Mrs. Dalloway was a challenging read because it flowed from one person’s consciousness into the next, often leaving me confused as to whose head I was in on any given page. Though I admired this amorphous stream-of-consciousness technique, I must admit I found it quite exhausting.
Exhausting as it may be, however, the omniscient stream-of-consciousness style does reinforce what I think is a central theme in the novel: the often invisible connectivity or sense of community (and/or shared estrangement) between people in a world where increasing commercialization (exemplified by the plane advertising toffee) and the after-effects of World War I have created a profound sense of of social disconnectedness–– “It was unsatisfactory, they [Peter and Clarissa] agreed, how little one knew people” (21, 152). One of my favourite images in the novel is at the start, when everybody is waiting for the car of some figurehead to pass, paused and eagerly anticipating greatness:
London is a grass grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known. (16)
This image, to me, seemed startlingly morbid in the midst of what seemed to be a rather quaint and picturesque scenario, vaguely reminiscent of The Beatles’ Penny Lane. This image reveals a deep social uncertainty, a fear, in the aftermath of war, that world-ending disaster is inevitable, (“we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship”) and that everyone is just passing their time with parties and other frivolities until they are simply a collection of bones and baubles (77).
Predictably enough considering my thesis topic, I found the most interesting perspective in the novel to be Septimus Smith’s. Although Septimus, a World War I veteran, appears to be mad from the perspective of outsiders and is pathologized by his physician, Dr. Holmes and his psychiatrist, Sir William Bradshaw, we get to see things from his perspective, and once we are inside his madness, we come to question how much of his madness is really illness (in any organic sense), and how much of it is just trauma blurring the boundaries of perception. Septimus is certainly critical of psychiatry, believing that doctors embody the worst of human nature, preying on people in times of weakness (99):
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless. (98)
Septimus even goes so far as to commit suicide to escape institutionalization at the novel’s close. Though he makes efforts to manage his own madness, he does not trust it to the management of others (149, 22).
Additionally, Septimus is not the only one to have what might be considered strange thoughts or skewed perception, since Woolf reveals similar kinds of secret feelings in her “sane” characters––especially Clarissa who feels that certain banal moments bear a certain sacredness, that she has “odd affinities” with people she’s never met, that she is wasting away when she finds out Lady Bruton has not invited her to lunch, and who has sexual feelings towards women (29, 31, 34, 153). The stream-of-consciousness technique is particularly useful in critiquing his madness, furthermore, since if Septimus is mad, and we are experiencing his consciousness, then we are mad too. I also found his wife Rezia’s perspective interesting, as she alternates between being angry at him for his madness, and being sympathetic, loving and defensive of him towards others (23-6, 65-71, 83-98, 140-9).
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