Hello again ASTU!

I hope everyone has had a great start to the new year and ready to face the second semester. There have been a few changes to our ASTU classroom that have been quite a contrast to the previous semester, especially in terms of how we explore literature. In class over the course of the first week of the semester, we discussed different works authored by famous American psychologists, Sigmund Freud, William James, and Silvan Tomkins. After exploring and delving into their research together, we applied their theories onto fiction works, including a short story in Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, and most recently, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.

I particularly found Mrs. Dalloway a difficult novel to delve into, until about 50 pages into the book that the characters started to stick to me as a reader, and I begin to be able to follow the different characters’ voices that mingle closely to each other. This novel follows a woman, Clarissa Dalloway, and her thoughts while she is planning for a party at the same time, many different characters who are acquaintances or friends of Mrs. Dalloway are also introduced, but in a peculiar fashion, mainly in the literary device and style that Woolf employs.

As we analyzed the text within Woolf’s work in the following classes, many factors contributed to the level of difficulty of it, but most remarkable is her usage of the free indirect speech style. Until learning of free indirect speech that Woolf used in her work, the typical novel that I experienced was a third person, omniscient narrative. Free indirect speech is also a style of third person narrative, but it also continuously weaves in and out of the character’s consciousness. There is an absence of reporting words and phrases such as “He says that he was in love,” or “she said it was true”. Instead, free indirect speech may follow the lines of “He thought about it for a moment. Was it really love?” Although this may be a simple example of this, Woolf utilized this style in a fluid, although complex way to project the characters to the reader in a more personal way. “But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car and the tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there – the Queen going shopping?” (12). In the second sentence, as a reader, I was given the sense that I am asking this question, although Lucrezia is asking this question to herself in her own mind.

Virginia Woolf is often described as an influential modernist writer, with her work trended the use of ‘stream of consciousness’ in literature. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, this narrative device works together with the free indirect speech by writing the character’s thoughts This concept of the ‘stream of consciousness’ is directly correlated with psychologist William James who discussed it in depth.  Interestingly, this theory could be related to Woolf’s usage of punctuation throughout her text. It was initially a confusing feature for myself as a reader, such as dashes, semi-colons, and parentheses across the text, and paired with sometimes paragraph-length sentences. An example of this can be seen when Woolf narrates Clarissa Dalloway’s inner monologue about her friend and past romantic interest, Peter, “And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with…” Clarissa reminiscences on this scene like a ‘flowing river’ as her thoughts come one after the other.

There is also a lack of clear separations between character perspectives, or even chapters, which can imply the state of the ‘stream of consciousness’ that Woolf integrates into her work. The thoughts and emotions that each character experiences are a constant stream that does not follow the typical sentence structure of one complete thought, rather, a series of ideas and emotions.

Mrs. Dalloway is a very unique novel, in particular to its style of free indirect speech and punctuation usages. As we discussed in our ASTU class, Virginia Woolf was thought to be the pioneer for this type of modernist literature that has arguably inspired it to become mainstream. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the unique perspectives and interconnectedness of the characters in an otherwise seemingly ordinary scenario of a middle-class woman throwing a party. I look forward to exploring more of Virginia Woolf!

Thank you for reading!