Beyond Modernist Shock: Virginia Woolf's Absorbing Atmosphere

Abstract

Shock has long been the dominant paradigm for theorizing urban modernism. Virginia Woolf’s representations of the city demand an adjusted framework: absorption is also a critical point of intersection between Woolf’s historical, psychological, and formal concerns. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) tells the story of a post-war metropolis that has absorbed the shocking blows of recent history. The novel also turns absorptive processes into a distinct narrative procedure: Woolf’s free indirect discourse allows the narrator to absorb and be absorbed by the novel’s extensive cast of characters. Woolf moves beyond the matter of how the psyche absorbs shock and trauma to consider how the urban atmosphere itself functions as shock absorber, a kind of affective repository for the past. Form and history meet in Woolf’s understanding of what is “in the air.”