The British novelist, critic and essayist Virginia Stephen Woolf is considered one of the most authentic writers of England in the period between the First and the Second World Wars. Being discontented with the novels on the basis of the well-known, actual and apparent, Woolf went on her own experimental way. Walking along this path, the writer discovered a more internal, subjective interpretation of life experience, which is reflected in all of her creative works. It is also worth mentioning about the impact of such famous people such as Henry James, Marcel Proust and James Joyce on her work. Mrs. Dalloway can be considered Woolf's one of the most famous and successful novels, which was written in 1922. Any literary text is characterized by the certain features of its compositional and stylistic structure. At the same time, the specificity of the organization and interaction of graphic means of text forms its "face", revealing a leading, dominant trait. The rhetorical Analysis of Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway allows the reader to follow the main principles of the text and understand the uniqueness of its stylistic, syntactic and other structures.
In Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, the opposition and struggle become the main stylistic principles. However, this is not an opposition of the characters, although this also happens within the text as in any other work, but rather the struggle of different states of the soul of one person: "All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?" (Woolf 71). Moreover, these states relate to the specific characters and are explicated as the syntactic and lexical means, such as the expressive word order, numerous repetitions, interjections, fragmentation, inappropriate punctuation and much more: "Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, – by sucking a gas-pipe?" (Woolf 142). Throughout the novel, Woolf draws the reader's attention to the inner world of her characters, which means that the usual descriptive is not peculiar here. Moreover, "the frame of ascent and descent has a prominent place, because it expresses the rising and falling moods of Clarissa's day" (Guth 18). The author does not just describe the world around her, its parts and actions of people – she uses the complex, sometimes abstract symbols with which she conveys the mood and feelings of her characters. By representing multiple perceived worlds or ‘realities’ alongside one another, the novel "breaks with traditional modes of representation and other pre-existing, conventionally ‘realist’ novelistic forms" (Smoley 199). That is why a particular attention should be paid to a space of time in the novel. Only one day is able to show the whole life, as a result, it can be argued that Woolf has introduced a temporary perspective, which is significantly different from any metrical regularity. This type of time created by the writer may also be called psychological time: "Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are" (Woolf 88). In other words, the time of the novel represents something like a flowing river of images and memories. This endless stream of human experience consists of a continuously mix of each other memory elements, doubts, prejudices and desires. In addition, it is also necessary to take into consideration the fact that the novel has the unity of time, place and action, which also affects the perception of what is happening.
An analysis of the text allows seeing Woolf's attempt to connect an inconsistently created inner world of a one person with a huge universe of the city. Therefore, the type of narration is of predominant importance here; the reader cannot but notice its brisk character: "First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air" (Woolf 67). This has a strong influence on the overall plot, which is essentially absent or is rather disintegrated into the separate sketches of the internal state of the protagonist. These sketches can be called "impressionistic" because of the style, as they also do not represent anything specific separately; one can understand the essence of what is happening only in their sum (Gay 145). This plot type contributes to the disappearance of the narrative intrigue: "A thing there was that mattered; a thing, [], obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter" (Woolf 219).
In addition, the novel does not contain rising action and interchanges, major or minor action, and as a result, the sequence is lost. Most of the actions are devoid of the ordinary logic, the causal structure. The smallest details, happy or sad memories that arise on the basis of association, slide over one another; they are fixed by the author and define the content of the book. Therefore, people trying to decipher skywriting in Mrs. Dalloway becomes "a model of how “Virginia Woolf’s disaffection from the heavily bonded forms of English society often expresses itself paradoxically . . . as affection and play.”" (Fernald 26). In her novel, Woolf uses the third-person narration, which can also be called neutral. It focuses primarily on the account of the author's thoughts and feelings of the characters. This allows the author to introduce the internal monologues, public confession, excerpts from diaries, letters, dreams, visions, and so forth. Woolf transfers the feelings, emotions, and moods through the creation of internal monologues. This occurs mainly via the internal construction features of the speech. A "stream of consciousness" can be considered one of a kind of internal monologue, which is used in the novel Mrs. Dalloway: "Her voice, her laugh, her dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her adventurousness; []; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang" (Woolf 116). Thus, the text analysis allows seeing the way the story, which is in the first person, often turns into an internal monologue. It seems to "endorse the idea of a private consciousness" which was free of the constraints and conventions of a "mechanized, regimented mass society" (Whitworth 121). The novel's text, its style and methods of presentation point to its high complexity. From this it follows that the author counted on a mature, thinking audience. The complexity of this novel creates difficulties for its holistic perception. In addition, the reader should understand that Woolf's novel was quit experimental for its time. Woolf passes the narrative initiative to the various persons, whose points of view become the leading narrative at the certain moments: "As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part" (Woolf 129).
The language of the novel is close to the poetry because of its rhythm, which is felt in the compositional, semantic, syntactic and lexical levels: "It was awful, he cried, awful, awful! Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day" (Woolf 118). The abundance of metaphors and vivid images, symbols fascinates the reader. In this work, Virginia Woolf attempted to break down the barrier between the reader and the characters thought the depiction of their inner world more fully through the associative flow of thoughts. The very text of the novel can be called a verbal painting. Characteristically, "reviewers contrasted the sordid, base, or dirty world of the obscene writer against ‘higher’, more beautiful and spiritual things" (Whitworth 91). The novel's text is very poetic and original. Virginia Woolf rarely took into account the traditional, classical dichotomy between the reason and emotion. The novelty of the product consisted in that transfer of the powers of the text creation to the reader. Psychological subtext in the novel Mrs. Dalloway is a statement of the facts that are compressed to hint, in which lack of information is offset by the concentration of latent expressivity: "For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn" (Woolf 214). The associations, which can be represented by the heard stories or memories, often spontaneously arise in the minds of the characters of the novel. Particular attention should be paid to the use of parenthesis, which plays a crucial role in shaping the stream of consciousness. Woolf's use of stream-of-consciousness and her imagistic style throughout the novel serve as "a foil for the deft self-fiction that is erected under cover of self-awareness, and deflect from a realization that Clarissa's own images" (Guth 23). In addition, the parentheses of the novel contribute to the process of creating dialogues; they dramatize the narrative and make comments on the characters' habits and interests. The parentheses that comment on the content of a gesture or a look of any character are very important here. Such parentheses make it clear what the mind can hide behind a gesture or a glance: "But the clock went on striking, four, five, six and Mrs. Filmer waving her apron (they would not bring the body in here, would they?) seemed part of that garden; or a flag" (Woolf 190).
In her novel, Virginia Wolfe created a completely new type of the narrative. She sought to maximize the expression, which in the end was achieved through the introduction of complex verbal constructions and narrative structures: "For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, [], holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life" (Woolf 99). The temporary layers of the novel intersect and slide one over another; when the past merges with the present in a single moment. The experiences of the characters often seem insignificant, but careful fixation of their states grows at an impressive mosaic, which is composed of a plurality of volatile memories, escaping from the observers. The aim of the author was to show the way a person thinks, or rather, to show the audience the way the thinking process occurs and the way the human mind works. Woolf "reflects society [or life] as a giant tapestry of social languages or discourses all of which are in a dialogic relationship with each other" (Smoley 204). Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway can be called very multifaceted in many plans. Her style is striking for its wealth and innovation. The author selects the most appropriate word for each phenomenon or feelings. Reading the novel makes the reader relive the most intimate life of each character. In addition there is a very deep symbolism, which, if properly understood, reveals the problems of the time in which the novel was set.
Conclusion
Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway can be considered one of the most interesting and complex modernist novels. In the novel, the juxtaposition and struggle become the main stylistic principles. This struggle takes place in the minds of the main characters, but at the same time, the reader is able to capture every feeling, gesture or emotion hidden from the eyes. The author uses the third and first-person narrative, which soon turns into a stream of consciousness. Woolf uses the parentheses in the very process of simulating the flow of consciousness of her characters in order to point to the most intimate details of the characters' lives. The novel was probably intended for a mature, thinking audience, and was some kind of a complicated psychological experiment.
Works Cited
Fernald, Anne E. Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. ProQuest ebrary, site.ebrary.com.proxy.chamberlain.edu:8080/lib/chamberlain/reader.action?docID=10158081. Accessed 30 January 2017.
Gay, Jane de. Virginia Woolf's Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh University Press, 2007. ProQuest ebrary, site.ebrary.com.proxy.chamberlain.edu:8080/lib/chamberlain/reader.action?docID=10156364. Accessed 30 January 2017.
Guth, Deborah. "'What A Lark! What A Plunge!': Fiction As Self-Evasion In Mrs Dalloway." Modern Language Review vol. 84, no. 1, 1989: 18-25. Academic Search Complete, web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.chamberlain.edu:8080/ehost/detail/detail?sid=c9e26b80-31fe-4e74-960a-5d67ce2acadd%40sessionmgr4008&vid=0&hid=4204&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=17589498. Accessed 30 January 2017.
Smoley, Christine. "Mrs Dalloway's Dialogic Discourse And The Function Of The Written Fragment." Transcultural Studies: A Series In Interdisciplinary Research vol. 11, no. 2, 2015: 199-215. SocINDEX with Full Text, web.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.chamberlain.edu:8080/ehost/detail/detail?sid=9d92a87f-c3cb-4bfd-a4bf-ff01c17bd948%40sessionmgr4007&vid=0&hid=4204&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=115875473&db=sih. Accessed 30 January 2017.
Whitworth, Michael. Oxford World's Classics: Virginia Woolf: Authors in Context. OUP Oxford, 2005. ProQuest ebrary, site.ebrary.com.proxy.chamberlain.edu:8080/lib/chamberlain/reader.action?docID=10271505. Accessed 30 January 2017.
Woolf, Virginia. Oxford Worlds Classics: Mrs Dalloway. Oxford Paperbacks, 2014. ProQuest ebrary, site.ebrary.com.proxy.chamberlain.edu:8080/lib/chamberlain/reader.action?docID=10469433. Accessed 30 January 2017.
