Techniques

Abstract

In her essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ written during the same year (1924) as the bulk of Mrs Dalloway, Woolf reviewed the need for a new method for fiction because the work of psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud had made people newly aware of the complexities of the human personality. She suggested that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’. The date was not arbitrary. It was then that her friend Roger Fry brought the first exhibition of post-Impressionist painting to London and the avant-garde began to understand, through the work of artists like Pablo Picasso, the ‘Modernist’ perception that people are not fixed entities who can be understood completely by an external observer. Woolf’s famous response to the change in artistic climate in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919) is worth quoting at length because Mrs Dalloway is an artistic exploration of the uneasiness which is being examined here:

more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves up in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant show of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there…. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.