Student Question
How does Mrs. Dalloway differ from a conventional plot-driven novel?
Quick answer:
Unlike conventional plot-driven novels, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, a hallmark of modernist literature, lacks a traditional plot structure. Instead of relying on a sequence of events leading to a climax, Woolf uses elements like time, space, and character perception to structure the narrative. The novel centers on Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party and her interactions, integrating psychological depth and fragmented, subjective experiences to create its narrative form.
Virginia Woolf belongs to a historical group of writers called "modernists" who wrote in a style called "modernism." Literary modernism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also included writers like James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound. The modernist movement is tied to the emergence of psychology and the study of the mind, as well as the escalation of industrialization and the rise of technology globally.
Mrs. Dalloway is one of the most famous novels of the modernist movement, and it exhibits many of modernism's defining features. Among these is its absence of a conventional plot. Predecessors to modernism, including nineteenth-century literary realists like George Eliot and Jane Austen, structured their novels around a collection of plot lines, or strings of events that climaxed in a conflict before being resolved at the novel's conclusion. One of the great innovations of Mrs. Dalloway is that it does...
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not use a plot to give itself structure: in fact, the basic action of the novel involves theprotagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, preparing for a party that evening and encountering her old beau, Peter Walsh.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf layers a number of different elements to give her novel a complex structure. For instance, she uses time, which she recalls through the chiming of Big Ben every hour, and space, which she incorporates through different London landmarks and neighborhoods that her characters pass through, to structure her characters' activities and thoughts. In addition, in Mrs. Dalloway, her characters' perception gives the book structure, as they each recall events of the past and string them together into their own, invented narratives that they bring to bear on their understanding of the present.