As we were having our class discussion today, it struck me that one of the aspects I consider part of Woolf's aesthetic is the way she presents key plot elements. While in other, perhaps less mature novels is a way to describe them, even the smallest things are shoved in your nose, its easy to miss events that completely change the plot in Mrs. Dalloway. For example, I was reading the homework and all of a sudden I realized they were talking about hospitals and I had to flip back to discover that somehow I had completely missed that Septimus had jumped out of a window and killed himself. Not entirely sure how that happened, but there it is. The event simply wasn't dramatized. There was no dramatic pause or chapter break right before some sort of cheesy statement like ".., and then...he fell." or anything like that. The entire thing took place in less than a page, and if I hadn't gone back I would have missed it altogether.
In a way this ties back to what I was saying before about subtlety, but instead of leaving you wondering about the ambiguity of a character's opinions, now even important plot elements are being minimized. I think that this goes back to the way that Woolf views the world as we think she does: just a big web of consciences reacting in variation of ways to events that they have in common, but the events themselves are not particularly important. Woolf seems to be much more interested in writing about the way that Holmes and Rezia react to his suicide than the actual event.
1 comment:
Yes--Woolf's narration of Septimus's leap isn't designed for maximum dramatic effect, as you say; its quickness, its seeming spontaneity (which is a big part of its *tragedy*--the sense that, in another minute, on a different day, under different circumstances, he *wouldn't* jump) is reflected in the narrative itself. It's a single, fleeting act that passes in a moment. There's no dramatic music playing; there's no cut to slow-motion. He just jumps, and there's a nauseating thudding sound. What you're describing here is part of Woolf's version of *realism*. We might say that, in "real life," a suicide is a single, private, unobserved and undramatic act, but the survivors are left to pick through the pieces, to try to make sense of it.
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