Authorial Point of View in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dallo Way Author(S): David Neal Miller Source: the Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol

Authorial Point of View in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dallo Way Author(s): David Neal Miller Source: The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 2, No. 2 (May, 1972), pp. 125-132 Published by: Journal of Narrative Theory Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225278 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:28 UTC

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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms AUTHORIAL POINT OF VIEW IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S MRS. DALLO WAY

David Neal Miller

The subtle narrative mode of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway has created confusion in critical literature: the voice of the third-person narrator, rarely present except to identify the speaker or consciousness through which the novel is being presented at a particular moment, is hardly adequate to establish an authorial point of view (we refer of course to the author's persona and not to the historical Virginia Woolf) distinct from and more reliable than the points of view of the individual characters. Yet Daiches, Hafley, and Roberts' represent the consensus in "sensing" an authorial point of view, though they must turn to the author's critical writings for substantiation of their intuition. How, within a work, may an author establish a reliable point of view in the absence or near-absence of an omniscient narrator, addressing the reader "behind the backs" of his narrative counsciousnesses? Several devices by which this is accomplished in Mrs. Dalloway will be discussed in this article. Philip Toynbee notes a "failure of differentiation" in Mrs. Dalloway since the "same language encloses nearly all the people in the book."'2 It is certainly true that the style and tone of reported thought (though not of direct discourse) is remarkably constant for all characters; I would suggest, however, that this is rather a signal than a lapse: the reader is alerted that the linguistic surface does not belong fully to the character whose thoughts are being recorded, but at least in part to the recording consciousness. Thus the reappearance of groups of words and images in the thoughts of more than one character does not seem improbable. This device--of which the reader but not the characters are aware-is Virginia Woolf's primary means of establishing an authorial point of view. The authorial point of view identifies Clarissa Dalloway with Septimus Warren Smith by page 211 (of the Harvest edition).3 Clarissa has a moment of insight while repairing her favorite green dress:

125

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Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking. (pp. 58-59) The reader's attention is drawn to this extraordinary passage by more than its beauty. It is one of only three extended attempts to render consciousness in language and syntax other than that used uniformly for action and reflection, setting it aside as reflection of a different order. (This passage approaches interior monologue:4 the sentence cadence is slowed down and made rhythmic by repetition of verbs depicting the sea's movement--"collect, overbalance, and fall," "Renews, begins, collects, lets fall"; by frequent replacement of commas by semicolons; by a lack of characteristic parenthetical observations, and by the alliteration-assonance of the final sentence.) Clarissa's insight, that individual fear may be stilled by identification with the superindividual flux which surrounds all things, is identical to Septimus' 152 pages later, although only the narrator and the reader are aware of this. The establishment of an authorial point of view by means of linguistic surface places a burden of recognition upon the reader; he must note the reappearance of words and patterns previously encountered or deprive himself of authorial commentary. Septimus, lying on the sofa of his sitting room, echoes Clarissa's insight:

Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing. Every power poured its treasures on his head, and his hand lay there on the back of his sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on the top of the waves, while far away on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more. (p. 211)

The author's hand is subtle: the sea simile and the common insight which it conveys do not reappear later in the novel, but are rather made conspicuous by the fourth of five mutations of Shakespeare's "Fear no more the heat o' the sun,/ Nor the furious winter's rages.""5 This readily-noted repetition acts as authorial signal of the importance of the passage which it accompanies, as well as (a) providing a measure of Clarissa's assimilation of the Shakespearean fragment6 and (b) further linking her with Septimus: the fifth repetition of "Fear no more," in Clarissa's final reverie on death, which we shall later examine in detail, recalls the identification here made. The narrative voice has, then, established an identification of Clarissa Dallo- way with Septimus Warren Smith and has provided the reader, by means of

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recurring word patterns on the linguistic surface, with authorial confirmation of this identification by page 211, 73 pages before Clarissa senses it (Septimus never does sense it). Does the narrative voice share this insight? That is, need the reader accept its substance as well as its existence as part of his emotional contact? Hafley takes simple identification as the "central movement" of the novel; Daiches assumes the authorial validity of its substance, but only on the basis of the author's preface to the Modem Library edition of 1928.7 There is, I believe, hitherto unexamined textual confirmation of the validity of the mutual insight; we shall examine several techniques of confirmation in the following paragraphs. Characteristic of Virginia Woolf's prose style is the frequent use of simile, the controlling consciousness of which is often difficult to identify. From whose consciousness do the following emanate?

It was a splendid morning too. Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets. (p. 82)

There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and lovers . . . . (p. 69)

The former might indeed be the thoughts of Peter Walsh in narrated monologue;8 the latter could not possibly be those of Rezia, certainly not as she would have expressed them. They are, rather, literary devices belonging to the linguistic, surface and express the authorial point of view. In the above contexts they establish the convention of privileged simile and lend authorial validity to the insights of Clarissa and Septimus, presented in both cases as simile. The reader who perceives this convention will give special credence to statements presented as simile. The marking of clocktime within the novel is a narrative device which would appear to serve three functions: (a) to orient the reader to the progression of external action and thus satisfy a residual demand for story line; (b) to provide a device-the chimes of Big Ben-to mediate between two characters' consciousnesses (the motor car and aeroplane serve similar functions); and (c) to reassert the temporal determination of at least the outer man. (Time passes regardless of one's attitude toward its passage: Clarissa is, after her insight, still pale from her illness and fifty years old.) The inescapability of time's passage is asserted twice in the same words, first as Clarissa's and then as Peter's thoughts; repetition of word patterns on the linguistic surface, we have established, presents the authorial point of view. Big Ben strikes, "first a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable" (pp. 5, 177). This assertion, however, is decisively undermined-also in the authorial voice; indeed it must be, since preoccupation with time will be identified as the common denominator of those characters whose world-views are rejected by the narrative consciousness. Ironic commentary on the irrevocability of Big Ben's strokes is presented thrice in the authorial voice: after the strokes, "the leaden circles dissolve in

This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 128 The Journal of Narrative Technique the air" (pp. 72, 142, 283). This suggests that clocktime is swallowed and rendered ineffectual by the flux which surrounds it-the image is of metal consumed by water and air, and will be examined further when Peter Walsh's knife play is discussed below. If the inescapability of time's passage is still in question, and the double perspective deprives the reader of rhetorical certitude, discrediting the characters with positive attitudes towards clocktime will resolve it in favor of the atemporal insight of Clarissa and Septimus. Three characters are notably preoccupied with time: Sir William Bradshaw, Dr. Holmes, and Lucrezia Smith; all are discredited. Sir William most explicitly lives by the scale, the clock, and "divine proportion": he has thirty years' experience and spends half his time undoing the blunders of general practioners; each patient, who is diagnosed within two or three minutes, is alloted three- quarters of an hour; after six months' rest, the patient weighing seven stone six will come out of the sanitorium weighing twelve. Sir William's perception is discredited, however, by inconsistency between his self-estimation and consciousness as revealed directly to the reader: he maintains that "he never hurries his patients" (p. 146), yet immediately wishes to terminate the interview with Septimus, who had already exhausted his forty-five minutes. Their views on the nature of health appear within eight pages of one another:

"Communication is health; communication is happiness, communication-" Septimus muttered. (p. 141) * *

Health we must have; and health is proportion .... (p. 149)

Two characters' views are juxtaposed; one character is discredited; the views of the other are thus rhetorically, if not logically, confirmed. By making Sir William time's advocate, Woolf establishes an authorial point of view rejecting the concern with time and provides authorial sanction for the atemporal, self- effacing mutual insight of Septimus and Clarissa. (Dr. Holmes and, to the extent that she is influenced by him, Lucrezia Warren Smith are similarly discredited. Holmes exposes his lack of perception when informed of Septimus' suicide: "Who could have foretold it?" Immediately thereafter, he consoles himself with the predicatable passage of clocktime: "The clock was striking--one, two, three: how sensible the sound was . . ." [p. 277]. Rezia, though a more complex character, also serves the rhetorical function of discrediting time consciousness; to Septimus' "Beauty is everywhere," she replies, "It is time" [p. 105].) The reader, although he has not yet been addressed in the authorial voice, has thus been instructed to reject the world-views of those characters whose time consciousness opposes the mutual insight. There is, however, a unique lapse in which a bitter and undisguised omniscient voice identifies time consciousness with the imposition of one's will upon another: Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable . . . . Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. (p. 151)

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Sir William Bradshaw (as well as Miss Kilman) is guilty of proselytism, the one trespass sufficiently condemnable to have induced the narrative voice to speak against it. Conversion is, in this context, the opposite of release of individuality to the flux; authorial bitterness toward it-however regrettable the lapse in narrative mode-confirms decisively the validity of the mutual insight. Peter Walsh is a more rounded character than Bradshaw or Holmes and hence less effective as signal in establishing the authorial point of view. His more genial self-assertion receives equal condemnation, however. Peter can identify with neither the flux nor with more tangible inanimate objects; both Clarissa and Sally Seton remember in identical words that he prefers "men to cauliflowers" (pp. 4, 294), a repetition on the linguistic surface which, as we have seen, expresses an authorial observation. Not men, but rather specific individuals (Clarissa but not the intruding Elizabeth, the young girl pursued to her home from Trafalgar Square but not the intervening crowd), are objects of his attention. Peter's consistent lack of success in personal encounters leads one to question the viability of the one-to-one relationship;1t overattention to the particular, it is suggested, precludes awareness of the general. Here the author uses incidents within the narrative to discredit an attitude opposed to the mutual insight. The narrative consciousness dwells on Peter Walsh's play with his pocket- knife, establishing it as leitmotiv of individual self-assertion. He fingers his pocket-knife before meeting Clarissa, when jealous of Daisy, while following the young girl, when faced with the flux:

The brain must wake now. The body must contract now, entering the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars were standing, and bright women were descending, the soul must brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his pocket-knife. (p. 250)

This passage has the potential of leading to the insight shared by Clarissa and Septimus, and sanctioned by the authorial point of view: the parallel sentence structure, repetition of words, relaxed causality and retarded cadence of the second sentence might have led to a moment of personal self-effacement. The abrupt first and third sentences culminating with the opened pocket-knife, however, show that Peter does not yield to the reverie; he thus makes himself still more condemnable than Bradshaw or Holmes, since he (a) is a character with whom the reader is potentially sympathetic-he does love Clarissa Dalloway and has the final word in a novel which records his thoughts at length, and since he (b) possesses the potential for insight. The reader is not privileged to excuse him this weakness, since the narrative voice chooses to draw attention to Peter Walsh's hostility to the mutual insight by means of the pocket-knife leitmotiv. There is, finally, an instance in which the reader's privileged knowledge of a situation discredits Peter Walsh's limited perception of it: Peter sees Rezia Warren Smith, distraught, imploring Septimus to tell her the time, and is enchanted to find "lovers squabbling under a tree" (p. 107). Exposure of a

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character's inadequate perception of a situation which is also presented omnis- ciently to the reader in the narrative voice is a device used to discredit authorially the self-assertion of Peter Walsh, as well as the time consciousness of Sir William Bradshaw and Dr. Holmes. We have seen, then, that Virginia Woolf does not simply identify Septimus and Clarissa, but rather establishes their insight as the authorial point of view "behind the backs" of the selected consciousnesses; dimensions of the narrative of which the characters are ignorant-repetitions on the linguistic surface, leitmotiv, exposure of a character's inadequate perception-are thus reserved by the narrator for direct communication with the reader. At least one other dimension independent of the limited points of view contributes to the authorial point of view: the external structure of the novel, which is, I believe, emblematic of the atemporal, superindividual common insight. Mrs. Dalloway lacks volume and chapter divisions; transitions between memory and observation, although always made explicit by the narrative voice, occur at irregular intervals; transitions between selected consciousnesses are similarly announced but unpredictable. Although Big Ben strikes each hour with "irrevocable" regularity, the hour struck is seldom mentioned, nor is there any correlation between Erzaehlzeit and erzaehlte Zeit; that is, the length of narrative between hourly strokes is not constant. Proportion and clocktime, the rhetoric of external structure suggests, are inadequate measures of human time, and hence of human life. If the external structure rejects proportion and clocktime, the narrative frame is subjected to minute temporal definition: the action is confined to a single day in mid-June, 1923; clocks strike over twenty times within the work: "shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, clocks . . . nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the advantages of a sense of proportion" (p. 154). This temporal overdefinition is ironically inaccurate, since memory broadens the narrative time span from one day to portions of several lifetimes. The plot, furthermore, does not reside in the novel's external action-the planning and execution of a party, the suicide of a shellshocked young man, the return of Peter Walsh-but rather in the emergence and authorial validation of shared insight. Clocktime can measure neither the flow of memories associationally evoked nor Clarissa and Septimus' movement toward self-effacement and identification with the flux. (This suggests, as Hafley correctly points out,10 that the analogy to Ulysses is inapt: Joyce demonstrates the richness of a single day, Virginia Woolf the inadequacy of a day as a measure of human time.) The ironic inadequacy of the narrative frame thus further confirms the authorial point of view. This essay will conclude with a consideration of Clarissa Dalloway's second extended moment of insight, with which the rhetorical movement of the novel also concludes. We have examined how repetition of "Fear no more," in addition to serving other functions, acts as authorial signal of an important passage; the Shakespearean fragment appears for the fifth time in Clarissa's final reverie on death. To this linguistic recurrence is added a structural recurrence, which also alerts the reader that especial attention is due the passage which it precedes:

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before throwing himself on the area railings, Septimus notes that an old man walking down the staircase opposite stops and stares at him (p. 226); before Clarissa's second moment of insight, the elderly lady in the window opposite similarly stares at her, establishing momentary contact before turning off her light (p. 283). (One remembers the young lady's glance in Peter Walsh's direc- tion, which, however, fails to meet his eyes [p. 81]. Peter stands structurally condemned to remain outside the mutual insight.) Structural recurrence here acts as authorial signal, as has linguistic recurrence from early in Mrs. Dalloway. Upon hearing of the suicide of one of Sir William Bradshaw's patients, Clarissa initially feels offended at the intrusion of death into her party. She retires to an empty, small room and experiences a moment of insight: The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on . . . . The words came to her. Fear no more the heat of the sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him-the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. (p. 283)

The substance of the original insight-that is, the desirability of identification with the flux- is not restated; rather, the word patterns which established it as the authorial point of view simultaneously evoke the insight and give precedence to its newly stated corollary that death, especially death through suicide, effectively effaces individuality and re-establishes contact with the flux. This corollary is sanctioned by the narrative voice, since it is (a) introduced by privileged structural repetition, (b) placed in juxtaposition with the word patterns which established the authorial validity of the mutual insight, and (c) presented through the consciousness of a character whose moments of insight have proven reliable. The structural parallel of strangers' glances met, which precedes Septimus' suicide and' Clarissa's contemplation thereof (in an earlier manuscript version, Clarissa herself commits suicide),11 acts not only as authorial signal of an important passage, but also as emblem of the communication attained through death. "Death was an attempt to communicate" (p. 280), Clarissa realizes, and the reader accepts the nature and efficacy of the attempt. The readiness with which the reader also accepts Clarissa Dalloway's identification with a young man whom she had never met-she knew from Sir William Bradshaw only that he had served in the army and had later committed suicide-is a measure of the prior establishment of an authorial point of view linking Septimus with Clarissa; the realization by the title character on page 283 of an identification completed on the linguistic surface by page 211 provides the "sense of an ending" for the novel. Virginia Woolf has, then, sought and made use of a number of devices to establish an authorial point of view in Mrs. Dalloway (repetition on the linguistic surface, privileged simile, leitmotiv, discrediting of characters with faulty perception, external structure emblematic of the central insight), despite

This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 132 The Journal of Narrative Technique the near-absence of an omniscient voice. She has thus provided the impression of narration through multiple, fallible consciousnesses while retaining the privilege of direct communication with the reader "behind the backs" of her selected consciousnesses. An unusually heavy burden of recognition is placed upon the reader of a novel in this narrative mode; an unusually subtle and beautiful interplay between authorial and limited points of view is his reward.

Merrill College University of California Santa Cruz, California

NOTES

1. Of the few works which discuss point of view in Mrs. Dalloway, the following were found most useful: David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (N.Y.: New Directions, 1942); James Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); John Hawley Roberts, " 'Vision and Design' in Virginia Woolf," PMLA, LXI (Sep- tember 1946), 835-47. 2. Philip Toynbee, "Virginia Woolf: A Study of Three Experimental Novels," Horizon, XIV (November 1946), 290. 3. Mrs. Dalloway (London: Horgarth Press, 1925), cited after the Harvest Book edition (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, n.d.). Subsequent references will appear in the text. 4. An excellent discussion of interior monologue and stream of consciousness which helps clear up the terminological muddle is W. J. Lillyman's, "The Interior Monologue in James Joyce and Otto Ludwig," CL, XXIII (1971), 45-54. 5. Mrs. Dalloway, pp. 13, 44, 59, 211, 283. The source is Shakespeare's Cymbeline (IV, 2), Guiderius and Arviragus' song to the mock-dead Imogen. 6. The fragment, originally read by Clarissa in Harchard's shop window, loses first its quotation marks (p. 59), then, with the interpolation of "says the heart" (p. 211), its identity as quotation. 7. Daiches, p. 75. 8. Dorrit Cohn suggests "narrated monologue" as an English equivalent of erlebte R ede and style indirect libre in her "Narrated Monologue: Definition of a Fictional Style," CL, XXI (1966), 109. Cf. also Lillyman, op. cit. 9. Indeed, sexual love is treated with disdain throughout the novel; it is, perhaps, the ultimate imposition of self upon another. Does Septimus speak authorially on p. 134, "Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end"? 10. Hafley, p. 10. Cf. also Hafley on Bergson's distinction between "time" and "duration," p. 70. 11. Cf. Charles C. Hoffman, "Virginia Woolf's Manuscript Revisions of Mrs. Dalloway," MFS, XIV (Summer 1968), 171-86.

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