Difference and Continuity: The Voices of Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

My party to-night! Remember my party to-night! [Clarissa] cried, having to raise her voice against the roar of the open air, and, overwhelmed by the traffic and the sound of all the clocks striking, her voice . . . sounded frail and thin and very far away. This moment in Virginia Woolf's novel, when Clarissa Dalloway calls after the departing Peter Walsh to remind him of the evening's party, offers a dynamic illustration of the interaction between women and the modern city. In Mrs. Dalloway, as in other female visions of the city, women's voices must contend with the noise of urban space, an arena traditionally defined and experienced as masculine. As Claudine Herrmann has observed, Physical or mental, man's is a of domination, hierarchy and conquest, a sprawling, showy space, a full space (169). Surprisingly, Woolf's novel may at first appear to recreate just such an approach to space, as its third-person narrator often suggests the teller's vast control, an imposition of uniformity; furthermore, salient linking devices such as the motor car in Bond Street, the skywriting, and the hourly chimes can be criticized as transitions too simple and intrusive, ones that emphasize the narrator's victory over urban complexity-a mastery of both time and (Rosenberg 212, 217). Nevertheless, even such overt methods of connection and unification point to more crucial concerns of the text: the nature of a social order and women's place(s) in relation to it; the passage of time, with implications of an irretrievable past and inevitable death; ways of reading and interpreting the city, particularly as a bastion of patriarchal institutions (Squier, Women Writers 3-10). Virginia Woolf works with the different voices of her re-created London in two seemingly antagonistic ways, both to unify and to fragment urban time and space. Just as Clarissa's personal voice must contend with the loud presence of the patriarchal city, so must the woman