A Single Day; ‘At the Bay’ and Mrs Dalloway

Abstract

Abstract In an article written in 1927 for the Dial, a Chicago magazine which published fiction by Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, the American poet Conrad Aitken observes that, in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Woolf writes ‘as if she never for a moment wished us to forget the frame of the picture, and the fact that the picture was a picture’. This chapter focuses on ‘At the Bay’ and Mrs Dalloway, because both take place in a single day and pivot on liminal experience, requiring a structure that accommodates the uncertainties of liminality. The writers’ obsession with the form of their fiction is explored in the context of changes in the visual arts as, for both of them, looking at painting and talking with painters provided routes into modernity. In writing, their expression of modernity was the form and narrative voice that allowed the reader to experience the destabilizing of the symbolic order, creating not imitating the life of human consciousness.