Fugues, Flights and Free Association

Abstract

Chapter four opens with a close reading of Mrs Dalloway outlining the ‘fugal’ form of the novel. It places the novel in a matrix of medical, musical and military discourses about fugue, proposing that the novel’s form is shaped by Bach’s music. It considers the way music informs Woolf’s representation of shell shock and hysterical fugue, and thus her response to the First World War. The chapter then turns to two related questions: the association of music and homosexuality in Mrs Dalloway, Jacob’s Room and The Waves, and the relationship between music and free association in Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and ‘The String Quartet’. The chapter proposes that music informs Woolf’s representation of (homo)sexuality, and that music provides Woolf with a means of both creating and disrupting textual order.