Don’t cross the streams of consciousness!

Title: Mrs Dalloway

Rating: 3 Stars

I’ve written a bit about existentialist novelists such as Camus. Although I appreciate their creativity and innovation, actually reading them can be a bit of a chore. I certainly don’t regret reading them, but after finishing one, I’m not exactly leaping out of my chair to grab the next one.

So it is with the modernists. Last year, I climbed one of my long time literary mountains when I read Ulysses. It took me over a month. I had to have two separate supporting references to even begin to understand it as I read it. I read it. I finished it. I appreciated it. I’m not sure how much joy I got out of it other than the satisfaction of tackling an extremely challenging work. As I’ve read other modernists like Faulkner, Proust, or Beckett, I usually end up with those same feelings.

So it is with Virginia Woolf. I’d previously read To The Lighthouse, which I somewhat surprisingly enjoyed. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like reading Lee Child, but I was actively engaged and interested throughout the novel.

With Mrs Dalloway, although a significantly less challenging read, I was reminded of Ulysses. I was so reminded not only because, like Ulysses, all events take place on one day. Some of the stream of consciousness threads that ran throughout Mrs Dalloway seemed reminiscent of Ulysses. Woolf, in ways similar to Joyce, tries to capture the transitory thoughts that flit through a person’s brain as they are, for example, idly staring through a store window.

Although definitely interesting, it does put real requirements upon a reader trying to do even a semi-serious reading of the work. For me, I essentially required near absolute silence. I put away my phone so that I wouldn’t be disturbed. Even so (and maybe this is part of the point), I found my own thoughts wandering as I was reading the wandering thoughts of whoever had the current point of view.

The multiple points of view is one of the interesting aspects of the novel. At least a dozen or so characters have their moment in the literary spotlight. The transitions of the streams of consciousness from one character to the next was done in an almost eerily seamless manner, almost as if Woolf’s proposing that we’re all part of one big hive of semi-random thought patterns.

There’s not a tremendous amount of plot. Mrs Dalloway is planning a party. During the day, she meets Peter Walsh, who was one of her suitors decades ago before she meets and weds someone more socially appropriate for her. Walsh, now in his fifties, has led a mediocre life and is questioning his life choices.

The other major thread is Septimus Warren Smith, a WWI soldier suffering from serious PTSD. In public, he mutters to himself and often hallucinates seeing Evans, one of his dearest, now dead, friends from the war. His wife, Lucrezia, is desperately trying to get help for him before he kills himself. Considering Woolf’s lifelong struggles with mental health and that she ultimately did commit suicide, her imaginings of the inner thoughts of Septimus seem both insightful and tragic.

It was beautifully written and certainly much more accessible than Ulysses. I just probably will not be jumping up and starting A Room Of One’s Own any time soon.