Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

I picked Mrs. Dalloway for my October novel because I could not believe how an author could write three hundred pages on the events in a single day: either Clarissa is a very exciting woman with a fruitful life or the author has the ability to shape any story to engage a reader. However, from what I have read, it is a combination of both intriguing characters and insightful writing.

Two weekends ago, I read five pages into Mrs. Dalloway and was utterly confused by Virginia Woolf’s punctuation of oddly placed dashes, recurring semicolons, and a seemingly endless stream of commas. I remember very clearly that we were taught to use exclamation marks rarely, yet Woolf often uses five exclamation points on a page. Why? And, where was the main subject and verb? The punctuation was overwhelming. (It reminded me a lot of when I read Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld and there were dashes everywhere and I couldn’t stand it.) I put down the book and did some other homework.

Last weekend, I managed to barrel through the first few pages and am now on page ninety-seven. My perplexity with Woolf’s distinct style is still as strong as it was two weekends ago. Her selection and arrangement of words is quite bizarre because the ideas seem out of order. Instead of “how still the fresh, calm air was in the early morning; it was like the flap of a wave or the kiss of a wave,” she writes “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” (1). Woolf’s ordering of words is reflective of a real person’s thoughts. Both Woolf’s writing and a person’s thoughts sometime do not make any sense until the thoughts are complete; then, aha! I always thought of writing as a better form of thinking aloud because a writer must take the time to reformat the thoughts into a cohesive idea. I am used to polished and chronologically sequenced writing. Therefore, Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness is quite a shock because it does require a little more patience. That is not to say that Woolf’s writing is unsophisticated and unorganized. Rather, her writing naturally flows like thoughts and words simultaneously form for individuals. She writes it as it is, not as it should be.

Woolf does a particularly good job in capturing the essence of characters, and she does this with simple, clear-cut language. Most of her sentences are straight-forward. Not a word could be stripped without destroying the meaning of the sentence. Yet, Woolf has a particular quirk in which she compares an event, characteristic, or feeling to many different ideas. There is a long chain of descriptive words following one noun. For example, Clarissa feels “in the midst of traffic…a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense” right before the Big Ben strikes (5). Each new description gives readers a slightly different perspective and the layers create a richer meaning. It is almost as if Woolf understands that people relate differently to the same things. Her solution is to give many different descriptions in the hopes that a reader will relate to at least one description. Later on in the novel, Woolf uses this technique again to create the same effect. She describes Miss Killman as someone who makes “you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion…” (16). This varied repetition of interesting descriptive phrases not only facilitates character development but also keeps the reader on his/her toes.

I have always prided myself on being able to predict the ending of movies and books and every plot twist along the way. On an eighth grade trip, I predicted that the protoganist in Big Fish would turn into a goldfish and nobody believed me; I was right. One notable exception is Harry Potter. I can never guess what is coming up next with J.K. Rowling’s writing. With Mrs. Dalloway, I am completely unsure about what the story is about. I am definitely following what is going on, but I don’t find a connection between the events. I find this extremely odd since I am already one third of the way through the book. Hopefully, there will be some explanation for the relationship between Clarissa and Richard, and Clarissa and Elizabeth. I also look forward to discovering the parallel between Clarissa and Septimus.

I understand that Mrs. Dalloway was a key element to Michael Cunningham’s novel, The Hours, and the movie based off of Cunninghma’s novel. Maybe I’ll rent it…

P.S. Since I mentioned Harry Potter and this blog is about Virginia Woolf, I googled both names and found “Dumbledore's Death in the Style of Virginia Woolf,” which is quite interesting. (813)