Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway - 5

[PolarisDiB]

Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway is having a party. As she prepares for the party, she reminisces over her past decisions and what they've meant to her, and as people from her past begin showing up for the party, multiple streams of conscious melt together to provide a portrait of the post-WWI upper class.

This novel was originally intended to be a short story, and it certainly has the overall arch and construction of a short story. Because of this, it can come across as a bit winded, but it's actually a lot shorter than it almost turned out to be... as evidenced by a side project, "Mrs. Dalloway's Party", which is a collection of short stories about characters that were ultimately cut out of the whole of "Mrs. Dalloway."

I would prefer it if it were a short story. Something about the way it jumps from character to character, getting involved sometimes in two different characters' thought processes, makes it sometimes distracting, and oftentimes I lost track of what the intent was. The short story collection of "Mrs. Dalloway's Party" makes it seem like "Mrs. Dalloway" would have been amazing as a collection of short stories that are each individual portraits of the characters who showed up to the party and what happened to them over that one day, but instead of breaking them apart Woolf chose to mix them together. I, personally, don't think it works as well as it could have.

I'm also not quite sure Woolf understands shell-shock. Of course such a phenomenon (later sent through different nomenclatures until currently settled on Post-traumatic Stress Disorder) wasn't well understood by anyone at the time, and as an external portrait of a suffering man, her prose works well enough. But the characters of the veteran and his wife seem ill-placed. According to the discussions I had over this novel, he is supposed to represent a doppelganger foil to Mrs. Dalloway, who is described as, "Someone not beautiful, not intelligent, but who loves life." As much as I tried to find it in there, however, I couldn't see it. Perhaps that's something to look more for while reading the novel the first time than to have to search out later.

At any rate, enough of the novel is enjoyable and the experimental prose is at least interesting, so that I can still see why this novel is published and regarded as a classic. However I'm not so sure it works as well as Virginia Woolf intended it to.

--PolarisDiB


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