Urban Spaces, Fragmented Consciousness, and Indecipherable Meaning in Mrs Dalloway

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway begins with the image of opening doors, immediately connecting the spatial with the temporal, as the middle-aged Clarissa’s voyage out into the streets of Westminster on a bright morning in mid-June 1923 invokes the parallel time-frame in which her eighteen-year-old self opened the French windows at Bourton on a similar June day in 1889, plunging into the fresh country air. Inside her house, the rooms are being prepared for her evening party, with the doors taken off their hinges, while outside she walks the city streets to Mulberry’s florist shop, where she will buy flowers to round off the preparations. The vivid spatial image of swinging hinges, and of thresholds crossed, is inseparable from the temporal process of remembering; in fact, the process of crossing and re-crossing thresholds works on both levels, as Clarissa crosses Victoria Street, walking through St James’s Park into Piccadilly and along Bond Street, moving between scenes of urban bustle with a brief rural interlude, just as she anticipates Peter Walsh’s imminent arrival at her party by recalling certain hurtful phrases he had uttered at Bourton. Her mind moves with her body from a feeling of satisfied elation at the early summer morning to the sombre remembrance of past experience and its associated feelings of dissatisfaction, and back to the present moment, as she pushes through the swing doors of the florist shop.