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Walking the Web in the Lost London of "Mrs. Dalloway" Author(S): ANDELYS WOOD Source: Mosaic: an Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol

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Walking the Web in the Lost London of Walking the Web in the Lost London of "Mrs. Dalloway" Author(s): ANDELYS WOOD Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2 (June 2003), pp. 19-32 Published by: University of Manitoba Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44029458 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:18 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 University of Manitoba is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:18:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms In Mrs. Dalloway, landmarks of 1920s London offer readers a web of spatial and temporal relationships: the novel's walks are located specifically but also problematically. Attention to Woolf's careful interweaving of time and place leads to fuller understanding of Mrs. Dalloway and of the London in its pages. Walking the Web in the Lost London of Mrs. Dalloway ANDELYS WOOD Virginia outer same sameVirginia time, time, details though,Woolf outerthough, many of is timecriticsdetails usually have many noted ofand considered timethe extreme place andcritics particularity than place have a with ofthanpsychological time with noted inner theinner exploration extremeexploration novelist, particularity of less ofcharacter. character. concerned of AtAt time withthe the and place in Mrs. Dalloway ; whose working title was "The Hours" (see Diary 248, 19 June 1923). References to specific landmarks locate the characters in a network of spa- tial and temporal relationships as they walk through London on a June day punctuated by the striking of clocks. In fact, readers who attempt to follow both time and place cues will find discrepancies, even impossibilities: nearly all the walks that clearly structure the novel must take considerably longer than the time so precisely allotted to them, as Woolf, herself an experienced London walker, surely knew. Instead of assuming, as Jean Guiguet does, that time and place in Mrs. Dalloway do not "correspond to any- thing real" (388), focussing attention on real-world correspondences of both provides insight into Woolf's method. The challenge to readers is that the reality of the novel Mosaic 36/2 0027- 1276-03/0 19014$02.00©Mosaic This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:18:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 20 Mosaic 36/2 (June 2003) involves London then and now, time in the mind and time on the clock, the experi- ences of writer, characters, and readers, all connected by the novel's web. Even though, as Jeremy Hawthorn comments, "part of the central experience of Mrs. Dalloway is that at any given point in the novel the reader is nearly always able to pinpoint the exact location of what is happening with complete accuracy" (66), critics have frequently treated the temporal impossibilities of many of the walks as mistakes. Woolf certainly was thinking about accuracy of place, as can be seen in what Brenda Silver describes as a "holograph map of 'Green Park,' 'Stratton St,' and 'Bond Street'" on the back of notes about Chaucer (240). Silver dates the notebook (Monk's House Papers, B.2q.) to 1922, during Woolf's writing of the short story "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" (Silver 235), which was published in July 1923 and extensively revised to become the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway. Evidence that she was similarly deliberate about the time scheme of the novel may be seen by examining the walks themselves and attempting some of the "processes of retrieval" that Sonita Sarker asserts must be involved in any study of Woolf (59). The walk that has received the most attention from commentators is the one that opens Mrs. Dalloway ; Clarissa's, from her house near Dean's Yard, Westminster, to the florist's in Bond Street. Big Ben strikes the hour as she waits to cross Victoria Street: "There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable" (4). Most critics have assumed that the hour is 10:00 a.m., although Harvena Richter makes a case for 9:00 a.m. both to fit the pattern of canonical hours in multiples of three and to give Clarissa time to complete her errand and return home by 1 1:00, the first defi- nite time provided (237). John Sutherland accepts the 10:00 a.m. starting time and even timed the walk himself at "some thirty-five minutes easy walking" (219). Not entirely seriously, he proposes that to have been home by 1 1:00, she must have had to take a taxi, which is not mentioned because taking a taxi was routine for a woman of her class (223). He thus suggests that the apparent temporal impossibility of Clarissa's walk actually reflects the limitations of Woolf's class perspective. I suggest that it is part of a larger pattern, calling into question the realities of time and place. Sutherland also mentions the novel's second walk as fitting with difficulty into the time allotted (221). Septimus Warren Smith and his wife begin in Bond Street after Clarissa has entered the florist's shop and end in Regent's Park, where they see the airplane and its skywriting. David Daiches and John Flower, tracing "A Walking Tour with Mrs. Dalloway" in Literary Landscapes of the British Isles : A Narrative Atlas , comment that the couple "must have gone pretty smartly up New Bond Street and Harley Street" (84). The Warren Smiths' experience of London, though, is very differ- ent from Clarissa's, or from Peter Walsh's in the next walking sequence. While Clarissa This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:18:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Andelys Wood 2 1 notices people, traffic, the "slow-swimming happy ducks" in St. James's Park (5) and landmarks with personal associations - Devonshire House and Bath House remind her of parties; Hatchards' window display makes her think of "tears and sorrows; courage and endurance" (10); the Bond Street shops recall her father and the world of "almost perfect gloves" to be had before the war ( 1 1 ) - Septimus and Rezia experience only confusing patterns of sound and colour. Septimus's madness and Rezia's fear of people noticing keep them from perceiving details, so that their route from Bond Street to the park is not specified, nor is it clear exactly when they arrive in Regent's Park. Unlike Clarissa with her particular errand, Septimus and Rezia are wandering, filling in time before his noon appointment with the Harley Street doctor, and their route has no special significance. However, their starting point opposite the shop where Clarissa is buying flowers, whatever time it is, makes this the closest spatial proximity between Clarissa and Septimus and parallels the scene near the end when she feels psychologically close to him as she imagines his suicide. In this walk, the indeterminacy of time and place reflects the troubled inner lives of the walkers. Like Septimus and Rezia, when Peter Walsh leaves Clarissa's house at 1 1:30 he is killing time before an appointment, in his case with solicitors in Lincoln's Inn. Unlike them, he notices many details of a specific route: leaving the Westminster house "in time with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour" (52), he walks up Whitehall, follows a young woman from Trafalgar Square across Piccadilly, Oxford Street, and Great Portland Street, dozes off on a bench in Regent's Park, and wakes again just as a clock strikes "the quarter to twelve" (77). Peter, a man of fifty-something, has covered more than two miles in less than fifteen minutes; no wonder he needs a nap. Besides, during that fifteen minutes, like Clarissa in her walk to Bond Street, Peter has travelled even farther in his mind than the distance from Westminster to Regent's Park. Looking at his reflection in a car showroom window, he thinks of his recent past: "All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a dis- trict twice as big as Ireland" (53). The belated bells of St. Margaret's make him think of Clarissa as hostess and of how much older she is than he remembered, and the sur- roundings of official Whitehall remind him of the more distant past and his personal failures (55). Following the young woman from Trafalgar Square and making up adventures leads to an expansive appreciation of the city: "A splendid achievement in its own way, after all, London; the season; civilisation" (60). The park takes him all the way back to childhood and a dream of a "solitary traveller" for whom "nothing exists outside [them] except a state of mind" (62). Waking, though, he vividly remembers "the final scene, the terrible scene" at Bourton when Clarissa rejected him, when he This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:18:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 22 Mosaic 36 /2 (June 2003) knew that she would marry Richard Dalloway (69).
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