London As a Principle of Structure in "Mrs
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LONDON AS A PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE IN "MRS. DALLOWAY" Author(s): Miroslav Beker Source: Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, VIRGINIA WOOLF NUMBER (Autumn 1972), pp. 375-385 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26279214 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:26 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern Fiction Studies This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LONDON AS A PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE IN MRS. DALLO WAY rrfr Miroslav Beker It has been noted by several critics that the city or locale in general is often of outstanding importance in modern fiction. In Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature we read that "the great city (Paris, London, New York) is the most real of the characters in many a modern novel."1 And writing about Madame Bovary Percy Lubbock says that "the town [Yonville] with its life is not behind the heroine, subdued in tone to make a background: it is with her, no less fully to the front; its value in the picture is as strong as her own."2 Referring to the locale in modern fiction, Hans Meyerhoff in his study on time in literature stresses that "the identity of the city has the same face as the identity of persons in the city. Fragments of lives in each are gathered together by a unitary symbolic frame of reference, which also constitutes the unit of the narrative itself."3 But the spatial character of modern fiction is probably given the most thorough-going treatment in Joseph Frank's study "Spatial Form in Modern Litera * Weilek and Warren, Theory of Literatur* (New York: Viking Pro«, 1956), p. 821. •Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New Yolk: Viking Pros, 1957), p. 85. •Ham Mey erhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley: Unlvenity of California Preu, 1955), pp. 39-40. 375 This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ture."4 Frank's general claim is that "modern literature is moving in the direction of spatial form," which means that the reader is intended to apprehend these works spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence. This claim calls into question what was traditionally taken for granted: that fiction as a narrative mode is expressed in time and that essentially it has a sequential character. According to Frank, Flaubert was among the first modern writers to practice the technique of simultaneity, but this was only a point of departure which in Joyce's Ulysses became the principle of spatial cross-references and symbolic allusions. Without too much effort we could think of other modern works supplying further evidence for Frank's thesis. We remember the central part of Lawrence's Rainbow (the Will and Anna section) and the novels by Lawrence Durrell and Robbe-Grillet. It has been observed that in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway the city—London—plays a greater part than the settings in her other novels. J. K. Johnstone is, therefore, right when he says that we shall enjoy the novel more fully if we know London: "The novel has an added savour, and its spatial relations are clearer, if the reader knows the West End; but it exists, nevertheless, as a self-contained work of art which is independent of outside knowledge."5' This is quite true, but the same claim could be made about many novels in which fa miliarity with the setting enhances understanding and enjoyment of the work: Dorothy Brewster says in the preface to her Virginia Woolf's London that the "roar of traffic in the Strand or Kingsway falls dif ferently on different ears in different circumstances,"6 and this is what really matters. But while Dorothy Brewster mostly describes Virginia Woolf's success in the presentation of London and its atmos phere, the present paper should try to answer how far the city in Mrs. Dalloway defines and tests the characters, how it reveals them and prompts the action of the novel. At the outset we could take the Dalloways and their place within the London scene. The beginning of the novel makes it clear that for Clarissa Dalloway the city (and Westminster in particular) has a profound meaning, a fascination that is not fully explicable in ra tional terms, amounting to a mystical communion with the locale. Thus we read about Clarissa in the first pages: 'The study was first published In three installments In The Sewanee Review in 1945 and later re-printed in J. W. Aldridge's collection of critical essays, Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920-1951 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952). 5 J. K. Johnstone, The Bloomsbury Group (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1954), p. 338. •Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf s London (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960), p. 9. 376 MODERN FICTION STUDIES This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a parti cular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting in doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason; they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane over-head was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.T The importance of London could hardly have been more suggestively introduced than in these remarks on the first pages of the novel. London has a somewhat similar effect on Clarissa Dalloway that nature had on Wordsworth; even amidst all the commotion of the metropolis she feels "a particular hush, a solemnity, an indescribable pause; a suspense . before Big Ben strikes." The experience is not unlike the ecstatic stasis in Wordsworth's poem when . the breath of this corporeal frame/ And even the motion of our human blood" are "almost suspended" and an extraordinary vision follows. On the other hand, Clarissa Dalloway's walk through London streets on a fine June morning probably defines and reveals her social character more suggestively than a detailed description would do. Clarissa's associations and reminiscences during the walk place her among the English upper classes; she muses on "Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh, and all the rest of it" (p. 6). She is on her way to a flower shop in Bond Street, London's most expensive shopping district. It is through Bond Street which "fascinated her" that she goes towards the shop "where they kept flowers for her." Clarissa notices that in this elegant part of the city there is not a single straw to be seen on the pavement. In the flower shop itself she is surrounded by a variety of flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilacs, carnations, roses, and irises. We know, however, that this social quality is only one facet of Clarissa's personality, that there is also another, darker side of her which is eroded by boredom and a feeling of futility and which even flirts with thoughts of suicide. This side of Clarissa's personality comes fully to the fore at her party when Sir William Bradshaw 'Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Inc., 1925), pp. 4-5. Subsequent references are to this edition. LONDON AS A PRINCIPLE 377 This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:54 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms breaks the news of Septimus' suicide—the death of the man who could not find his place in the vast multitudes of London and who ended his life by jumping out of the window of his Bloomsbury apartment. Clarissa remembers that once she had thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, "never anything else" (p. 280). But the other man was persistent and resolute in his pursuit because, after all, as Clarissa thought, Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; . one was alone. There was an embrace in death, (pp.