Stream Of Consciousness in Mrs Dalloway - The Uncovered English
Mrs Dalloway
Novel by Virginia Woolf
Stream Of Consciousness in Mrs Dalloway
Mrs. Woolf belongs to the school of stream of consciousness novelist. She is on e of those great modern English novelist of the 20th century who had the courage to break free from the tradition and then to give a new direction, a new form amd a new spiritual direction to the modern English novel. she was totally dissatisfied with the current form of the novel as represented by Edwardians like Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy. In this novels 'life escapes' because life is not what they present in their novels. She has very clearly expressed her own views in her great essays 'Modern Fiction.' To her "life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged" but it 'is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.' The task of the novelist is "to convey this varying, the unknown and uncircumcised spirit." In her novels the inner life has been rendered convincingly in a modernistic way through stream of consciousness method. So Edward Alberd remarks, "It is in this field that Virginia Woolf makes her most important contribution to the novel by an over riding concern with character presentation by the stream of consciousness method."
According to K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, "In short novel like Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway the stream of consciousness method achieves its best results." The action of the novel is confined within a narrow frameworks of a single day in the life of the single figure, Mrs Clarissa Dalloway with relations to few other characters. In a modernistic through the minds of these few people. Mrs Clarissa Dalloway the focal point and all the actions revolve around her.
Virginia Woolf takes one day, from morning to evening in the life of Mrs Dalloway and builds her story through the events of the short time. Like a modern novel events are psychology. The whole novel is constructed in terms of the two dimensions kf space and time. "We either stand still in time and are led to contemplate diberse ebents in space or we stand still in space and are allowed to move up amd down temporarily in the consciousness of one individual." Says David Daiches The focal point alternates from the consciousness of one character to another and from London to Bourton, from the present to the past.
Though Woolf has not followed the conventional style in Mrs Dalloway, yet it is not chaotic and formless. She has evolved a new convention of her own that suits the ourpose of rendering inner reality or mind of the character. Joan Bennett has well commented that, "she adopts a rigorous process of selection and clarification and so each of her novels has a vigorous and positive structure." Mrs Dalloway is specially praiseworthy for the "brilliance and fitness of its construction."
The married couple has to face the given realities of life and their love is tested by many incidents and then comes out its true picture. According to Mrs Woolf trhe love is the colour of life, it exists throughout the life but passion is transitory and diminishing a mere bubble that gets evaporated at the first contact of prosaic and psychological which is a trait of modern mind.
According to David Diaches, "In Mrs Dalloway she limits its scope in time and place her characters are few and their relations to each other clear-cut: the time scheme is patterned wtih extraordinary care: and altogether the novel represents as neat a piece of construction as she has ever achieved." The stram of consciousness novel is essentially formless. But, "Mrs Dalloway is a brilliant achievement in which the novelist has reached the right compromise between the need for formed clarity and the requirement of stream of consciousness."
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