Time in Mrs. Dalloway

We can infer from the original name of the novel, “the hours” that time is an important theme. Time is also one of the things that caught most of my attention when I was reading this novel as it definitely makes it’s reading more difficult. Time is presented in a very particular way. Even though, the story happens in less than 24 hours, as it starts in an early morning in June 1923 and ends the next day at 3am, a lot of things happen in just a few minutes of real. This is because throughout Mrs Dalloway we have two types of time: real time and “mental time”.  Virginia’s “ability to show the random yet patterned working of our minds gives us a realistic sense of mental time”. We can see what the characters see, we can feel what they feel and we can have privilege access to the set of memories that unfold when the situation unchains them.

“The time of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer elements of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation”. (Woolf, 1928) (qtd in Hasler, 1982)

Somehow, we lose sense of time when we enter to the minds of Woolf´s characters and I was interested with the concept of "time that only existed inside the character´s minds". As “mental time does not progress steadily forward, like clock time. “In the novel time is presented as a constant flow, time that is the present but also the past, time that is linear but sporadic and time that is eternal but yet vanishing”.

This duality is represented in the novel with the presence of the Big Ben and St. Margaret´s Tower. On the one hand, the Big Ben marches straight and does not look back, pretty much like real time. 

On the other hand St. Margaret’s gently make its presence known. According to the essay written by Armentrout, Woolf gives two purposes to the Big Ben. Firstly, its concise clanging points the time we lose each day as it shows the “constant forward movement of the hours”. Secondly, the fame of Big Ben suggests that “the mark we leave on the world be something grand”, something great.  In the novel it is implied that the sound of the Big Ben agitates Clarissa: “the sound of the Big Ben flooded Clarissa´s drawing –room where she sat, ever so annoyed, at her writing table; worried; annoyed”. (Woolf, 1925) We can deduce that the clock tells her that her time is running out and reminds her of the fact that she is a middle-aged woman. Its clang reminds her that she has done nothing that society would consider “impressive”. As Woolf’s description of the bell as a “warning” and the hours as irrevocable (used more than once) clearly stated a negative idea of the Big Ben time. “The strike of the clock cautions that another hour has passed—time that we will never have to live again”. (Armentrout, 1991)

However, St. Margaret´s serves another purpose. While Big Ben reminds Clarissa of her mortality, with “St. Margaret’s, Wolf presents a time that appeals to the human spirit”. It suggest that time drifts and passes delicately. Armentrout (1991) suggests that the towers bell represents “an approach to life that accepts the moment. It somehow makes the listener aware of time not as to fear it but to appreciate it instead.

An example of this is when the ringing of St. Margarets´s makes Peter think of Clarissa: “Ah, said St. Margaret´s like a hostess who come into her drawing room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there already. I am not late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says. Yet, though she is perfectly right, her voice, being the voice of the hostess, is reluctant to inflict its individuality. Some grief for the past holds it back; some concern for the present. (Woolf, 1925) This can be seen as a clear parallel that Woolf draws between Clarissa and St. Margaret’s.Both the bell tower and Clarissa are different from the Big Ben. They are not brave in their individuality and rather make an impression on the world in a different manner such as the one of hostesses.  Woolf says that Clarissa feels that her only gift was “knowing people almost by instinct”. The hostess in Clarissa represents her art. She has the gift to influence other people’s lives, which is not seen as a great achievement by Peter and Richard who criticize her and laughed at her for her parties. Clarissa has this sensibility to “feel the presence of people separated from one another” thus her ability to bring people together. (Armentrout, 1991) It is through her parties and her affinity for people that Clarissa gets to experience a feeling of timelessness.

 “Mrs. Dalloway is an experiment with time. It is a mingling of present experience and memory”. (Armentrout, 1991) It is through Clarissa that Virginia Wolf expresses her perspective of time. When she decides to pay attention to details and appreciation of the moment we understand that time exists in different forms. We know that it exists in the external world but perhaps more importantly it also exists in the internal world.   

I have been reflecting on Mrs. Dalloway’s gift of sensibility towards people and how useful it would be to have a Clarissa in our lives. Nowadays, with the technological changes and a fast moving-globalised-computer society we are somehow bound to become alienated from a quality face to face conversation, and the opportunity to engage in a rich conversation with the ones we love, or to spend quality time without constantly looking at out cellphones, becomes almost impossible to achieve, and even if we do, we fail to appreciate it. As some might find Clarissa's gift of bringing people together trivial, I believe it to be incredible and almost an unachievable task these days. It becomes more difficult with every day that passes to find people that have the ability to “create community where it no longer exists”. 

References: 

Armentrout, L. (1991). THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TIME IN MRS. DALLOWAY. Retrieved from Prized Writing University of California : http://prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu/past/1991-1992/the-significance-of-time-in-mrs-dalloway

Vos, M. d. (n.d.). "There are still the hours". Time in Mrs. Dalloway and The hours. . Retrieved from Ethesis : http://www.ethesis.net/Dalloway/Dalloway.htm

Hasler, J. (1982). Virginia woolf and the chimes of big ben. English Studies,63(2), 145-158.