by Vera Yakupova
Published on the 14th of May 1925, while merely describing a 24 hour period, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is turning 100 years. When we remember the novel in the present, what do 100 years mean, as the characters’ memories and experiences reach us today?
The New Yorker described a resurgent interest in the novel during the recent COVID-19 pandemic with the title “Why Anxious Readers Under Quarantine Turn To ‘Mrs. Dalloway’”. As Kindley notes, the novel offers a meditation on the intersection of personal trauma and rigid social structures—an experience that echoed strongly during global lockdowns and collective uncertainty. Virginia Woolf’s subtle references to the Spanish influenza pandemic and the aftermath of World War I root the narrative in a time of societal fragility, allowing us to draw parallels to our own times. The novel captures the lingering effects of both physical and psychological trauma, offering readers a framework to process their own. Mrs. Dalloway might also resonate with current readers because it covers topics of urban alienation, as the novel captures how people can feel deeply isolated even while surrounded by others in a busy city; a feeling also present in our hyper-connected, yet often lonely, digital age. Woolf’s London shows a cacophony of clocks, cars, and crowds. In these isolating rhythms of the modern city a party becomes a fragile attempt to forge connection.
The story of a single day in post-WWI London interweaves the inner lives of the main characters Clarissa Dalloway, a politician’s wife preparing the party, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran. The characters are constructed by their thoughts, as the stream-of-consciousness technique merges the past and present, showing how memory intrudes on daily life. The novel approaches the experience of time as non-chronological, and story as a conglomerate of present and past. For Clarissa Dalloway, planning a party that day, recollections of her youth at Bourton, particularly her relationships with Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, haunt her present. When she goes out to “buy the flowers herself” (Woolf 13) for the party, the impressions of the mornings and her thoughts registering them lead her further down the line to thinking about Peter Walsh:
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she […] (Woolf 13)
The imagery, “like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave”, initially evokes calm, but then turns into tension, as the young Clarissa senses that “something awful was about to happen,” capturing a moment of existential unease. The open window becomes a transition, placing her between the internal and external world. The intrusion of Peter Walsh’s teasing comment—“Musing among the vegetables? […] I prefer men to cauliflowers”—breaks this reflective mood, highlighting how social expectations and gendered dismissiveness interrupt her introspection. The narrative’s structure of memories, interrupted with hesitations and the attempt to remember (“was that it?”), mimics the fragmented, uncertain nature of recollection and shows Woolf’s interest in internal experience over linear storytelling. Ultimately, the passage captures how the past remains emotionally alive and embedded in the present.
Young Virginia Woolf and an imaginary cover of Mrs. Dalloway. Image generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI. 01 May 2025.
For Septimus also, his memories haunt his present, as he is deeply troubled by his experience of war, and relives the trauma through hallucinations of his dead comrade Evans:
There was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not look. Evans was behind the railings! “What are you saying?” said Rezia suddenly, sitting down by him. Interrupted again! She was always interrupting. (Woolf 47-48)
This passage captures the fragmentation and horror of the war experience—”he dared not look”. The imagery of “white things” has a ghostly connotation, blurring the boundary between the real and the hallucinatory. Septimus’s hallucination of Evans appearing “behind the railings” evokes both the persistence of traumatic memory and his inability to separate past from present, as the vision seems to be right in front of him, a little distance away from his hand. The railings symbolise a barrier between the living and the dead, perhaps as well a barrier between sanity and delusion, yet for Septimus, these boundaries collapse. Rezia’s sudden question—“What are you saying?”—and her physical presence break into his recollections; yet, rather than grounding him, her repeated interruptions seem to become a source of irritation, reinforcing his isolation. The brief, jarring sentences and exclamations mirror the fractured nature of Septimus’s mental state, and Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique immerses the reader directly into his inner turmoil, making visible the often-invisible suffering of psychological trauma. Through Septimus, Woolf offers a sensitive and remarkably prescient portrayal of trauma and mental illness. His experience with what was then termed “shell shock” (now understood as PTSD) demonstrates the failures of early 20th-century mental health professionals to genuinely address psychological suffering: “Virginia Woolf’s sardonic description implies that Sir William simply wants control (and money) and caricatures the regime to be followed.” (Thomson 64). Septimus’s silence to the external world is not a void but an expression of trauma and a desire to be understood beyond words. However, Sir William Bradshaw’s prescription to Septimus is to
rest in bed; rest in solitude; silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months’ rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes out weighing twelve. (Woolf 170)
Thomson also notes, if Bradshaw’s prescription is not effective, “Septimus will have to undergo conversion. He will have somehow to be changed to have more acceptable behavior.“ (Thomson 64). Woolf’s style allows her to demonstrate Septimus’s past as a soldier as something that is vividly present for him.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses the characters’ memory and experience of time as a way for exploring identity, trauma, and mortality. Clarissa and Septimus construct their identities through fragmented memories, forming a psychological time that coexists with the present. Clarissa’s recollections of Bourton and her emotional ties to Sally Seton and Peter Walsh shape her current self, while Septimus’s emotional responses to trauma are delayed and unresolved. Holt argues that Woolf’s narrative delves into the complexities of selfhood and the profound solitude inherent in human consciousness (Holt). Thus, at times, the thing that interrupts the stream of consciousness is the chimes of the Big Ben (e.g. Woolf 85).
In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf depicts urban reality as it is and experienced: an ephemeral and piecemeal admixture of sense and memory […] Woolf renders her characters’ experiences as plural realities of the same geographical space, moment in time, event, or phenomenon, thus asserting the presence of dynamic, simultaneous perspectives. (Falcetta 113-114)
Septimus’s inability to narrate his pain, his hallucinations of Evans, and the novel’s fragmented structure together express the unspeakability of trauma and its resistance to narrative closure. Ultimately, Woolf’s narrative technique avoids linear plot progression in favour of psychological excavation, allowing memory to become the backbone of the novel. Holt argues that Woolf portrays each character as confined within their own mind, which points to the limitations of language in fully articulating one’s inner life. Through stream-of-consciousness narration, Woolf illustrates how personal memories and perceptions shape identity, yet remain largely inaccessible to others.
Thus, to remember Mrs. Dalloway means to take the novel on its own terms, as it will show us that the past does not always stay in the past, that memories construct our stories alongside our experience of the present and our experience of time.
Works Cited
Falcetta, Jennie-Rebecca. “Geometries of Space and Time: The Cubist London of ‘Mrs. Dalloway.’” Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 13, 2007, pp. 111–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24907092. Accessed 12 May 2025.
Holt, Emily. “The Ineffable Self and Memory in ‘Mrs Dalloway’,” Washington College Review, Volume XXV, 2018, https://washcollreview.com/2018/07/16/the-ineffable-self-and-memory-in-mrs-dalloway/. Accessed 30 April 2025.
Kindley, Evan. “Why Anxious Readers under Quarantine Turn to ‘Mrs. Dalloway’,” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-anxious-readers-under-quarantine-turn-to-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway. Accessed 26 April 2025.
Thomson, Jean. “Virginia Woolf and the Case of Septimus Smith.” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, vol. 23, no. 3, 2004, pp. 55–71. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/jung.1.2004.23.3.55. Accessed 13 May 2025.
Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, Brace & World, INC: New York.