselves through the

few bodily caps.

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Woolf’s second short story period which begins in 1921 with “‘Cracked Fiddles,’”

turns sound as color and image and narrative presentation to displace the human being. The

sketches of “‘Cracked Fiddles’” explore narrative through subversive sensory means,

particularly through sound depicted as image and a shattering of the absolute narrative

viewpoint, applying color and shape as a means to viewing. In the first section, “The

Evening Party,” attention is directed “there, rising in a mound against the sky” (Woolf,

“‘Cracked’: Evening” 307). The “mound” is the earth, already revealed in the second

sentence not to be the center of the story, a signal that the entire piece will be looking at the

world on a slant. She continues, “On every chair there is a soft mound. Pale wisps of gauze

are curled upon bright silks” (307). She speaks of ladies in evening gowns with shawls,

reducing them to “soft mounds,” a way of getting “closer to life …by discarding most of the

conventions which are commonly observed” by writers (307; “Modern Novels” 33). She

also returns to color. “The street is almost empty; the blinds are drawn in the windows; the

yellow and red panes of the ocean liners cast for a moment a spot upon the swimming blue”

(“‘Cracked’: Evening” 307, emphasis mine). Unlike the fixedness of “Kew Gardens” on

primary colors, this narrative floats over color in little flashes. Woolf writes as if she can

move anywhere, without fear of stepping into impropriety. Glimpses of color in “Holborn

Viaduct,” the fourth section, show a home where “the bootboy lifting the concertina,

squeezes out a melody. The kitchen table, with its yellow loaf, white aprons and pots of jam,

is rooted to the heart of the world” (308). The servants’ quarters is represented in miniature

strokes, the objects of bread, aprons and jam standing in for their figures. Woolf also begins

to play with sound in this piece, as death casts the tones and “The organ peals skeleton

music….Wheels and cries sound now low, now high; all in harmony. One bee hums through

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the room and again out – away. The flowers bend their heads in time” (“‘Cracked’: Death”

308). The feeling of death represented in sound and tone makes this read like poetry, with

the same finesse and grace afforded to verse but often removed from prose. One could insert

line breaks in these sentences. Woolf’s foray into sound allows her to make the scenes she

has been setting since A Voyage Out more plausible and flexible. Though the four sketches

are not connected, they are part of an “‘essentially poetic’ compression of a single narrative”

which blends different tones and textures together (Shaw 3), afforded by the spaces and new

titles in between. The reader does not expect solid connection in this collection but some sort

of commonality, either in theme or in viewpoint in these domestic vignettes.

“The String Quartet” (1921) makes further use of sound as a means of depicting the

experience of a concert, a “plotless prose-sketch…” (Shaw 232) used to depict different

states of perception without “dramatic framework” (Beer 331). Unencumbered by a bodied

narrator, the piece leaps from dialogue to dialogue, single lines, whole pieces presented, then

back to the vessel of the narrator again to present the music:

Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain.

Fountains jet; drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and

deep, race under arches, and sweep the trailing water leaves, washing shadows

over the silver fish, the spotted fish rushed down by the swift waters, now

swept into an eddy where –it’s difficult this –conglomeration of fish all in a

pool; leaping, splashing, scraping sharp fins; and such a boil of current that

the yellow pebbles are churned round and round, round and round –free now,

rushing downwards, or even somehow ascending in exquisite spirals into the

air; curled like thin shavings from under a plane; up and up…. (“String” 133)

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The joy in the movement of the bows is traced in the energy of the words, the opening line of

the paragraph rocking between two syllables, one syllable then two again and then one with

the jaw relaxed in the “u” to mimic a boat tipping into the current of the Rhone River and the

listener plunged with the boat carried by the motions of the strings. A high amount of reader

interpretation is required here as Woolf does not mention an exact location nor character

names, but paints the joys of London in the people passing by the concert. She is able to do

this through her displacement of the narrator, who appears in body only with the line, “if the

ties of blood require me, leaning forward, to accept cordially the hand which is perhaps

offered hesitatingly” (132). The body of the narrator leans forward, but there is no glimpse

of specific features, no eyes, lips or arms to be shown, which roots the reader in the

anonymous figure sitting at a concert with relatives while allowing a limited view that

permits the writer to explore sound as viewed by the comparisons of that particular narrator.

But it is not merely the narrator, but also the people who become just forms and bodies, so

featureless that when Woolf writes:

The gentleman replies so fast to the lady, and she runs up the scale with such

witty exchange of compliment now culminating in a sob of passion, that the

words are indistinguishable though the meaning is plain enough –love,

laughter, flight, pursuit, celestial bliss –all floated out on the gayest ripple of

tender endearment –until the sound of the silver horns, at first far distant,

gradually sounds more and more distinctly, as if the seneschals were saluting

the dawn or proclaiming ominously the escape of the lovers… (135)

The figures presented are more vivid than those in the rest of the story who have no relations

to one another but voices. The sounds are given a relationship, accorded a type of

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communication, even though they are not characters. The gentleman and lady are

personifications of the notes which “run… up the scale.” What is interpreted by the narrator

is shown to be more important than the “reality” around him or her.

Woolf’s ability to get away from a plot- and character-based work is what allows her

finally, “In the Orchard,” written in August of 1922 just after the finish of Jacob’s Room and

about a year after her initial contemplation of Mrs. Dalloway (Dick 295, Lee 227, 192), to

turn over narrative presentation without having to put in “the enormous labour of proving the

solidity, the likeness to life, of the story… [which] seems” to come from the writer’s idea that

a plot without “‘tragedy, comedy and excitement’ as well as an air of probability so

impeccable that if ‘all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed

down to the last button of the fashion of the hour’” he has not done his duty (“Modern

Novels” 33). Woolf’s final state in her experimentation contemplates modes of narrative

presentation and the resulting shapes. “Orchard,” for example, works best through its tri-fold

views of Miranda under the apple tree, first in a detailed account, then less certain and more

tentative. In the first section, “Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the

apple tree” (143). The area, character and character’s action is established, the narrator is

firm. In the second section, made so by a line break, “Miranda slept in the orchard –or

perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved very slightly,” her actions are rendered

uncertain by the “or.” In the final section, once again separated by a line break, “Miranda

slept in the orchard, or was she asleep, or was she not asleep?” (144), twice the first clause is

contradicted by the “or” and the last clause reverts the sentence’s meaning to that set by the

very first. The shifts unsettle the reader; reality is not constant. Reality is only a constant

from each viewpoint. As Miranda is pared farther and farther from the piece, she is

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represented in the end “across the corner of the orchard the blue-green was slit [by] a purple

streak” (144-5). “‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’” (145), her only line in that section, is encased

in parenthesis. She is removed from the main action and narrative scope, her figure appears

as a shape and not as a body, built out of Woolf’s ability to displace the human and decrease

its significance.

Woolf also displaces the narrative as she depicts time as sound and image, creating a

“palimpsestic layering” (Able 161). Miranda’s shifting features do not just indicate the

minimalization of the human, but are a means of working at different narrative distances.

The first section is in the third person but hovers over Miranda and flies in the area, “above

the apple-tree and the pear-tree two hundred feet above Miranda lying asleep in the orchard

bells thudded” (Woolf, “Orchard” 143). The figure of Miranda is always kept in view, a

hearthstone for the reader. Thus the narrative begins again after the section break with

Miranda, but now follows the scene in a close third person, so that the narration is filtered

through her thoughts before the last section, an utterly distant third person that pulls a

panoramic view of Miranda’s surroundings. The reader knows that these shifts are made

through the shifts in sound. If one were to follow the first sound, for example, one would

hear in the first section

a shrill clamour as if they were gongs of brass beaten violently, irregularly,

and brutally. It was only the school-children saying the multiplication table in

unison, stopped by the teacher, scolded, and beginning to say the

multiplication table over again. (143)

There is a limited omniscience here that privileges the human and centers the human in the

narrative. The narrator knows what is going on around Miranda but does not enter in any of

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the characters’ thoughts or tell their histories. The next section, in a close third, shows

Miranda thinking “if I were a leaf or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table)”

(144). The sound is no longer important, reflected by its silence and by the parenthesis

wrapped around it. The “shrill clamour” has shrunk to the periphery. Likewise, by the final

section, the panorama, the sound does not register at all and the reader is left with scenery.

Woolf’s turning of technique in all these stories affirms her statement that “Any method is

right, every method is right, that expresses what we wish to express” (“Modern Novels” 34).

Through her experimentation, she has a gathering of techniques and forms that enable her to

express fiction in a way “more real than realism,” subverting the dominant methods. Her

new use of color, polyphony and narrative detachments and displacements have finally made

her ready to create the tensely structured but polyphonic and shifting narration of Mrs.

Dalloway.

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Master

Watching Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway is like watching a skier maneuver through moguls;

not reliant upon chapters to move her narrative, she uses line breaks and techniques learned

in her prior works like the poles and muscles of the skier to pivot and turn. The initial push

is controlled; a rhythm builds in the next push before the tumble of the first mogul run, the

second jump and the path between poles. All looks effortless and nearly uncontrolled, but

the motion fully is within the skier’s grasp. So too is Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway where the form

of her narrative encloses life and expands on it, that “luminous halo” not lined up but

modally distributed (Woolf, ‘Modern’ 154).

Woolf’s work on Mrs. Dalloway was made possible by her work in her short stories,

but also by Jacob’s Room, in which she says she was “writing without the old banisters”

which caused her to “make…jumps and jerks … [which] are unnecessary” with the

knowledge that she would improve in her next work (qtd. in Beer 3). Her reference to

leaving behind “old banisters” is tied to her growth out of old structure, which created a few

necessary starts into working on her own without guidance, as evidenced by her prior

writings. In 1920, she wrote that she conceived of

a new form for a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another –

as in An Unwritten Novel –only not for 10 pages but for 200 or so –doesn’t

that give the looseness and lightness I want: doesnt that get closer & yet keep

form & speed, & enclose everything, everything? …I figure that the approach

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will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen;

all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour, everything as bright as fire

in the mist. …conceive mark on the wall, K[ew] G[ardens]. & unwritten

novel taking hands & dancing in unity. (Diary II 13-4)

She conceived of Mrs. Dalloway as a culminating work, one which took the free and

disembodied movement of “Mark,” the raw colors and figure forces of “Kew” under the

length on “Unwritten” to create envelopes of being opening out of one another to supply the

whole. Mrs. Dalloway was to be a combination of her most technically formative stories of

that time with a full awareness of the importance of the novel’s shape to its content. Though

she would later note that “The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to

wrench my substance to fit it” (249), she also compares the book’s form to the soul and its

content to the body (249). One can breathe as a body but one does not exist on the unseen or

spiritual plane without a soul. A book that lacks form lacks transcendence and exists as

“kitsch” or “acceptable art” (Abraham Moles qtd. in Moretti 36). It has “human proportions”

(36) or merely a body, without a soul, whereas art, or the ideal form for the novel, has both.

Mrs. Dalloway assumes the ideal form for Woolf’s story and voice through structure.

The multiplicity of the novel yields two ways of looking at its body. The first observes that

the novel is composed of nine sections, none of which are separated by chapter number or

letter, but instead by the visual spacing afforded by line breaks. The second views the

division through the dual protagonists, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. Both features

are key to understanding the narrative and aesthetic of the structure. In the first, line breaks

unite the experience of the novel despite the jumps in location or narrative. The sections are

unnumbered so that they cannot be mistaken for chapters, forcing the reader to break from

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the narrative briefly. Unlike the chapter, the use of sections allows a loose connection to be

held between the blank space, ideas of the prior section transferred on to the new with

association. Take for example the first break:

…and it lifted her up and up when –oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!

‘Dear, those motor cars,’ said Miss Pym, going to the window to look,

and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full of sweet peas,

as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars, were all her fault.

The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss Pym

go to the window and apologize came from a motor car which had drawn to

the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s shop window.

Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of

the very greatest importance against the dove-grey upholstery, before a male

hand drew the blind and there was nothing to see except a square of dove

grey. (Woolf, Dalloway 13-4)

In the paragraph before the break, there is no mention of where the car is or of Mrs.

Dalloway jumping. The reader is within Mulberry’s shop. The space allows one to move out

of the shop without needing to follow Clarissa Dalloway. The reader has been detached from

her with the empty space, but still remembers her and is reminded of her as the narrative gaze

shifts to the “Passers-by” and the man inside the car hidden by a blind of grey. Were this

new section presented as a chapter, the impression of the sound of the car and the shop space

would be wiped away entirely. Instead, there would be an expectation of an entire switch in

space or a continuation of the Clarissa narrative. What Woolf does instead allows her to

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shift, which would not have been possible with the chapter. The subject and image would

have been obliterated from the reader’s mind in a new chapter, a fumbling of re-orientation

from the page break to a numbered section known as the chapter. For Woolf to use the

chapter, her ending line of that first section would be too brief. There is an expectation of a

tie-in, a narrative tuck that allows the reader to feel closure before launching to the next

movement.

The chapter also carries expectations of length. A uniformity of length was often the

decisive form of the chapter according to the older formula of the serialized novel, as if the

key to the creation and maintenance of a successful novel could be contained in a kit: a box

of worksheets with blank spaces for character names, setting and main problem, each chapter

even-lengthed because ten or twenty pages were the number of sheets the form-creator

believed were the correct length. While the average section length in Mrs. Dalloway is

twenty-one pages, the largest section, VII, totals at 84 and the smallest, V, totals at two, a

length that would not be approved of in the model. Obviously, the novel does not fit within

the conventions, for as Woolf said, life “refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting

vestments as we provide” (“Modern Novels” 33). Yet, she wrote, the writer had continued to

“construct… thirty-two chapters after a design which more & more ceases to resemble the

vision in our minds” (33). Woolf undoes the convention and escapes the boxes via her

varying lengths and utter refusal of the chapter to make the form match the vision. The

structure of a novel, Woolf writes, “leav[es]… a shape on the mind’s eye, built now in

squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings & arcades, now solidly compact and

domed like the Cathedral of St. Sophia at Constantinople” (Room 71). The myriad of shapes

in each vision suits the shape of Mrs. Dalloway, which uses its shortest section, V, to pivot

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the narrative. Most prose–like, the section is driven by the repetition “Such are the visions,”

sandwiched with the nurse knitting as Peter dozes, the language arcs out, then in, tightened to

the pegs of the narrative structure again in the sixth section, which again begins with the

knitting and Peter dozing, but ends with Peter awake, mind in the past, once more in the past

which makes much of Mrs. Dalloway. The repetition has been used more to bind poetry

structure than prose structure, but the technique functions in the fifth section and in the entire

novel according to Woolf’s use of the section break where each section acts as a stanza.

Woolf even thought “that in poetry you get greater intensity than in prose, & have the right to

be more jerky & disconnected” (Letters III 432). The “intensity” of Mrs. Dalloway can be

attributed to this way of structuring, so that the work is a prose poem.

The other way of viewing Mrs. Dalloway is in seeing it through the twin structure

built by Clarissa and Septimus Smith, which Woolf referred to as the novel’s two parts

(Friedman 331). She conceived of Septimus as Clarissa’s “double” after the first version of

Mrs. Dalloway (qtd. in 331). Representatively, Septimus is death to Clarissa’s life. As one

ends, the other is in a state of perpetual continuation. As protagonists, they supply two

distinct forms of plot, which may be linked to their genders. Clarissa, the life representative,

exists in the novel to get to her party. Her narrative becomes most vivid when it passes from

present to past and then back again. The entire novel is enmeshed in her presence, marked

by the last section occurring at the party. The narrative swirls around her and tosses together

all elements of the novel in a final swell of feeling in the concluding section. Yet the end-tie

which comes through Peter still sees Clarissa.

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it

that fills me with extraordinary excitement?

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It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was. (Woolf, Dalloway 194)

The narrative ends, without gasp or strain but in knowing that the elements of Clarissa’s life

story have met, that the movements it has shown are most important to her in bringing

together her past and present. The plot cannot be said to be forward-moving, but rocks back

and forth, spirals through the novel.

Septimus’s constant death-threat, however, is pointed and self-propelled. Though he

too moves between past and present in his narrative, his movement is much briefer and

constantly points to an end. His issue climaxes until he literally bursts from the narrative

structure, “flung himself vigorously, violently down” (149). Septimus physically acts out his

plot’s falling action, his conclusion forms as the reader hears of his death at Clarissa’s party.

He is a line pointing through Clarissa’s spiral, providing the movement in the other

expression for the plot and form. The ending line, “For there she was” sets Mrs. Dalloway

complete in the reader’s hands. The novel sits as a marvel of budding circles encased in a

larger circle, veins and swirls further in, creation held in concentrate, the lighter, but more

world-filled descendent of the “loose baggy monsters” Woolf had left behind by 1919.

The novel embraces the male and female to achieve wholeness. The length of Mrs.

Dalloway fits with Woolf’s idea “that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated,

than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of study and uninterrupted

work” (Room 78). This idea is mainly centered in a practical knowledge of the interruption

of a woman’s duty to family, either in child care or home maintenance, that takes a woman

away from writing but also rests in the differences in thought rendered by such constrictions,

via the formation of gender which had affected Woolf as she tried to write in larger forms.

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Yet she would say that to think consciously in this way, either as male or female, is “fatal”

(104). The writer “must be woman-manly or man-womanly” to allow their work to flourish

in the reader’s mind (104). “Such collaboration has to take place in the mind between the

woman and man before the act of creation can be accomplished” (104). There must be a

blend of both minds for the writer to grasp all parts of life and display them in his or her

work. This distinction, which Woolf makes and breaks out of, is visible in the “gendered”

plots of Clarissa and Septimus and is embodied in fulfilling her personal philosophy for the

length of a woman’s work.

What else may qualify Woolf’s writing in Mrs. Dalloway as “distinctly female” could

be drawn from Nancy K. Miller’s argument that such a “text is categorized by an

idiosyncratically feminine emphasis or inflection –the sign of an ironic apprehension of

conventional concepts of characters and plot” (qtd. in Brownstein xxvii). If “ironic” can be

seen as a non-dominant viewpoint, Miller’s classification fits Woolf’s work, not only in its

technique but also in its actual subject focus, dislocating “female” writing or the “feminine

mark” from being biologically centered to being socially centered. Yet Woolf has distinct

apprehensions of the male and female in relation to one another which she displays in the

voices of her characters. Sir William Bradshaw for example, whom Woolf reports, “not only

prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth,

penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too,

share his sense of proportion –his if they were men…” (Dalloway 99). The sentence drones

to the next page, separated by commas, one instance of parenthesis and a single use of the

semicolon. Sir Bradshaw’s “proportion” orders the sentence. His viewpoints and values

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order dominant life and give it subject. One word follows the next; the commas fall one after

the other. In comparison there is his wife, who

waited with the rugs above her knees an hour or more, leaning back, thinking

sometimes of the patient, sometimes, excusably, of the wall of gold, mounting

minute by minute while she waited; the wall of gold that was mounting

between them and all the shifts and anxieties (she had borne them bravely;

they had had their struggles) until she felt wedged on a calm ocean, where

only spice winds blow, respected, admired, envied, with scarcely anything left

to wish for, though she regretted her stoutness; large dinner-parties every

Thursday night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened; Royalty

greeted; too little time, alas, with her husband, whose work grew and grew; a

boy doing well at Eton; she would have liked a daughter too; interests she had,

however in plenty; child welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and

photography… (94-5)

Her speech tumults out, the first clause prior to the semi-colon mirroring itself, beginning and

ending with “waited,” repeating “wall of gold” to weigh the woman into her seat before a

flurry of commas followed by increasing semi-colons which indicate her increased mania

against the rigidity of thought, a dash here and there of a phrase to represent her life, one

which may be called “multi-tasking” presently, what was then seen as unevenly ordered. The

use of the semi-colon here is not for grammar; Woolf does not separate her clauses to please

the reader or publisher but separates them to please herself and give her characters voice and

to display the distinctions of gender created by the patriarchal structure she has been trying to

criticize from The Voyage Out.

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Woolf is able to criticize the patriarchal structure not only through these distinctions

and the form of her plot but also by several other bolts which pin her novel together. As Mrs.

Dalloway was originally called “The Hours” for its span of a single day, her play with time,

narrative and character are the mechanics of the forms. Her depiction of time, that which

normally binds a day, allows “an iconoclastic plot to weave its course covertly through the

narrative grid” (Abel 161). The unusual plot structure’s regulation resonates in her use of

Big Ben and several other clocks to mark the actual and apprehended time in the novel as

perceived by the characters. “There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the

hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in air” (4). Big Ben stakes the actual

temporal space of the novel’s day against the characters’ perceptions and narrator’s

presentations of the temporal, the impression of sound and time’s echoes dissipating, though

the fact of time, noon or three o‘clock, does not melt. At first, time is seen frequently, first

on page four, then signaling eleven on page twenty-one, then a half hour on page forty-eight,

slowing with noon appearing on page ninety-four, quickening on page 117 and then again on

118 as three o’clock, on the half hour on 127 and in its last definite as six o’clock on 150 just

after Septimus has killed himself, after which time is no longer defined. The mention of time

at Clarissa’s party, for example, does not link with a number but falls away, obscured by

Clarissa’s thoughts. For Clarissa does not work in hours but in people and moments.

Time does not only serve to sew Mrs. Dalloway’s form into place but also to allow

the form to exist. While Big Ben’s rings are absolute, there are several other clocks chiming

alternate and contradicting times. The “late clock,” for example, had “its lap full of trifles.

Beaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages …the last relics of this lap full of odds and

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ends seemed to break…” (128). The late clock is alternate time, time as another sound.

Likewise there are “the clocks of Harley Street” (102).

Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street

nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, pointed out

in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of

time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop

in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure

to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-

past one. (102)

These clocks do not boom or click, but their sounds cut up the day according to the hours

mounted on their faces, time itself being both a man-made construct and a socially measured

structure. The context is key. What Woolf suggests in this passage is that many different

“times” exist. Some are official, like Big Ben. Those which ring afterwards, are thus

considered “late” or deviant. Those on Harley Street, little multiples of time, ring at their

own hours, less official but no less valid as they are sanctioned by commerce, which receives

authority through money.

But time detached from clocks does not mark itself in sound. The concept of “time,”

which is man-made, culminates in an image created by Septimus:

The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips

fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard,

white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an

ode to Time; an immortal code to Time. (69-70)

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The word is broken into what it sounds like, the sign considered as sound-concept and sound-

image at once. The reader experiences what “time” feels like on the movement of the lips

through the image of time breaking open like corn, the letters the kernels broken and re-

configured so that the word is tied not to clocks but to language. Time, as considered in its

dominant space, then in its alternates and then as concept, shapes the narrative structure by

establishing a series of subversions.

The subversions of the novel do not merely work in time, but begin on the first page.

Woolf’s first parenthesized line, “(for a girl of eighteen as she then was),” prompts the reader

to ask, “What age is she now?” and “When are we now?” (3). This change in the narrative

layout of time depends on the sound of doors moving off their hinges in the present, which

prompts Clarissa to think:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with

a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the

French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how

calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap

of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as

she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window,

that something awful was about to happen… (3)

The shift into the next paragraph tips the narrative into the more abstract, passing the woman

through the ages, the mutability of the feminine and female in the sphere of the historic and

contemporary. This abstract displacement is enabled by the sound techniques cultivated in

her short stories and introduces multi-chrononomy as a chief narrative element which gives

Woolf the freedom not only to explore realities beyond present, but minds beyond the present

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very fluidly. Her displacement of time and mind makes Mrs. Dalloway a multi- rather than

mono-narrative. The narrative both withholds knowledge and presents it in terms of its sense

rather than its strict identity, which draws the reader closer to the experience and validates

the authority of the narrator in a way that does not mirror the absolutism of the earlier

authorial narrative. While what is presented is not strictly stream of consciousness, the

multiple strands are governed by Woolf’s authority, a membrane which “collectivizes

authoriality without ceding it, giving a different shape to authorial imperatives rather than

refusing them” (Lanser 119). The narrative gaze is directed and is selective, but the gaze is

allowed to wander across the scene and taste its colors. The experience of the novel is so

utterly changed by this ability to shift and juggle, which Woolf furthermore displays in

section IV under the gaze of Peter Walsh:

The way she said ‘Here is my Elizabeth!’ –that amazed him. Why not ‘Here’s

Elizabeth’ simply? It was insincere. Elizabeth didn’t like it either. (Still, the

last tremors of the great booming voice shook the air round him; the half-

hour; still early; only half-past eleven still.) (Woolf, Dalloway 49)

The outside intersects, as it does when Woolf notes “As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls

on London; and falls on the mind” (49). There she casts her narrative in the authorial voice.

There the narrative flows and drifts before being caught again into Peter’s thoughts and

experience. She has once more turned it beyond the mind, beyond the first person narrative

wound to many other first person narratives by the membrane of the third person, which

allows her to roam into the landscape and survey the populace before diving into the coated

first person again, a first person which, according to her method, allows the reader to dwell

between the character’s ear and brain, thoughts not completely “stream of consciousness” so

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as to appear in pictorial fragments or unrelated words, as represented by Joyce, but thoughts

unfiltered, the unbidden thoughts the character would not dare speak aloud. Woolf knows

that these thoughts, a part of the “secret life” of human beings, are what create the outward

appearances beyond the exterior that says, “‘I love walking in London,’” to a good morning.

An interior calls the speaker “very well-covered, …perfectly upholstered… (he was almost

too well dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court)” (5-6). There

are inner lives that do not spill into the outer, cannot spill into the dialogue her earlier novels

would have the reader believe would actually be said, so eloquent and perfect in their

movement of the plot. Real dialogue, she knows, is not eloquent and usually not interesting

and cannot be as controlled as prose itself without appearing contrived. To jump from

dialogue to dialogue to give another character “voice” is not as possible, for while dialogue is

speech, what the character says is mediated by the persons present and how they wish to

appear. It is performance. To go beyond performance, to the truth of the character, requires

delving into the characters’ minds, unencumbered with worry of how others may think of the

thought. If encumbered, the corrections are laid visible for the reader to see by the author’s

hand. The inability of escaping personal interiority is registered by Clarissa in Section III,

for “She could not see what she lacked. …It was something central which permeated;

something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or

of women together” (31).

The new shape of dialogue does not control Woolf but allows her to control its

content which drives the characters and shapes the movements. If all the undercurrents of

thought and the casts into the past were taken away in Mrs. Dalloway, the reader would be

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left with text that looked very much like that of The Voyage Out or Night and Day. Take for

example the dialogue between Peter and Clarissa with the undercurrents removed:

‘Richard’s very well. Richard’s at a Committee,’ said Clarissa. …did

he mind her just finishing what she was doing to her dress, for they had a

party that night?

‘Which I shan’t ask you to,’ she said. ‘My dear Peter!’ she said.

…Why wouldn’t she ask him to her party? he asked.

…‘But it’s so extraordinary that you should have come this morning!’

she cried. …‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘how the blinds used to flap at

Bourton?’

‘They did,’ he said. …‘I often wish I’d gotten on better with your

father,’ he said.

‘But he never liked anyone who–our friends,’ said Clarissa. …‘Hubert

has it now,’ she said. ‘I never go there now,’ she said. …‘Do you remember

the lake?’ she said, almost in an abrupt voice…

‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said….

‘Well, and what’s happened to you?’ she said….

‘Millions of things!’ he exclaimed….

Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath.

‘I am in love,’ he said. …‘In love,’ he repeated, …‘in love with a girl

in India.’ …

‘In love!’ she said. …‘And who is she?’

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…‘A married woman, unfortunately,’ he said, ‘the wife of a Major in

the Indian Army.’ (41-5)

This is, of course, only a part of the scene, cut down so that the dialogue and a few authorial

glosses remain. What can be gleaned from this stripped-down version of the scene is the

present. Led by this, one could guess that there is history between the characters, but the

actual romantic past is removed. The dialogue alone leads the story to being concerned with

Peter’s legal maneuvers and Clarissa’s hostess prattle, not much more. When the internal

narrative is reinserted, the characters’ real voices and concerns emerge. Take for example

the emotional middle of the passage:

‘But he never liked any one who-our friends,’ said Clarissa; and could

have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry

her.

Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart, too, he

thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked

at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was

more unhappy than I’ve ever been since, he thought. And as if he were sitting

there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised

it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be

sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.

‘Herbert has it now,’ she said. ‘I never go there now,’ she said. (42)

Neither appear as unfeeling as they did, nor so abrupt or arbitrary in their speech with the

narrative casting beyond their surfaces, taking on a very close third person and then layering

that close third person with a distanced third person watching the actual movements in

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Clarissa’s drawing-room objectively. Peter moves closer to Clarissa in the passage seeing

himself in Bourton as the reader sees him in both Bourton and Clarissa’s drawing room

simultaneously under the narrative’s flexibility. The undercurrents of Peter’s thoughts rest

beneath the surface of his dialogue, undercurrents which lap against her own thoughts and

dialogue, so that when she says “‘Herbert has it now,’” the line does not come out of

awkward silence, but from the glow of the moon on the terrace. Through the oscillating

narration, Woolf depicts the actual scene, acting as “translator” for her characters (J. W.

Graham qtd. in Lanser 114), creating a vivid text through their motives and pasts.

This way of working through characters was one of Woolf’s chief aims in Mrs.

Dalloway, of which she said: “I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to

criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense” (Woolf, Diary II 248).

She wished to give her work form through her characters which had always been paramount

in the work. Of Clarissa, she tunnels through and says,

She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now,

except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the

cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I

am this, I am that. (Dalloway 8-9)

There is an internal detail allowed here that would not come from elsewhere but from an

authoritative narrative. This consciousness would not be observed without Woolf’s

avoidance of creating, as she says, “personality” (Diary II 265). “Characters are to be merely

views,” she wrote, for “Directly you specify hair, age &c something frivolous, or irrelevant,

gets into the book” (265). While Mrs. Dalloway is stuffed with characters, it is always with

their voices ringing out: Clarissa, Peter, Lucrezia, an old man speaking, the reader catching a

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gloved hand, a chocolate éclair, red nostrils but not a police profile description, a thin man of

average build standing at five foot ten with grey-streaked hair.

Her characters are always shifting, not concrete enough to pin to the entomologist’s

block, but full of the twists and turns of minds encased in names and bodies. The “voice of

no age or sex” heard by Peter Walsh near Regent’s Park Tube station (Dalloway 80), for

example, does not attach itself to a physical figure until a page passes.

Like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of

leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing

ee um fah um so

foo swee too eem oo

and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze. (81)

The depiction of the woman as a sound and not as a person thwarts the desire to exact

knowledge. Her words, which may yield meaning or character, evade even those aspects, as

they are not words in a recognizable Western tongue, but syllables, the chanting of nature

that has not conformed to the constructs of human language or the male form. Experience is

kept in the realm of the abstract. Similarly, the first page dances away from immediate

identification, beginning with the line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers

herself” (3). The reader knows exactly with whom the novel is concerned through passing

around Clarissa but does not have an immediate grip on the physical end. Experience is to be

seen instead through a palate of color and shape. Woolf’s reasoning for this arises out of the

idea that

No one can see… [the ‘human soul’] whole…The best of us catch a glimpse

of a nose, a shoulder, something turning away, always in movement. Still, it

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seems better to me to catch this glimpse, than to sit down with Hugh Walpole,

Wells, etc. etc. & make large oil paintings of fabulously fleshy monsters from

top to toe. (Letters II 598)

Once again, she avoids not only the descriptions of her Victorian predecessors but also the

scope of the texts they worked in. Though she calls the works “fabulously fleshy monsters,”

which implies an indulgent fondness for their breadth, she seems resigned to getting a portion

of the motions of character into her writing rather than all of them crowding her page (598).

Yet Woolf does not avoid detail. In an impressionistic fashion cultivated in “Kew

Gardens,” she captures the flower shop proprietor of Mrs. Dalloway, for instance,

turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding

tufts of lilacs with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the

delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh

like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays, the roses looked;

and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet

peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale… (Dalloway 13)

The color focus centers the reader in a very specific atmosphere and guides the narrative to

look at aspects of the shop to gain not only place but person. However, her attention to detail

was criticized by W. L. Courtney in his review of The Feminine Note in Fiction as the

element which prevents women from being “artists …because … a passion for details …

conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work” (Woman’s 3), which may be one of

the obstacles faced by Woolf in her work, if one were to accept “a passion for details” as a

female trait. That opinion, however, can be disputed by any glance at a Charles Dickens’

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novel. The specifically honed attention to detail, controlled use and momentary indulgences

pulse Woolf’s narrative in glimpses and intense bursts around her characters.

Her work with Lucrezia, for instance, further does away with the necessity of

physical presence. Once more the narrative ebbs around direct present thought, as if

Lucrezia were speaking and past images conjured in her mind.

It was she who suffered –but she had nobody to tell.

Far was Italy and the white houses and the room where her sisters sat making

hats, and the streets crowded every evening with people walking, laughing out

loud, not half alive like people here, huddled up in Bath chairs, looking at a

few ugly flowers stuck in pots! (Dalloway 23)

Detail allows Woolf to cast out, to bring up the past as vividly, if not more vividly than the

present. Remove the detail and the passage is left: “Far was Italy and the …houses and the

room… and the streets… not …like people here …looking at flowers …in pots!” The

transfer is possible, but the passage lacks body, without the specifics wrought in “A Mark in

the Wall” and employed here. This mark of the advanced language, the ability to speak of

that which is not present weaves the rest of the text, allowing a “revis[ion of]… traditional

modes of ‘character drawing’” (Brownstein 276) and signaling that the matters of time,

established social order and novel structure are no longer applicable or usable and the people,

sights and sounds, unofficial swirling patterns, are the new mode of the novel now

appropriated for the furthest expression of reality, away from the old emphasis on setting.

Mrs. Dalloway does make use of space, however for coloring the narrative and its

motions, but does not specify location until the end of the second page, after which it has

been alluded to previously in the mention of Westminster, Big Ben and Victoria Street.

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Setting is a backdrop, a space to play and to pass from character to character. As Woolf used

the snail in “Kew Gardens” to pass from character to character, she uses setting in Mrs.

Dalloway to jump minds. When the reader inhabits Mulberry’s shop, prior to the first

section, for example, they are roused from it by the bang of a car, which turns them to the

street in the next section, which passes from Edgar J. Watkiss, then to Septimus and then to

the general crowd. “The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had stopped

outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on top of omnibuses spread their black

parasols…Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked

out…” (Woolf, Dalloway 15). The narrative has passed from Clarissa, to Watkiss, to

Septimus, to the collective and back to Clarissa again because of the use of setting as an

active medium. What matters is not the scenery but the characters inhabit that space, an

interactive canvas that does not merely furnish tone but also a means to access the details of

human existence.

Woolf’s constant displacement of the traditional narrative structure is remarkable as it

thwarts the reader’s expectations to build not the anticipated structure but the needed

structure. When the reader desires the most definition and description, as when the woman

of “no age or sex” chants, the translation is removed, as in an Ancient Greek text where the

meaning of chant is not found. The reader must make his or her own translation based on the

elements provided in the rest of the text. The reason for the woman’s speech is not given

even in the sound, allowing it to be drawn into symbolizing the meaninglessness of modern

life or the power of woman. The ambiguity of the speech as it is presented affirms rather

than negates Woolf’s power as narrator. She creates spaces for interpretation in all of her

weaving, refusing to answer questions of whether Peter marries his Daisy or not, or whether

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Clarissa and Sally will become friends again. Such is not the concern of this novel. What

matters in Mrs. Dalloway are the events of a single day in preparation for the party that forms

a final climax, an ending that does not climax in the straight sense, but blossoms. The

conclusion is a final welling of sensation, expression and color, a culmination of the novel’s

world and the writer’s work before the reader is cast off the page.

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Coda

The path to creating a text about Virginia Woolf’s forms has been a task that has

demanded a consciousness about my own writing that was previously unaccessed. The

process was one of stepping back, them a submergence, then stepping back again from the

texts to pin down Woolf’s forms and techniques into coherent and well-reasoned sentences.

Woolf’s constant channeling of voice, overturning of the authoritative narrative and overall

displacement of the prevailing techniques and values of fiction creates both a space and an

example of a non-dominant text, one which does not need the traditional narrative arc to

carry the novel, “formulas which are supposed to represent the whole of our human

experience” (Woolf, “Art of Fiction” 125) but do not do so for every writer. Woolf is an

inspiration in her development of techniques and methods that may be applied by

contemporary writers for the continued creation of new forms. As Woolf once said, the

shape of a book was made “by men out of their own needs for their own uses. There is no

reason to think that the form of the epic or of poetry play suits a woman any more than the

sentence suits her” (Room 77). Every form and any form is accessible and proper for the

female narrative and female voice, as Woolf discovered. In her journey from The Voyage

Out to Mrs. Dalloway, she reclaimed fiction for her own diction, breath and subject,

reforming the shape of the British novel.

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APPENDIX A

Graphic Chronology

Dates

June 1906

August 1906

1908

December 1910

Summer 1912

1915

1916

July 1917

August 1917

1918

1919

January 1920

September 1920

January 1921

Early 1921

August 1922

1924

1925

Short Stories

“Phyllis and Rosamond”

“The Journal of Mistress Joan

Martyn”

“The Mark on the Wall”

“Kew Gardens”

“An Unwritten Novel”

“A Society”

“The String Quartet”

“Cracked Fiddles”

“In the Orchard”

Novels

Melymbrosia, first draft

Melymbrosia, fifth draft

The Voyage Out, complete

Night and Day, developing

Eliades 91

Night and Day,

completed

Night and Day Mrs. Dalloway, developing

Mrs. Dalloway

APPENDIX B

Narrative Shapes

Eliades 92

Eliades 93

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