Chapter 9. Dismantling narrative modes
Authorial revisions in the opening of Mrs Dalloway
This study examines Virginia Woolf ’s authorial revisions of the opening of Mrs
Dalloway and their implications for narrative theory. I compare passages from
the short story ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and the early drafts of ‘The Hours’
with the published novel and show that there is a consistent pattern of revision
which complicates the representation of character consciousness. This complexity
lies in the dismantling of narrative modes used for the representation of
consciousness, most typically by conflating them into the syntactic boundaries
of a single sentence. From a stylistic standpoint, the dissolution of the syntactic
boundaries between narrative modes challenges most standard accounts of
speech and thought presentation which posit narrative modes as discrete syntactic
units. From a narratological standpoint, this syntactic and semantic dismantling
of narrative modes reflects an attempt at representing distinct facets of
consciousness as simultaneous phenomena of experience. Thus, Woolf ’s revised
text captures the simultaneity of, for instance, a character’s less conscious perception
of the narrative world and the more consciously executed reflective thought,
or of a character’s internal state and direct speech, grafting them into the text as
narrative modes that are syntactically and semantically interdependent.
References
Adamson, S.M
1999 Literary Language. In
The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. IV: 1776–1997,
S. Romaine (ed.), 591–690. Cambridge: CUP.
Banfield, A
1982 Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Boston MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fludernik, M
1993 The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction. London: Routledge.
Herman, D
2011 1880–1945: Re-minding modernism. In
The Emergence of Mind. Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English,
D. Herman (ed.), 243–272. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Leech, G. & Short, M
2004 Style in Fiction. London: Longman.
Lodge, D
2002 Consciousness and the Novel. London: Secker and Warburg.
Love, J
1970 Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Minow-Pinkney, M
1987 Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Brighton: The Harvester Press.
Palmer, A
2002 The construction of fictional minds.
Narrative 10(1): 28–46.
Palmer, A
2004 Fictional Minds. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Palmer, A
2005 Intermental thought in the novel: The Middlemarch Mind.
Style 39(4): 247–439.
Sotirova, V
2007 Woolf’s experiments with consciousness in fiction. In
Contemporary Stylistics,
M. Lambrou &
P. Stockwell (eds), 7–18. London: Continuum.
Sotirova, V
2011 D.H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint. London: Continuum.
Sotirova, V
2013 Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study. Houndmills: Palgrave.
Woolf, V
1969 [1925] Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin.
Wussow, H.M
(ed.) 2010 Virginia Woolf: ‘The Hours’. The British Museum Manuscript of Mrs Dalloway. New York NY: Pace University Press.
Zunshine, L
2008 Theory of mind and experimental representations of fictional consciousness.
Narrative 11(3): 270–291.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Grisot, Giulia, Kathy Conklin & Violeta Sotirova
2020.
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Readers’ responses to experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation in Woolf’sTo the LighthouseandMrs Dalloway.
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 29:2
► pp. 103 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.