Lecture Notes on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Lecture 1: Virginia Woolf – ENG 210, 2025

Lecture Objectives

By the end of these lectures, students should be able to:

  • Discuss Woolf’s concern with time, memory, and consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway.
  • Discuss Woolf’s treatment of gender issues and sexuality.
  • Discuss the preoccupation in the novel with trauma and Woolf’s representation of the medical establishment.
  • Identify and discuss the Modernist aspects of the novel.
  • Analyse an extract in detail, relating it to the novel as a whole.

Woolf in Context

  • Biography
  • Modernism & Feminism
  • The Bloomsbury Group
  • Relation to Ulysses
  • Diary Commentary

Biography

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941)

Modernism & Feminism

  • Modernism (Kathleen Kuiper, 2011): A period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly after World War I.
  • Fueled by industrialization, colonial exploitation, rapid social change, and advances in science (e.g., Freudian theory).
  • Modernists felt alienation from Victorian morality and convention, seeking new modes of expression.
  • Literary Modernism is associated with the post-World War I period due to the war's undermining of faith in Western society.
  • T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) exemplifies Modernism, focusing on the search for redemption in a sterile landscape.
  • Woolf, V. (2008). Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Argues that human relations shifted around 1910, impacting religion, conduct, politics, and literature.
  • Woolf critiques Edwardian novelists (like Mr. Bennett) for focusing on superficial details rather than capturing the essence of human nature (Mrs. Brown).
  • Edwardian writers describe external details without truly looking at life or human nature. Woolf rejects their techniques as inadequate for her purposes.
  • Woolf dismisses the detailed, materialistic descriptions favored by Edwardian novelists, as they obscure the true essence of character.
  • Margaret Walters (2005) highlights Woolf’s argument in A Room of One’s Own about the frustration and waste of women's talents due to deprivation of experience and opportunity. Woolf creates the character Judith, Shakespeare's gifted sister, who is exploited and ultimately dies, symbolizing the stifled potential of women. Judith lives on in other women who are not present because they are washing dishes and putting children to bed.'

The Bloomsbury Group

  • Davies, Beadle, Beer, Butler et al. (2011): The Bloomsbury group rejected the perceived humbug and hypocrisy of their parents' generation, aiming for uncompromising honesty in personal and artistic life.
  • Woolf portrayed the limitations of the self and the possibility of transcendence through engagement with others, places, or art.
  • Woolf believed her viewpoint offered an alternative to masculine egotism, which she saw as a cause of World War I.
  • She recognized feminine characteristics (regard for others, awareness of multiple experiences) in some men.
  • Woolf was pessimistic about women gaining influence, despite advocating for it in Three Guineas (1938).
  • Woolf and Joyce transformed the treatment of subjectivity, time, and history in fiction, deeming traditional forms inadequate.

Relation to Ulysses

  • Kathleen Kuiper (2011): James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) marked the development of Modernist literature.
  • The novel employs stream of consciousness to detail the events of one day in the lives of three Dubliners, ignoring orderly sentence structure to capture the flow of mental processes.

Diary Commentary

  • Woolf, V. (1982). Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Diary. Edited by Leonard Woolf. London: Harcourt.
  • 14 October 1922: Mrs. Dalloway will explore insanity and suicide, contrasting the perspectives of the sane and the insane.
  • 30 August 1923: Describes her “tunnelling process” for character development, revealing “beautiful caves” behind characters that connect and surface in the present moment.
  • 15 October 1923: Expresses confidence in using past experiences, but worries about Mrs. Dalloway's character being too stiff. Her tunnelling process allows her to reveal the past gradually, as needed.
  • 19 June 1923: Aims to depict life and death, sanity and insanity, and critique the social system at its most intense. She is struggling with the mad part of the novel. She responds to critics like Arnold Bennett regarding her ability to create surviving characters, arguing that she intentionally distrusts and insubstantializes reality to convey a deeper truth.."

Mrs. Dalloway – Opening Passage Analysis

  • Clarissa Dalloway decides to buy the flowers herself.
  • The house is being prepared for a party; Rumpelmayer’s men are coming.
  • Clarissa recalls a past moment at Bourton, opening French windows onto a fresh morning.
  • She remembers Peter Walsh's comment about preferring men to cauliflowers.
  • Peter Walsh is expected back from India; Clarissa remembers his sayings and personal traits.
  • Scrope Purvis observes Clarissa, noting her bird-like qualities and aging appearance.
  • Clarissa feels a particular hush and suspense in Westminster, possibly linked to her heart condition, before Big Ben strikes.

Things to Note

  • Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness (interior monologue, free indirect discourse) technique attempts at psychological realism.
  • We experience the flow of Clarissa’s mind also with the sensorial richness of the present and the intrusion of the past.
  • The perspectival shifts of the book are also announced in the early sections; what we receive is a democratic vision as we move in and out of people’s minds.
  • Clarissa is haunted by the past even as she delights in the present: an indication of Woolf’s treatment of time.
  • On the one hand, the steady, chronological, authoritative, relentless, rational, ostensibly ‘masculine’ movement of Big Ben.
  • On the other, a far more fluid conception of time: repetitive, cyclical, emotional, preoccupied with thwarting linearity by returning to the past; in short, Woolf’s ‘feminine’ subversion.