Mrs. Dalloway, Clocks And Sounds

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Very Insightfull Essay on Clock symbolism and importance of sound in Mrs. Dalloway

The beautiful and complex narrative of Mrs. Dalloway seems to defy readers' powers of description. David Dowling's Mapping Streams of Consciousness exemplifies a sense one must ``reconstruct'' the text in order to understand it. In a section entitled ``A Reading,'' Dowling dissects the novel into neat structural packages so the reader can easily study its anatomy. He includes maps of London showing various characters' movements and intersections, an hourly chronology of the day of Clarissa's party, character sketches condensed from details scattered in the text, and, in the appendix, a kind of ``miniature concordance'' that provides counts for some 32 words (``India'' appears 25 times).

Other studies of Mrs. Dalloway are less detailed but serve as well to illustrate the difficulties of describing its narrative patterns. In ``Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ideology: Language and Perception in Mrs. Dalloway,'': Teresa L. Ebert discusses binary structures--``counterpointing...visions'' (Ebert 152)--in the novel's language. Building on Nancy Topping Bazin's Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, she explores how female and male polarities in the text are resolved in images of androgyny. Instead of metaphor and metonymy, Caroline Webb examines the ``anti-allegorical'' nature of the text (Webb 279). In ``Life After Death: The Allegorical Progress of Mrs. Dalloway,'' she argues that the narrative invites us to look for a ``hidden story,'' but ultimately frustrates our expectations (Webb 279). Focussing on the narrator as a specifically created presence in the work, Sharon Stockton refers to classical physics and phenomenology to show Woolf ``deconstructing the conventi!
ons of authoritarian representation'' (Stockton, ``Turbulence in the Text: Narrative Complexity in Mrs. Dalloway'' 51).

The novel's narrative has also been described specifically i...