Stream of Consciousness and Mrs Dalloway
The lecture is over stream-of-consciousness; it also includes information about modern innovation
in writing, Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway.
Stream of Consciousness
Stream-of-consciousness, as a technique in literature, is a style of narration meant to mimic the
flow of human thought.
If you think about the way that you think, which is called metacognition, the human brain when it
thinks doesn't divide things into chapters or into sentences: often your thoughts are incomplete or
fragmented or you jump from one to the other, your brain just goes various different directions.
The human thought process flows and authors try to mimic the way humans loosely associate
when jumping from thought to thought. This is a contrast to traditional narration, where you have
a third or first-person narrator who is telling what happened.
Whether it's in an emotional way or it's in an objective way or whatever, you would often get a
character's perspective on the stage through a soliloquy. In a soliloquy the speaker addresses the
audience or some absent third person so that we can know what the speaker is thinking even
though - no one else is on stage.
Stream of consciousness, then, is primarily the character addressing the character's self. It's like a
soliloquy except for the fact that the third person is the reader instead of the audience and the
character is not actually saying the words as they would in a play. With a stream of consciousness
we see the inside of the character's mind and it has little structure: it can jump from place to
place, whereas with a soliloquy you're usually going to get a logical sequence, with complete
sentences and beautiful vocabulary, lots of literary devices – though the human mind doesn't
really work like that.
Primarily, this technique (SoC) is used in fiction instead of drama or poetry, though it is used in
poetry to a degree.
After say 1920 or so, often this technique of stream-of-consciousness is also lacking in punctuation
or traditional grammatical structure: sentences can be whole pages long or more, whereas what
we see in more traditional works follows a traditional structure and pattern of grammar.
Stream of consciousness is often used interchangeably with the term “interior monologue”.
An interior monologue performs the functions of stream-of-consciousness in a more organised
way , it is generally going to be more structured. We see the characters’ thoughts as in stream of
consciousness and they may still be disjointed make associative leaps. However, an inner
monologue usually maintains syntax and punctuation, often it'll be a more comfortable narration
than stream of consciousness, which might make you stop and think you have to reread some of
the stuff because you're reading someone else's thoughts and they're not going to think like you
necessarily.
These terms, though, are still used interchangeably and some consider stream-of-consciousness as
the genre, while interior monologue is the delivery of stream of consciousness because inherently
stream of consciousness is the interior speech in someone's brain, so it is by definition an interior
monologue.
This innovation, these things in writing when the whole scope of writing changes, these things
don't happen by accident, these come from talented authors or new authors who are purposefully
seeking to change the craft, like Woolf and her contemporaries. They wanted their work to reflect
life, they wanted authenticity, they wanted to mirror the universal human experience.
Previously characters and books had been written for the upper classes or they had been made for
tragedy, you have to be of noble blood because you have a long way to fall, whereas what Woolf
was trying to do, or better, what her group was trying to do was to make it accessible, to make
literature relatable to everyone.
Also we have to consider that she was writing in between the world wars. World war one was
unlike anything England or America or anyone had ever seen before: it changed how people lived,
how they saw the world, what they thought of as important and valuable and because literature is
fundamentally a reflection of the human experience, literature had to change, too as the human
experience changed.
Biography
Woolf herself was born in England 1882, post-civil war in America.
Her two most famous works are Mrs. Dalloway and To the White House.
She was part of the Bloomsbury group, a group of authors living in England who were working
together to be as innovative and as creative as possible.
Woolf is considered one of the most influential modern writers.
She was prolific in her writing: even when she was suffering from these nervous episodes or
breakdowns, she still would write, her social life would suffer but she would write and write and
write.
She married in 1912 and had an extremely happy marriage: her husband, Leonard, was a writer in
the Bloomsbury group and they set up their own publishing house, so a lot of her works were
published by herself and her husband in their own home.
She was a feminist and she believed that often men's narcissism and repression were what caused
women to have these nervous episodes in the first place.
Finally, she died in 1941 by committing suicide: she put rocks in her pockets, got in the river and
drowned herself. She wrote a letter to her husband as she felt that she didn't want him to have to
suffer because she was ill, she wanted him to be able to live and to work without having to worry
about her –this was not her first suicide attempt and she addresses suicide in Mrs. Dalloway.
Woolf's innovation comes from her experimentation with storytelling. For example, Mrs. Dalloway
is a woman's whole life explained within the confines of a single day: it starts out in the morning
and in the evening but this whole time we're getting images out of the protagonist’s brain.
There's another story that she wrote that takes place two days that are ten years apart and it tells
the story in kind of the same way as Mrs. Dalloway where we're in real time, we have very small
amount of time but in brain-time we see memories, flashbacks, feelings triggered by events.
She wrote a book-linked essay discussing woman's needs and writing fiction called A Room of
One's Own and she used a stream of consciousness and inner monologue in all of these works
where she's trying to be innovative in doing something different with fiction.
Mrs. Dalloway is her most well-known novel and it's about Clarissa Dalloway as preparations for a
party that she's giving that evening are taking place.
Clarissa Dalloway is in her mid-50s, she's in society, well-to-do, very wealthy, her husband's in
Parliament and throughout this day, as she's preparing for the party, she has various memories
and flashbacks of life choices she regrets or wasn't able to make because homosexuality is literally
illegal in the late-18th-century England (see Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest) and,
although Mrs. Dalloway takes place in the interwar years, it is still a taboo at the time.
The whole novel takes place within a single day. It also deals with another issue that was
confronting the world at this time: post-traumatic stress disorder.
After World War one, when men came back from the war a lot of them were really messed up by
what they had seen, what they had done, what they had experienced and Septimus Warren Smith
in Mrs. Dalloway is one character who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The story is told in a third person point of view.