Chloe Frantzis

Part ii: Excerpts from Cambridge dissertation (2024)

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Chapter 3: Mrs Dalloway and the reader as guest

Turning now to a study of perspective in Woolf’s own fiction, I suggest that an attention to her use of perspective (or focalisation) exposes crucial nuances to how Woolf configured the relationship between reading and a text.

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Beginning with the sentence, ‘One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought.’, the narration of the last fourth of Mrs Dalloway largely neglects the perspective of its heroine. The final scenes of the novel may be centered on Clarissa Dalloway’s story, yet the events themselves are focalised through the eyes of Peter Walsh, the man who long ago captured her affections and remains a relic of an older, less complex, less modern age. Readers then track the flight of Peter’s mind in the late afternoon as he jumps from memories of Clarissa, to the scruples of a love-less marriage, to whether he should attend her climactic party. Peter does indeed go, and there the focalising frame moves briefly to other characters before finding its way back to him for the closing lines of the novel: ‘What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? […]’.

 

While Clarissa’s focalisation opens the novel literally and stylistically, in forfeiting much of the culminating narrative to the ‘civilised’ male gaze, the text, I assert, prompts questions about the shifting role of perspective in Woolf’s prose-writing. Do readers sense tension between Peter’s frame and Clarissa’s story? Is this tension received as nostalgic or anachronistic? Is Peter’s frame, in other words, emblematic of a more old-fashioned, Edwardian kind of fiction—one fixated on materiality at the expense of characters’ interiors? Mrs Dalloway raises these concerns when it raised Peter’s stature from that of side character to primary focaliser.

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To resolve Peter’s narrative intervention, I place the shift in perspective he enacts alongside the culminating significance of Clarissa’s party. In doing so, Peter’s perspective emerges as a metaphor for reading, whilst the party itself a metonym of the text. Briefly returning to Woolf’s essays, we find precedence for this notion of the reader as guest in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), published a year before Mrs Dalloway.

 

‘Both in life and in literature it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other’. The ‘bridge’ Woolf references in the essay is that which makes the reader-writer relationship one of intrigue and excitement. Though not clearly implied in the essay, I contend that this act of ‘bridging’ is actualised through perspective. Later in the piece, Woolf sketches a memorable hypothetical where her contemporary critical adversary, Mr Arnold Bennett (the spokesman for an Edwardian fiction), engages in short dialogue with the imaginary Mrs Brown (Woolf’s archetype for a rounded, believable, modernist character). This scene remains one of the most resounding defences of the status of character in fiction. Yet more crucial to my contention in Mrs Dalloway is noting how Woolf stages this polemic between Bennett and Brown as ‘a little party in the railway carriage’.

 

‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, then, encourages a configuration of reading as an invitation into the world of the novel. Thus, like with any social outing, the unknown ‘guest’ becomes integral to its atmosphere and success—they are part of how the party is perceived. The judgements readers pass ‘steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print’ she writes in ‘How Should One Read a Book?’. ‘To know whom to write for is to know how to write’ Woolf further posits in ‘The Patron and the Crocus’. A reader’s perspective, we see, is thus essential to the livelihood and creation of a text.

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Returning to Mrs Dalloway, I locate three ways in which Peter’s presence and perspective stands in for the reader’s experience. First, his focalisation imbues the end of the novel with an air of nostalgia. In phasing back into Clarissa’s life after so many years, he is a reminder of lost opportunity, an enigmatic ‘what-if’ looming between them. A reader’s approach to a text similarly carries a nostalgic tinge, as there is invariably some gap in time—whether it be a few or few hundred years—between the author’s act of composition and the reader’s act of interpretation. A novel thus re-enters, or phases, into existence with each new readerly encounter.

 

Second, Peter as a guest in Clarissa’s life is unexpected, but not wholly unwelcome. His perspective remains unthreatening, and the pressure he puts on the structure of the text is not disruptive: the party will go on, no marriages are ruined; he moves in Clarissa’s home as a detached, slightly uncomfortable observer, meagerly participating in the conversation and action of the night. Yet as a guest, Peter is still invited to contribute to the atmosphere. He thinks, he feels, he speculates. The way he hovers on the outskirts of the party—invited in by the host but nevertheless unfamiliar with the people and customs—is qualifiable to how a reader flits along the margins of a text as not quite character, not quite creator, but still central to the underlying performance and functionality nevertheless.

 

In this light, we can treat the end of Mrs Dalloway as a dramatisation of readership: the relationship between host and guest comparable to that of text and reader (as prophesised in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’). In the last few pages of the novel, Peter discusses with Sally Seaton (another figure from Clarissa’s past) how passion and feeling have the power to evolve across time: ‘now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling […] it increased […] alas, perhaps, but one could be glad of it—it went on increasing in his experience’. The way these middle-aged persons reflect on feelings as something which expands and blossoms with time is analogous to a reader’s affective relationship to a text. As a reader approaches the culminating events of a novel, their impressions and emotions expand so that, ‘[s]uddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently’. 

 

Thirdly, then, I contend that Peter Walsh’s perspective in Mrs Dalloway is crucial in the way it embodies and enshrines the participatory perspective of the reader. In finishing a novel, a reader ‘open[s] the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading with out the book before you […] is difficult […] still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling’. In ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, the proper, affective response to finishing a novel is configured as the creation of a virtual book, void of plot and structure, yet packed with emotion, illumination, and sentimentality. This is what allows one to ‘continue reading’ long after the tangible pages have been concluded. This notion of a disembodied, affectual text harkens back to what Iser identified in Woolf as a ‘form of life’—the readerly impressions which sustain the life of a book after the temporal, page-flipping ends.

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Though Woolf never assigns veritable terminology to this virtual, affective text, we may recall that Mrs Dalloway also explores the image of a fragmented text divorced from its page. Early on, an airplane soaring through the skies of London spells out an advertisement for toffee, momentarily distracting a crowd gathering outside Buckingham Palace. Detached from any kind of materiality, the larger-than life skywriting stands in stark contrast to the intimate gesture of putting pen to paper. The narration moves through the reported speech of the bewildered onlookers, noting that, ‘[o]nly for a moment did [the letters] lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out of the sky’. In this regard, writing registers as awe-inspiring, prophetic, and even tensely apocalyptic, as ‘the whole world’, it seems, ‘became perfectly silent’ to watch the spectacle unfold.[12] No one notices or cares that the Royals are now driving through the gates, for all eyes are working to decipher the swooping, cursive letters—‘a K, and E, a Y perhaps?’. This confusion is revealing. In spite of the gargantuan, celestial display, the disembodied text holds none of the affective capabilities encased in virtual text discussed by Iser and in Woolf’s ‘How Should One Read a Book?’. This is because the skywriting’s interpretive potentiality is severely limited, as there is no truth to unearth; it is ephemeral in its textuality and meaning. The scene asks us to ponder, so what if words can float in the sky? Where does their meaning lie?

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In this regard, Mrs Dalloway issues a warning along with its consecration of the powers of the affective, virtual text. When rendered properly by the author, a novel has the potential to invite the reader into the affective experience of its universe, benefiting all parties in promoting the influence and craft of the work. If a novel’s perspective strays too far and remains inaccessible or dislodged from the reader, meaning is confounded and emotion lost—indeed an aspect of the problem Woolf examines in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. Feelings expand with time, as Peter and Sally’s conversation reminds us; but they are also fleeting, ephemeral, and difficult to navigate. Life and fiction, we now see, must meet the reader on steady ground, not necessarily at a specific moment or place, but phasing across time, secure in the refuge of the mind.

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Turning back to Peter Walsh then, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which Mrs Dalloway, through the manipulation of free indirect discourse and various narrative planes, at times undermines the character’s focalisation. Prior to Clarissa’s party in the late afternoon, Peter is presented as the chief internal heterodiegetic focaliser. Across many pages, readers chart the story through his eyes. Then suddenly, he decides to go to the party, becoming captivated by the fantasy that there ‘he was about to have an experience’. All of a sudden, the focalising frame shifts. The next two paragraphs revert back to an omniscient gaze, as the narrative delves into a sermonising evocation on the ‘beauty’ of the walk from ‘Bedford Place leading into Russel Square’, the one Peter will take to get to Clarissa’s house. After this intervention, readers catch up with Peter in the midst of his walk. But the perspective of the story is still held tight by omniscient narrator, who reports through free indirect speech: ‘he stepped with indescribable idiosyncrasy, leant a little forward, tripped, with his hands behind his back and his eyes still a little hawk-like; he tripped through London, towards Westminster, observing’.

 

Peter’s urban sauntering evokes a kind of British ‘Flaneur’; nevertheless, the character does not conform to the typically appreciative, cognisant Baudelairean romantic in the way he is characterised as passively observant—‘leant’ over, ‘trip[ing], and uninterested in the buzz of life emanating from the city around him. Peter is nostalgic of beauty instead of contentedly dwelling in it. The narrator’s further use of oxymoronic language—he steps with ‘indescribable idiosyncrasy’; he ‘trip[s]’ though his vision is ‘hawk-like’—moreover implies that a jump in narrative frames (from the focalisation of character to the perspective of a narrator) is designed to complicate the basically consistent point of view Peter has supplied across the last ten pages.

 

Forcing the reader to switch the ‘eyes’ through which they view the events of Mrs Dalloway deters Peter’s focalisation from having the totalising effect of casting Clarissa’s party in terms of masculine desires. No longer are readers moored in Peter’s ‘own concerns’ and need for ‘experience’. Thus, sifting through new perspectives involves taking the reader by the scruff and forcing them to view the character they inhabit afresh, from the outside. The salient effects of this manoeuvre are increasingly apparent when we consider how Peter may in fact represent a reader of old-guard, pre-modernist fiction; one who does not think self-consciously nor self-critically about the perspective they hold.

 

On the streets on London, Peter entertains the idea of skipping Clarissa’s party altogether so that he may ‘settle in and read and absorbing book written by a man he used to know at Oxford’. The character’s desire to confine himself in the insular world of academia is further epitomised in his urge ‘to poke about in the Bodleian, and get at the truth about one two little matters that interested him’. Taken in isolation within the text’s diegesis, these remarks ring as harmless indicators of Peter’s bookish intellectualism. Yet absorb them alongside Woolf’s criticism, and they come to signify a type of meandering only afforded to people like Peter—that is, men, with access to education and a university library. As Woolf in Three Guineas notes, ‘though we may look at the same things, we may see them differently […] the noble courts and quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge often appear to educated men’s daughters like petticoats with holes in them […]’.

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Moreover, Peter’s inclination to ‘poke’ around Oxford to ‘get at the truth of one of two little matters’ contrasts sharply with the disposition of the fictional Lecturer/narrator who opens A Room of One’s Own. This figure states that she will ‘never’ be able to provide her audience with ‘a nugget of pure truth’, instead packaging her ‘prosaic conclusion’—that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write—as an ‘opinion’. Even if simply an ironic, critical scheme meant to deflate or de-masculinise the rhetoric, the delicate countenance of ‘truth’ within the framework of A Room of One’s Own exposes the tendentiousness of Peter’s focalising frame.

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