Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway

Abstract

One important kind of literary criticism involved in the turn describes and theorizes the ethical relations that readers perceive among characters or between characters and the narrator.1 My interest in such value structures within a literary text, however, begins from an issue still rarely treated. I am concerned with experimental narratives with third-person narrators who deliberately make it difficult for readers to discern what evaluative stance they are supposed to have toward characters, events, or descriptions.2 In Virginia Woolf s middle-period fiction, the narrator's tonal cues within the text are frequently contradictory, inconclusive, or simply absent. By tonal cues I mean textual markers that prompt readers to have one affective response rather than another a response like sympathy, condescension, irritation, suspicion, approval and to make conscious or unconscious evaluations accordingly: a character is good, pompous, or inferior; a passage of dialogue or indirect discourse is misleading, pretentious, or to the point. In the fiction that interests me here, third-person narrators give conflicting or insufficient guidance about whether a character is admirable or trustworthy or about whether a passage in the narrative voice or an utterance by a character should be regarded seriously or ironically. In Peter Rabinowitz's terms, readers lack the wherewithal to make snap moral judgments, a loss that makes moral judgment puzzling and thus important to the process of reading (Rabinowitz 84-93). Mrs. Dalloway, one of the most beloved of Woolf 's novels, is also one of the most experimental in terms of the values its third-person narrator complicates or withholds. Its affective indeterminacy leaves elements of the story open to different responses, and these responses cue conscious or unconscious judgments.3 For