Review of Virginia Woolf's Mrs.Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment."

There is a word that we usually do not associate with classics. Science-fiction? Sure. A thriller with a convoluted plot? Probably. A classic? Surely not. But then, Virginia Woolf's most famous classic, describing a single day's dusk-to-dawn in early 20th century London, can be accurately described with the word mind-boggling. I have a strange and inexplicable habit of pacing the mundane activities of my life to suit the rhythm of the book I am currently reading. As a child, I remember being asked to go to the grocery store while reading a Perry Mason and literally running to the shop until I realized that my life isn't as fast-paced as Gardner's courtroom thrillers and forced myself to slow down. After Dumbledore and Voldemart came face-to-face in Harry Potter and The Order of Phoenix, I couldn't sit down for a long time until my excitement subsided. Reading Mrs.Dalloway, I frequently found myself breathless trying to keep pace with the narrative.

There is not much in terms of plot in Mrs.Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway is hosting a party, while unconnectdly, a soldier fresh out of World War 1 is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The threads intersect as characters wander through the streets of London often coming across one another. The general rule of fiction writing is to take an ordinary character and put them in an extra-ordinary situation. Mrs.Dalloway is an extra-ordinary woman in ordinary circumstances, and this is not the first rule of writing that Virginia Woolf breaks. Mrs.Dalloway is humble though, imagining that "her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct". On the said day, she looks back at her life and reflects on what she has become. Her husband is normal in most senses of the word, but "with twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes - one of the tragedies of married life". Her reminiscences take her back to the days of her youth, and her friends Sally and Peter, making her wonder how her life would have turned out if she had married Peter.

There are two parallel philosophies in Mrs.Dalloway both of which are existential in nature and recognize the futility of human life. "One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that", says one strand, while the other strand counters this with "As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeons with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possible can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way".

The striking thing about Mrs. Dalloway is the narrative technique. The famed climatic scene from Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was my first exposure to the power of a stream-of-conscious narration. Mrs.Dalloway uses this technique throughout. The genius of Virginia Woolf lies in how one scene segues to the next, seamlessly transporting us from the mind from one narrator to the mind of another. Her descriptions are heavy, and her sentences are long, often extending to complete paragraphs. For example, consider these lines which describe the humble experience of a guy falling asleep in a public park : "A great brush swept smooth across his mind, sweeping across it moving branches, children's voices, the shuffle of feet, and people passing, and humming traffic, raising and falling traffic. Down, down he sank into the plumes and feathers of sleep, sank, and was muffled over". There is also a hint of rationality, feminism and a critique on how society views mental illness, all of which were much ahead of the time when the book was published (1925).

The narration of Mrs.Dalloway is an immense feat in itself, and to be honest, I felt it very hard to keep up at times. I struggled for the first few pages to dig into the story, and kept struggling each time I went back to the book after a break. But once I succeeded in digging into the narration, I couldn't come out of it. Mrs.Dalloway is a beautiful book. I regret that I didn't read it as carefully as I should have, but I will forever remember the wonderful experience of reading it. And I would probably revisit this book multiple times over the years to get more of the nuances.

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