Virginia Woolf does an excellent job at subverting the stylistic devices used in her novel Mrs. Dalloway. The way she does this is by using pure realism to explain (quite respectfully) topics that are very natural and yet unnamed in literature. They are, among others, suicide, homosexuality, lesbianism, sex, marriage, social expectations of women, repression, and madness.

All these elements may sound negative to some readers, but they are realities of life that, in Virginia Woolf's unique style, must be exposed for what they are: Realities.

Far from presenting the typical plot of a love struggle turned into a fantasy romance, she brings us two characters that are psychologically and spiritually identical: Clarissa and Septimus. Both characters have undergone repression for loving people of their own sex, have experimented the results of repression, and have lived through a life of choices whose results are neither magical nor supernatural. Their choices just move their lives toward another stage: Clarissa's is a life of isolation. Septimus is death by suicide.

The inevitability of fate, and the reality of life are the key topics treated in Romantic literature. Love, loss, happiness, and sadness are not products of some form of fantastic alliance. They are inevitable processes of growth through which all of us have to live. Our choices are simply additional milestones for us to continue to live. Some of us will succeed, others will give up. It is just the way life is.

That is how Virginia Woolf subtlety infuses these techniques to explain the beginning, middle, and end of Clarissa and Septimus's lives.

How does Virginia Woolf subvert Realist conventions in Mrs. Dalloway?

Virginia Woolf subverts Realist conventions in Mrs Dalloway through a mix of Surrealism and stream of consciousness.

Ostensibly, the novel centers on realistic themes and characters, yet Woolf infuses the ordinary atmosphere with fantastical images. Her bizarre depictions link her to the Surrealist tradition, as Surrealists emphasized how everyday events could give way to unreal thoughts and perceptions. Early in the novel, after the explosion, Woolf’s omniscient narrator says: “the throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body.” Here, Woolf uses a simile to turn cars into something unreal—a human body with a heartbeat. Later, Woolf does something similar with the clocks of Harley Street. She describes them as “[s]hredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing.” She turns the regular clocks into violent creatures.

A critical part of Surrealism is the focus on the mind and how the mind, through its string of associations, can turn realistic people, things, and sights into something or someone quite uncanny. In Mrs Dalloway, stream of consciousness, due to its connections to Surrealism, also helps jar Realist conventions. For example, Septimus’s stream of consciousness interiority takes him from lying down on the couch to “falling down, down […] into the flames!” He goes from a realistic state to a nightmarish place.