An analysis of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf

V. Dneprov

It's easy to criticize a Virginia Woolf novel, but you really shouldn't be seduced by this lightness. The novel was born more than 60 years ago and has not disappeared in the literary storms of our century: it lives on and continues to be read. According to Belinsky, the best critic is history, time. This "critic" spoke in favor of the novel, despite its palpable weaknesses.

The action of the novel took only one day, which, however, is not surprising. This day is dedicated to a significant event - a social reception scheduled for the evening - its success or failure is considered as an exciting problem. A more essential content lives, as it were, in the pores between the elements of the preparatory rite: the cleaning of the apartment, the arrangement of furniture, the choice of dishes, the putting in order of the green dress, recognized as worthy of celebration, the visit to the flower shop and the selection of flowers, the appearance of the first guests and that last moment when, closing doors behind them, the characters leave the novel, and the heroine is left alone - happily devastated. Throughout the day, every half an hour, the inexorable Big Ben beats loudly and melodiously - Time itself is put at the service of the upcoming festival. Such is the outer frame of the book, its scheme, or, if you like, its frame composition. Is the author teasing the reader, drawing him into a dispute: I am engaged in things so vain and external because the events that dominated the novel of the past are called upon to play a secondary role in the modern novel, and the internal action taking place in the subjective world of the characters acquires decisive importance - here is beauty and poetry.

And here's how a more significant action is simply introduced: it happened that on this very day Peter Walsh arrived from India after a long absence - a man whom Clarissa Dalloway seemed to love in her youth. Do not expect that conversations will follow with the inevitable “do you remember” and a showdown. It just doesn't exist in the novel. Dialogue occupies an insignificant place in it. Direct communication is replaced by what is usually called the internal monologue, or stream of consciousness of each of them, that is, recollection; the spiritual life of the heroes is open to us, we "see" and "hear" what happens in their minds, we directly comprehend everything that happens in someone else's soul. Thus, communication, as it were, is carried out through the reader: it is he who can compare, put into a certain relationship what he learned in their internal monologue or the process of remembering. The foregoing seems to be of paramount importance when it comes to the work under consideration by Virginia Woolf. Here the reader, passing alternately through the souls of Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh, moving along the course of each of them's memories, seems to compose the novel himself.

Within these limits, there is some difference between interior monologue and stream of consciousness. In the first, the content depicted is more subject to thematic unity, more connected and subject to the logic of the unfolding meaning. In the second, the stream of consciousness, its course is broken by the intrusion of momentary, incidental impressions or unexpectedly emerging associations that change the direction of the mental process. The first can be represented by a more or less regular curve, the second by a broken line. The literary technique of the internal monologue, or stream of consciousness, was brought to maturity by Russian writers: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. To understand the difference between an internal monologue and a stream of consciousness, it is enough to compare the image internal states Anna Karenina before her suicide, as given in the variant and the final text. In the first, the internal monologue decisively prevails, in the second - the stream of consciousness. (I mention this because Virginia Woolf's novel makes extensive use of the distinction, and the writer skilfully moves from one to the other.)

So: the stream-of-consciousness monologue of Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh becomes the supporting structure of artistic content, leads to the main idea of ​​the novel. The strongest love excitements of Clarissa are connected with Peter Walsh, but this did not prevent her soberly and decisively from breaking with him and taking as her husband a benevolent and gentlemanly mediocre man, who promises her a quiet life, a comfortable and beautiful life, and, moreover, loves her so much that his love enough for her for all the years of living together. Richard Dalloway is a model of an aristocratic-conservative nature, a stronghold of a life order without upheavals and crises, he will provide her with life at the social level that she needs. Peter Walsh is uneven, restless - moments of high tenderness and attraction to him are replaced by quarrels, he is too prone to unconventional judgments, there is an element of unpredictability in his actions, there is too much insight in his irony addressed to her to be desirable: Clarissa should be accepted and love it the way it is. Peter Walsh is neither personally nor socially reliable enough, he does not have the strength required to weave a nest with him. Now that she has achieved everything she hoped for, suddenly Peter appears again. Experienced with him passes in the memories as a living thing and requires an answer. Now Clarissa has matured and understands more clearly how much she has lost. But not for a moment does it occur to her to doubt her innocence. Now "love headlong" seems to her even more vague, more disturbing, more dangerous than it seemed before. And the current eccentric disorder of Peter confirms this. The test was not easy - it was associated with pain, but the result is quite clear. Now that she is over 50 years old, and she has essentially remained a young woman, slender, shiny and beautiful, Clarissa not only rejects Peter Walsh again, but goes beyond the borders of her memory, yesterday still warm and alive, finally saying goodbye to youth. It is noteworthy that the book, for the most part devoted to love, turns out to be anti-romantic through and through. Clarissa was capable of love, but did not want it, seeing above her another value that is more significant than love: the realm of poeticized aristocratic everyday life and tradition, tender partnership, joyful care of the house that she is so proud of. Mrs. Dalloway vividly represents a cultivated beautiful femininity, in spirit and flesh belonging to the world of conservatism and stability inherent in the English aristocratic environment. (Let me remind you that since the end of the seventeenth century, the aristocracy, having become an honorary part of the bourgeoisie and successfully serving its class, has retained some originality in morals, culture, life manners, showing over the course of these centuries the stability of a lifestyle that has not been seen in any other European country.) Ability the aristocracy and the upper stratum of the bourgeoisie to remain themselves in all the transformations of history is the invisible premise of the whole concept of being in the novel by Virginia Woolf. Let it be as before - such is the formula of the socio-psychological idea of ​​"Mrs. Dalloway". The reality of England after the First World War is, as it were, deliberately taken from the female end: husbands are given politics, careers, affairs, but the occupations and interests of women do not at all require knowledge of men's affairs in their essence. From such a ladylike-aristocratic position it is easier to depict the life of post-war England, bypassing the great upheavals of history.

Mrs. Dalloway, coming out into the London street, hearing its many-voiced noise, measured rhythm, the inner peace hidden in its revival, felt with special joy that this was the old London, "and there is no more war": it has been erased, washed away by the waves of the restored former English life. Peter Walsh, having arrived from India, found London imperturbably the same as he once knew it: as if a man returned to his old apartment and, with a feeling of rest, puts his feet in slippers without looking.

However, Woolf is a good enough writer not to amend the utopia of imperturbable English pragmatism, the idyll of time stopped. The war left such a notch in the memory of the nation that it is impossible to remain silent. The war had drawn a sharp black line into the happily luminous spectrum of London life.

The novel included a tragic episode. Just as suddenly as other characters, there appeared in the novel a young man, Septimus Smith, in whose humane, poetic soul the horror of war was reflected in a noble neurosis, leading to torment and death. His shocked psyche is depicted very accurately, with the kind of poetry that is not afraid of meeting the fatal questions of life. The doctors treating him are presented in the spirit of cruel satire coming from realistic English novel XIX century. Soulless, self-satisfied, they are completely unable to understand the suffering of Septimus Smith, and their treatment is a special form of violence and suppression. The scene when Smith, horrified by the approach of the doctor, throws himself out of the window, was written by the hand of the master. The whole episode demonstrates the author's innermost, and not realized, possibilities. But the episode must be introduced into the general structure of the novel so that its idea, its basic tone, is not disturbed. That is why he is placed in brackets, isolated from the general course of the novel, taken to the margins of it. The episode is, as it were, the payment that prosperity pays to suffering - it, like the tail of a comet, stretches out from the war.

The basis of the novel is the artist's desire to preserve English reality as it was and is. Even changes for the better threaten its constancy - let it be better that everything remains unchanged. Virginia Woolf's novel is the embodiment of the spirit of conservatism that lives in every cell of artistically captured life. It's not just the superficiality of the author's approach to life - behind it is a conservative ideal, the desire to combine illusion and reality. Now that English conservatism has become tougher, meaner, more aggressive, more dangerous, the emergence of a novel like Mrs. artwork became impossible. The hero of Lermontov is ready to give two lives "for one, but only full of worries", and Mrs. Dalloway easily gives such an extraordinary value as love, for a worry-free, beautifully prosperous life. The author does not condemn, does not approve of his heroine, he says: it is so. And at the same time admires the completeness and charming integrity of her character.

The author does not criticize her heroine, but she is unlikely to be able to avoid accurate criticism from the reader. Possessing the external and superficial signs of a charming woman, she is essentially devoid of femininity; the sharp mind of the heroine is dry and rational; she is catastrophically poor in the realm of emotions - Mrs. Dalloway's only burning emotion found in the book is hatred. Class prejudice replaces her feelings...

A lowly character in a lowly world at the time of gigantic upheavals. In all this, the narrowness of the historical and social horizons of the artist himself - Virginia Woolf ...

In order to see the novel of Virginia Woolf more broadly and more accurately, we must determine its connection with the phenomenon of art and culture, which Bunin called "increased susceptibility." It's about about historically developed changes in the structure of the human personality, changes that have affected the entire sphere of human sensory reactions, bringing new richness to their content. The same Bunin said about "the amazing figurativeness, verbal sensuality, which Russian literature is so famous for." From now on, the sensual connection of a person with the world forms a special layer of the human psyche, permeated with the most general emotions and thoughts. And Bunin's words refer primarily to Tolstoy, who artistically placed the world of the sensual in a new place - and was clearly aware of this.

But regardless of this shift in Russian literature, almost at the same time, great painting was being created in France, which said a new word in the history of world art and received the name impressionistic - from the word "impression". Anyone who has penetrated the world of this painting will forever see the world differently than he saw it before - with more sighted eyes, will perceive the beauty of nature and man in a new way. The deep educational significance of this painting is undeniable: it makes the acts of human existence more intense or, to use the words of Tolstoy, enhances his sense of life. To this we must add: a similar process has been outlined in French literature: it is enough to compare the figurativeness of Balzac with the rich nuanced figurativeness of Flaubert, with his landscape that conveys the mood, or with the prose of Maupassant, highly valued by Tolstoy for its "colorfulness", to be convinced of what has been said. Both movements: in the color and light of painting, in the word of literature, closed in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time - here the impressionist era in France is summed up.

The following is also significant: in his later years, Bunin admitted that he suddenly discovered a significant similarity between his prose and Proust's prose, adding that he had only recently become acquainted with the works of the French writer, thereby saying that the similarity appeared beyond any mutual influence. All this allows us to talk about an era in the development of art, historical stage in the phenomenology of man.

English literature joined this process much later than Russia and France. It is worth noting that the group of English writers who were guided by "increased susceptibility" directly referred to the achievements of the "Post-Impressionists": Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin. It was to this group that Virginia Woolf, who wittily and faithfully depicted her lineage as a writer in her articles. Naturally, she turned first of all to the work of Tolstoy, whom she considered the greatest novelist in the world. She especially liked the fact that Tolstoy depicts people and human communication, moving from the external to the internal - after all, here is the core of her whole art program. But she resolutely did not like the fact that the famous "Russian soul" plays such a large role in Tolstoy's writings. She had in mind that in Tolstoy we meet not only with the adjunction of emotions and thoughts to the blessed realm of increased impressionability, to the sphere of contemplation, but also the overlying layers of personality, where questions about the moral forces of the people are raised and resolved, where the image of the ideological personality. Virginia Woolf is drawn to the first, and the second is alien and undesirable to her. She, as we see, knows how to think clearly and knows what she needs.

Much closer to her was the English-language writer Joyce - a wonderful stylist, enormously gifted in the field of figurative speech and who developed the techniques of the "stream of consciousness" to perfection. From Joyce, she took the idea of ​​consciousness, which is momentarily dependent on invading impressions and the chains of association coming from them, of the intertwining of “now” and “was” into an inseparable unity. But she, as an extreme, was irritated by the disorder, the disorder of this consciousness, its lack of culture: a lot in it speaks of mass character and common people. The spontaneous democratism of Joyce's art was alien and unpleasant to her. With Wolfe's characteristic class instinct, somewhere deep down connected with aesthetic taste, she guessed how alien to her in all respects Mr. Bloom with his petty deeds and worries, with his mass-petty-bourgeois experiences. She wanted her keen susceptibility to be tightened with a sense of proportion, which entered into flesh and blood and only occasionally burst into passionate outbursts.

Virginia Woolf speaks of Proust with great reverence as the source of modern literature, designed to replace obsolete literature - such as the Forsyte Saga. Reading her novel, at every step you meet with the influence of Proust - right down to the tone and manner of expression. Like Proust, in Mrs. Dalloway, the process of recollection plays an important role, forming the main content of the novel. True, in Wolfe the stream of memory is included in the "today", memory is separated from the present, while in Proust this stream moves from the depths of time, turning out to be both past and present. This difference is not just external.

In Woolf, as in Proust, the action is played out on the upper floor of life: they do not look into those socio-economic mechanisms that determine the conditions of life of the characters; they accept these conditions in their essence as given. But the definite bears the features of the defining, and Proust, within the limits set for himself, gives the finest social characteristics of the characters portrayed, representing the socially particular in all its possible reflections. Virginia Woolf's horizons are narrower, more constrained, her person in most cases coincides with the English aristocrat - and yet she clearly outlines the subtle differences of social typicality through the subjective world of her heroes. Not to mention the fact that secondary characters - in "characteristic" roles - in the overwhelming majority of cases are described in the traditions of the English realistic novel: Woolf sees no point in examining them in the aspect of subjectivity.

Proust's influence on Woolf's novel is most determined by the fact that Proust builds the human image mainly from impressions and the combination of impressions, from what "painfully exaggerated sensibility" can give. At the center of Woolf's artistic world is also "sensibility". Perceptions are like flashes that are born from the contact of the subject with the surrounding world or another subject. Such flashes are moments of poetry, moments of the fullness of being.

But here, too, there is an important difference between Woolf and Proust: Proust, not caring about proportions or entertainment, is ready, concentrating on one impression, to devote many pages to it. Woolf is alien to such an extreme sequence, she is afraid of the merciless clarity of Proust. She, as it were, throws a transparent veil over a given sum of perceptions, immerses them in a kind of unifying shimmer, a light haze, subordinating their diversity to the unity of color. Proust talks long and hard about one thing. Woolf - short and concise about many things. She does not achieve the enthusiasm that Proust seeks, but her prose is easier to digest, it may seem more entertaining, it is softer, more proportionate to Proust's prose. Proust's novel is difficult to read: it is not easy to follow a writer who, in the psychological microcosm, untiringly divides an impression into elementary parts and includes it in a whole circle of associations; Woolf makes it easier, she runs through the series of impressions faster, she is more moderate here too, fearing extremes and one-sidedness. Wolfe's artistic virtue is sharply filed moderation. She so combines the extremes of her predecessors that there is a smooth harmony at the level of high artistic culture. In addition, along the way, she can benefit from the lessons of Henry James, whose phrase moves through subtly subtle shades, caresses the ear with grace and sweet-musical rhythm. Still, Wolfe will not descend with James into the dark chaos of a novel of his like The Turn of the Screw.

It would be unfair to consider as a disadvantage such a reduction of many independently developed forms into a kind of unity. This kind of artistic coexistence, this rounding of sharp corners - this is exactly what makes Woolf herself, what creates a peculiar English version a prose based on "heightened susceptibility" that places Mrs. Dalloway in a literary era that has taken over many countries - from Russia and France to Hemingway's American prose or Norwegian prose.

From the first pages, we learn how the engine of the novel starts, in what rhythm it sounds. The first line of the novel is: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." And I thought: "What a fresh morning." And from the thought of a sudden throw in the morning from youth. “How good! It's like you're dipping! It was always like that when, to the faint squeak of the hinges, which is still in her ears, she opened the glass doors of the terrace in Borton and plunged into the air. Fresh, quiet, not what it is now, like a slap of a wave; the whisper of a wave..."

From the decision to go for flowers, a throw to the fact that the morning is fresh, from him a throw to a memorable morning from his youth. And from this there is another throw: to Peter Walsh, who said: "Dream among vegetables." The relation between the past and the present is included: the air is quiet, not like now. Included is the author's decision not to pose as a man, but to remain a woman in the field of art as well: the slap of a wave, the whisper of a wave. We immediately learn about much that begins to happen in the novel, but without any involvement of the narrative. The narration will arise if the reader manages to link together, as it were, moments of a moving consciousness flying in different directions. The content is guessed without the help of the author: from a combination of elements calculated by the author in such a way that the reader has at hand everything that ensures guessing. We learn about the appearance of the heroine from the act of seeing, through the eyes of a person, by chance - that's luck! - who happened to be next to Clarissa at the moment when she stood on the sidewalk, waiting for the van: “something, perhaps, looks like a bird: a jay; blue-green, light, lively, even though she is already over fifty ... "

Clarissa walks to the flower shop, and at this time a lot of events are happening in her head - we quickly and imperceptibly move into the center of the novel plot and at the same time learn something important about the character of the heroine. She reached the gates of the park. She stood for a moment, looking at the buses rolling down Piccadilly. She will not talk about anyone on the sow: he is such or such. She feels infinitely young, at the same time inexpressibly ancient. She is like a knife, everything goes through; at the same time she is outside, observing. Here she is looking at a taxi, and it always seems to her that she is far, far away on the sea, alone; she always has the feeling that to live even a day is a very, very dangerous thing.” Here we meet with the "stream of consciousness" - a model of Virginia Woolf. The stream easily sways, not stopping at one thing, overflowing from one to another. But the running motifs then link with each other, and these linkages give the key to deciphering, make it possible to read his supposedly incoherent speech coherently. At the beginning of the paragraph, we read that Clarissa “will not say about anyone: he is like this or that” - a short, tattered thought. But she's grappled with prior thoughts about whether she was right to marry Richard Dalloway and not Peter Walsh. And then, at the end of the paragraph, the flow turns sharply to Peter Walsh again: “and she won’t talk about Peter anymore, she won’t talk about herself: I am this, I am that.” In the stream, thin streams are indicated, either coming to the surface, or hiding in the depths. The more fully the reader becomes acquainted with the original collision of the novel, the easier he is to single out the various lines of content that run through the fluid elements of Mrs. Dalloway's consciousness.

Finally she's at the flower shop. “There were: spur, sweet peas, lilacs and carnations, an abyss of carnations. There were roses, there were irises. Oh, and she breathed in the earthy, sweet smell of the garden..., she nodded to irises, roses, lilacs, and, closing her eyes, absorbed after the roar of the street a particularly fabulous smell, amazing coolness. And how fresh, when she opened her eyes again, roses looked at her, as if lacy linen had been brought from the laundry on wicker trays; and how strict and dark the carnations are, and how straight they hold their heads, and the sweet peas are touched by lilacness, snowiness, pallor, as if it were already evening, and the girls in muslin went out to pick sweet peas and roses at the end summer day with a deep blue, almost blackening sky, with carnation, spur, arum; and it’s as if it’s already the seventh hour, and every flower - lilac, carnation, irises, roses - sparkles with white, purple, orange, fiery and burns with a separate fire, gentle, clear, on foggy flowerbeds ... ”Here is painting with a word and at the same time a poem , here is artistically the highest realm of Virginia Woolf art. Such pictorial poems of impressions, crossing the text, maintain the artistic level of the whole. Reduce their number - and this level will decrease and, perhaps, collapse. We vividly feel the pleasure with which the author repeats, like a chorus or a poetic spell, the names of flowers, as if even the names are fragrant. Like this, it is worth pronouncing the names Shakespeare, Pushkin, Chekhov, and we feel a wave of poetry hitting us.

And one more thing needs to be said. Each reader in the above passage undoubtedly feels that this was written by a woman ... Many signs scattered throughout the text make this known with certainty. Until the 20th century, in the art of fiction, "man in general" spoke in a male voice, with male intonations. The writer could conduct the most subtle analysis of female psychology, but the author remained a man. Only in our century is human nature differentiated in the initial positions of art into male and female. The opportunity appears and is realized in the very method of depiction to reflect the originality of the female psyche. This big topic, and I have no doubt that it will be duly investigated. And in this study, the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" will find its place.

Finally, the last. I mentioned the orientation of the group to which Woolf was attached to the French Post-Impressionists. This orientation did not remain an empty phrase. The path to revealing the beauty of the surrounding world is related to the path of Van Gogh, Gauguin and other artists of the direction. The rapprochement of literature with modern painting is an essential fact of the art of the late 19th - first quarter of the 20th century.

How much we learned about the heroine of the novel during her short walk to the flower shop; how many serious and vainly feminine thoughts flew through her lovely head: from thoughts about death, about religion, about love to comparative analysis its feminine attractiveness with the attractiveness of other women, or the special importance of gloves and shoes for true elegance. What a large amount of diverse information is placed on more than four pages. If you pass from these pages to the whole novel, it will become clear what an enormous saturation of information is achieved by combining an internal monologue with a stream of consciousness, a montage of impressions, feelings and thoughts, supposedly randomly replacing each other, but in fact carefully verified and worked out. Of course, such a literary technique can be artistically successful only in a number of special cases - and we have just one of such cases.

By the methods of a kind of mosaic, so to speak, nested image, a rare completeness of the characterization of Mrs. Dalloway was achieved, and, closing the book, you thoroughly recognized her appearance, her psychological world, the play of her soul - everything that makes up the individual typicality of the heroine. The word "mosaic" is used in a broad sense: it is not a portrait composed of fixed stones of different colors, as in a Byzantine mosaic, but a portrait created by changing combinations of multi-colored, igniting and fading light pulses.

Clarissa Dalloway steadfastly keeps the image that has developed in the opinion of the people around her: a calmly proud winner, who fully owns the art of aristocratic simplicity. And no one - neither her husband, nor her daughter, nor Peter Walsh who loves her - knows what is hidden in the depths of her soul, which is not visible from the outside. This specific divergence between the line of external behavior and the line of movement of subjective consciousness is, in Woolf's view, what we usually call the secret of woman. There is a lot going on in the depths that no one except herself knows about her - no one except Virginia Woolf, who created her heroine along with her secrets. "Mrs. Dalloway" - a novel without mystery; one of the important themes of the novel is precisely the question of the soil from which the feminine secret grows. This soil is historically hardened ideas about a woman, to which she, like it or not, is forced to orient herself in order not to deceive her expectations. Virginia Woolf touched on a serious issue here, which one way or another should have touched female romance XX century.

I'll say a few words about Peter Walsh - just in one connection. Woolf knew how to write a novel, and she wrote it the right way. It was where Peter Walsh is mentioned that she spoke most clearly on the decisive question of the meaning of heightened susceptibility. “This impressionability was a real disaster for him ... Probably, his eyes saw some kind of beauty; or simply the burden of this day, which in the morning, from the visit of Clarissa, tormented with heat, brightness and drip-drip-drip of impressions, one after another into the cellar, where they will all remain in the dark, in the depths - and no one will know ... When suddenly the connection of things is revealed; ambulance"; life and death; a storm of feelings suddenly seemed to pick him up and carry him to the high roof, and below there was only a bare, white, shell-strewn beach. Yes, she was a real disaster for him in India, in the English circle - this is his impressionability. Reread the pages dedicated to Peter; Walsh on the eve of the evening party, and you will find the Virginia Woolf aesthetic program there.

Keywords: Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway", "Mrs. Dalloway", modernism, criticism of the work of Virginia Woolf, criticism of the works of Virginia Woolf, download criticism, free download, English literature of the 20th century.

Essay

Stylistic analysis of the features of the modernist novel by S. Wolfe

"Mrs. Dalloway"

English novelist, critic and essayist Virginia Stephen Woolf (Virginia Stephen Woolf, 1882-1941) is considered one of the most authentic writers in England between the First and Second World Wars. Dissatisfied with novels based on the known, the factual, and the abundance of external details, Virginia Woolf took the experimental paths of a more internal, subjective and, in a sense, more personal interpretation of life experience, adopting this manner from Henry James, Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

In the works of these masters, the reality of time and perception shaped the stream of consciousness, a concept that perhaps owes its origin to William James. Virginia Woolf lived and responded to a world where every experience is associated with difficult changes in knowledge, the civilized primitiveness of war and new morals and manners. She described her own, sensual poetic reality, without, however, renouncing the legacy of the literary culture in which she grew up.

Virginia Woolf is the author of about 15 books, among which the last "A Writer's Diary" was published after the writer's death in 1953. "Mrs. Dalloway", "To the Lighthouse" and "Jacob's Room" (Jacob "s Room , 1922) make up much of the literary legacy of Virginia Woolf. "Journey" (The Voyage Out, 1915) is her first novel, which attracted the attention of critics. "Night and Day" (Night and Day, 1919) is a traditional work in terms of methodology. Short stories from "Monday or Tuesday" (Monday or Tuesday, 1921) received critical acclaim in the press, but "In the Waves" (In The Waves, 1931) she masterfully applied the technique of stream of consciousness. Her experimental novels include Orlando (Orlando, 1928), The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941). Virginia Woolf's struggle for women's rights was expressed in "Three Guineas" (Three Guineas, 1938) and some other works.

In this paper, the object of study is Wolfe W.'s novel "Mrs. Dalloway".

Subject of study - genre features novel Mrs Dalloway. The goal is to reveal the features of the modernist novel in the text. The work consists of an introduction, two main parts, a conclusion and a list of references.

Work on the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" began with a story called "in Bond Street": it was completed in October 1922, and in 1923 it was published in the American magazine Clockface. However, the finished story "didn't let go", and Woolf decided to rework it into a novel.

The original idea is only partly similar to what we know today under the name "Mrs. Dalloway" [Bradbury M.].

The book was supposed to have six or seven chapters describing the social life of London, one of the main characters was the Prime Minister; storylines, as in the final version of the novel, "converged at one point during a reception with Mrs. Dalloway." It was assumed that the book would be quite cheerful - this can be seen from the surviving sketches. However, dark notes were also woven into the story. As Wolfe explained in the foreword, which is published in some publications, the main character, Clarissa Dalloway, was supposed to commit suicide or die during her party. Then the idea underwent a number of changes, but some obsession with death remained in the novel - another main character appeared in the book - Septimus Warren Smith, shell-shocked during the war: in the course of work, it was assumed that his death should be announced at the reception. Like the final draft, the interim ended with a description of the reception at Mrs. Dalloway's house.

Until the end of 1922, Woolf continued to work on the book, making more and more corrections. At first, Woolf wanted to name the new thing "Clock" in order to emphasize the difference between the flow of "external" and "internal" time in the novel by the title itself. Although the idea seemed very attractive, the book, nevertheless, was difficult to write. The work on the book was subject to Woolf's mood swings - from ups and downs to despair - and demanded that the writer formulate her view of reality, art and life, which she expressed so fully in her critical works. Notes on "Mrs. Dalloway" in Diaries and notebooks female writers are living history writing one of the most important novels in modern literature. It was carefully and thoughtfully planned, nevertheless it was written heavily and unevenly, periods of creative upsurge were replaced by painful doubts. Sometimes it seemed to Woolf that she wrote easily, quickly, brilliantly, and sometimes the work did not move from the dead center, giving the author a feeling of powerlessness and despair. The exhausting process lasted two years. As she herself noted, the book was worth “... the devil's struggle. Her plan is elusive, but it's a masterful build. I have to turn my whole self inside out all the time in order to be worthy of the text. And the cycle of creative fever and creative crisis, excitement and depression continued for another whole year, until October 1924. When the book came out in March 1925, most reviewers immediately called it a masterpiece.

The key phrase for the modernist novel is “stream of consciousness”.

The term “stream of consciousness” was borrowed by writers from the American psychologist William James. He became decisive for understanding the human character in the new novel and its entire narrative structure. This term has been successfully generalized whole line ideas of modern philosophy and psychology, which served as the basis for modernism as a system of artistic thinking.

Wolfe, following the examples of his teachers, deepens the Proustian “stream of consciousness”, trying to capture the very process of thinking of the characters in the novel, to reproduce all of them, even fleeting, sensations and thoughts [Zlatina E.].

The whole novel is a “stream of consciousness” of Mrs. Dalloway and Smith, their feelings and memories, broken into certain segments by the blows of Big Ben. This is a conversation of the soul with itself, a living flow of thoughts and feelings. The ringing of the bells of Big Ben, which beats every hour, is heard by everyone, each from his place. A special role in the novel belongs to the clock, especially the main clock in London - Big Ben, associated with the Parliament building, power; the bronze hum of Big Ben marks each of the seventeen hours during which the novel takes place [Bradbury M.]. Pictures of the past surface, appearing in Clarissa's memories. They rush in the stream of her consciousness, their contours are indicated in conversations, remarks. Details and names flash by that will never be clear to the reader. Time layers intersect, flow one on top of the other, in a single moment the past merges with the present. “Do you remember the lake?” Clarissa asks a friend of her youth, Peter Walsh, and her voice was cut off by a feeling that suddenly made her heart beat out of place, caught her throat and tightened her lips when she said “lake”. For - immediately - she, a girl, threw bread crumbs to the ducks, standing next to her parents, and as an adult woman she walked along the shore towards them, walked and walked and carried her life in her arms, and the closer to them, this life grew in her hands, swelled until she became all life, and then she laid her down at their feet and said: “That's what I made of her, that's it!” What did she do? Really, what? Sitting and sewing next to Peter today.” The noticed experiences of the characters often seem insignificant, but a careful fixation of all the states of their souls, what Wolfe calls “moments of being” (moments of being), grows into an impressive mosaic, which is composed of many changing impressions, striving to elude observers - fragments of thoughts, random associations, fleeting impressions. What is valuable for Woolf is that which is elusive, inexpressible by anything but sensations. The writer exposes the irrational depths of individual existence and forms a flow of thoughts, as it were, “caught halfway”. The protocol colorlessness of the author's speech is the background of the novel, creating the effect of immersing the reader in a chaotic world of feelings, thoughts, and observations.

Although outwardly the outline of the plot-plot narrative is observed, in fact, the novel lacks precisely the traditional eventfulness. Actually, events, as the poetics of the classical novel understood them, are not here at all [Genieva E.].

Narrative exists on two levels. The first, although not clearly eventful, is external, material. They buy flowers, sew up a dress, walk in the park, make hats, receive patients, discuss politics, wait for guests, throw themselves out of the window. Here, in an abundance of colors, smells, sensations, London arises, seen with amazing topographical accuracy in different time day, under different lighting conditions. Here the house freezes in the morning silence, preparing for the evening flurry of sounds. Here the clock of Big Ben beats inexorably, measuring the time.

We really live with the heroes of the long June day of 1923 - but not only in real time. We are not only witnesses to the actions of the heroes, we are, first of all, "spies" who have penetrated "the holy of holies" - their soul, memory, their dreams. For the most part, they are silent in this novel, and all real conversations, dialogues, monologues, disputes take place behind a veil of Silence - in memory, imagination. Memory is capricious, it does not obey the laws of logic, memory often rebels against order, chronology. And although the blows of Big Ben constantly remind us that time moves, it is not astronomical time that rules in this book, but internal, associative time. It is the secondary events that have no formal relation to the plot that serve as the basis for the internal movements that take place in the mind. In real life, only a few minutes separate one event from another in the novel. Here Clarissa took off her hat, put it on the bed, listened to some sound in the house. And suddenly - instantly - because of some trifle: either a smell, or a sound - the floodgates of memory opened, two realities - external and internal - were paired. I remembered, I saw childhood - but it did not flash in a quick, warm way in my mind, it came to life here, in the middle of London, in the room of an already middle-aged woman, bloomed with colors, resounded with sounds, rang with voices. Such a pairing of reality with memory, moments over the years creates a special internal tension in the novel: a strong psychological discharge slips through, the flash of which highlights the character.

It describes only one day in August 1923 in the life of two main characters - the romantic secular London lady Clarissa Dalloway and the modest clerk Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War. The method of maximum consolidation of real time - to the instantaneous impression, to the isolation of one day - is characteristic of the modernist novel. It distinguishes it from the traditional treatment of time in the novel, on the basis of which, by the beginning of the 20th century, multi-volume family chronicles grow up, like the famous Forsyte Saga (1906-1922) by John Galsworthy. In the traditional realistic narrative, a person appears immersed in the flow of time; the technique of modernism is to give the length of time compressed in human experience.

The change of point of view is one of the favorite devices in the modernist novel. The stream of consciousness “flows” in banks much wider than the life of one person, it captures many, opening the way from the uniqueness of the impression to a more objective picture of the world, like an action on a stage reproduced from several cameras [Shaitanov I.]. At the same time, the author himself prefers to remain behind the scenes, in the role of a director silently organizing the image. On a June morning, Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of an MP, leaves her house to buy flowers for an evening party she is hosting. The war is over, and people are still full of a sense of peace and tranquility that has come. Clarissa looks at her city with renewed joy. Her joy, her impressions are interrupted either by her own worries, or by unexpectedly wedged impressions and experiences of other people whom she does not even know, but whom she passes on the street. Unfamiliar faces will flash across the streets of London and voices will be heard that have only been heard once in the novel. But three main motives are gradually gaining strength. The heroine of the first and foremost is Mrs. Dalloway herself. Her mind constantly jumps from today (somehow the reception will work, why Lady Brutn didn’t invite her to lunch) to what was once, twenty years ago, to memories.

The second motive is the arrival of Peter Walsh. In their youth, he and Clarissa were in love with each other. He proposed and was rejected. Too Peter was always wrong, intimidating. And she is the embodiment of secularism and dignity. And then (although she knew that after several years spent in India, he should arrive today) Peter bursts into her living room without warning. He says that he is in love with a young woman, for whom he came to London to file his divorce. At this, Peter suddenly burst into tears, Clarissa began to reassure him: “... And it was surprisingly good and easy for her with him, and flashed: “If I went for him, this joy would always be mine” ”(translated by E. Surits). Memories involuntarily stir up the past, intrude into the present and paint with sadness the feeling of a life already lived and a future one. Peter Walsh is the motif of a life that hasn't been lived.

And finally, the third motive. His hero is Septimus Warren-Smith. Plotally, he is not connected with Mrs. Dalloway and her circle. It passes along the same London street as an unnoticed reminder of the war.

Modernists sought to expand the scope of expressiveness. They forced the word to compete with painting and music, to learn from them. Plot leitmotifs converge and diverge, like musical themes in sonata. They overlap and complement each other.

Clarissa Dalloway has little in common with the traditional romantic heroine[Bradbury M.]. She is fifty-two years old, she has just been ill with a severe flu, from which she still has not recovered. She is haunted by a feeling of emotional emptiness and a sense that life is running out. But she is an exemplary mistress, a part of the social elite of England, the wife of an important politician, a member of parliament from the Conservative Party, and she has a lot of secular duties that are not interesting and painful for her. What, Savor then it exists to give meaning to existence; and Clarissa “in her turn tried to warm and shine; she hosted a reception.” The whole novel is a story about her ability to “warm and illuminate” and respond to what warms and illuminates this world. Clarissa was given the gift of “instinctively comprehending people ... It was enough for her to be in the same space with someone for the first time - and she was ready to bristle or purr. Like a cat". This gift makes her vulnerable, she often wants to hide from everyone, as happens during her reception. Peter Walsh, who wanted to marry her thirty years ago and now reappeared in her house, has known this property of her for a very long time: “The ideal hostess, he called her (she sobbed because of this in the bedroom), she has the makings of an ideal hostess, he said". In fact, one of the stories unfolding in the book is the story of Peter Walsh's discovery (or even recollection) of Clarissa's all-inclusive wholeness as he wandered around London. He rediscovers London - the way London became after the war - wandering around the city day and night, absorbing images of its urban beauty: straight streets, illuminated windows, “a hidden feeling of joy”. During the reception, he feels inspiration, ecstasy and tries to understand what is the reason for this:

This is Clarissa, he said.

And then he saw her.

Virginia Woolf Mrs. Delloway

One astute critic discerned in Virginia Woolf's novel the fascination of the "metaphysical hostess", a woman who is endowed with the gift not only to arrange receptions, but also to cleanse the ties between domestic and ties between people in society from everything superficial, to reveal in them the hidden sense of being, wholeness, which our intuition tells us is inherent in reality, the ability to purify, making it the center of one's existence.

Another feature is the acute sense that permeates the novel how much modernity has changed the world. Virginia Woolf attached great importance secular life, honored the "unshakable" foundations, was no stranger to snobbery; but she treated it differently than her male heroes, who devoted their lives to politics and power, busy signing international treaties and ruling India. Woolf, in all these “establishments,” saw a kind of metaphysical community. It was, to use her words, a world seen from a woman's point of view, and for Woolf, as for Clarissa, it had a certain aesthetic unity, a beauty of its own. But besides, it was also the post-war world: fragile, unsettled. The airplane above the city in the novel reminds both of the past war and of the current merchants. The car of the "powerful man" bursts into the narrative, announcing itself with a "pop like a pistol shot." This is a reminder to the crowd, the voice of power. Together with him, Septimus Smith enters the story, with his terrible visions - they break out to the surface like flames that burn the story from the inside. The memory of what World War also began with a pistol shot, lives in the novel, surfacing again and again, primarily in connection with Septimus and his visions of the world as a battlefield that haunt him.

By introducing Septimus into the novel, Virginia Woolf was able to tell about two partially overlapping and intersecting worlds at once, but not with the help of traditional narrative technique, but weaving a web of mediated connections. She was worried about whether critics would see exactly how the themes were intertwined in the novel. And they intertwine in the stream of consciousness of the characters - this method turned out to be especially important for the modern novel, and Virginia Woolf was one of the great pioneers. The themes are intertwined by describing the life of a big city, where random intersections of characters lined up in a single complex pattern. The imposition of topics also occurs because Septimus embodies the very spirit of the “other” London, destroyed by the war and plunged into oblivion. Like many heroes of post-war literature, he belongs to the "tragic generation", which is partly associated with the vulnerability and instability of modern life, and Woolf's novel is an attempt to understand this instability. Septimus is not a typical character for Woolf, although in the literature of the 20s we will find a great many heroes similar to him. The fragmentation of Septimus' consciousness is of a completely different kind than that of Clarissa. Septimus belongs to a world of brute force, violence and defeat. The difference between this world and the world of Clarissa emerges in the final scenes of the novel: “The earth moved in a flash; rusty rods, tearing, crushing the body, passed through. He lay, and in consciousness it was heard: bang, bang, bang; then - the suffocation of darkness. So it appeared to her. But why did he do it? And the Bradshaws are talking about it here at her reception!”

What is the ending of the novel? In general, there is no final [Shaitanov I.]. There is only the final connection of all the motives that converged in the living room of Clarissa Dalloway. The novel ended with the reception and even a little earlier. In addition to the usual small talk and the exchange of political opinions, there were also memories here, because many years later people met who had once been in Clarissa's country house. Sir William Bradshaw, the medical luminary, also arrived, reporting that some poor fellow (he was also brought to Sir William) had thrown himself out of a window (not named here by the name of Septimus Warren-Smith). Consequences of a military concussion. This should be taken into account in the new bill ...

And Peter Walsh was still waiting for the hostess to be free, to come up to him. A mutual friend of those early years recalled that Clarissa had always liked him, Peter, more than Richard Dalloway. Peter was about to leave, but suddenly he felt fear, bliss, confusion:

This is Clarissa, he thought to himself.

And he saw her."

The last phrase of the novel, in which the events of one day contain the memory of a life lived and a life not lived; in which the main event of our time flashed by the fate of a minor character, however, awakening in the heart of the main character the fear of death so familiar to her.

An impressionistic novel, such as Mrs. Dalloway, is busy with momentary experiences, appreciates the accuracy of fleeting impressions, cannot get rid of memories, but, immersed in the stream of consciousness, this novel captures the rumble of the life stream, which so swiftly carries a person to the inevitable limit of being [Shaitanov AND.]. The thought of eternity makes it possible to experience the instantaneousness of life impressions more sharply.

With the release of "Mrs. Dalloway" and the novels that followed it, Virginia Woolf gained a reputation as perhaps the brightest modernist prose writer in English literature [Bradbury M.].

Wolfe W.'s novel "Mrs. Delloway" presents character traits a whole literary era, but, nevertheless, she managed to preserve her unique voice, and this is already the property of a great writer. Creatively developing, transforming, comprehending, modifying the artistic precepts of Lawrence Stern, Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, she gave the writers who followed her a whole arsenal of techniques, and most importantly, an angle of vision, without which it is impossible to imagine the image of the psychological and moral image of a person. in foreign prose of the XX century.

Her novels are a very important part of the literature of modernism, and they are completely unique for their era. And they are much more intimate than most modern novels, they are built according to their own aesthetic laws - the laws of integrity. They have their own magic, which is not so much in modern literature (“Does she know that a fairy garden surrounds them?” asks old Mrs. Hilbery at Clarissa’s reception), they have a poetry of prose speech, which otherwise contemporary writers seemed to discredit herself, although, as we see from her reviews, diaries, and also some of the satirical scenes of Mrs. Dalloway, she knew how to be caustic and biting: sometimes out of pure snobbery, but more often out of loyalty to unvarnished moral truth.

As more and more of her works, not published during her lifetime, come out, we see how rich in shades her voice was, how comprehensive and sharp her attention to the world is. We see the scope of her strength and that great role which she played in shaping the spirit of contemporary art.

References

1. Bradbury M. Virginia Woolf (translated by Nesterov A.) // Foreign Literature, 2002. No. 12. URL: http://magazines.russ.ru.

2. Genieva E. The truth of the fact and the truth of the vision.// Wolf V. Orlando.M., 2006.S. 5-29.

3. Foreign literature of the 20th century, ed. Andreeva L.G. M., 1996. S. 293-307.

4. Zlatina E. Virginia Woolf and her novel "Mrs. Dalloway" // http://www.virginiawoolf.ru.

5. Nilin A. Appeal of talent to talent.// IL, 1989. No. 6.

6. Shaitanov I. Between Victorianism and Dystopia. English Literature of the First Third of the 20th Century. // "Literature", publishing house "First of September". 2004. No. 43.

7. Yanovskaya G. "Mrs. Dalloway" V. Wolfe: The problem of real communicative space.// Balt. philol. courier. Kaliningrad, 2000. No. 1.

Essay
Stylistic analysis of the features of the modernist novel by S. Wolfe
"Mrs Dalloway"

English novelist, critic and essayist Virginia Stephen Woolf (Virginia Stephen Woolf, 1882-1941) is considered one of the most authentic writers in England between the First and Second World Wars. Dissatisfied with novels based on the known, the factual, and the abundance of external details, Virginia Woolf took the experimental paths of a more internal, subjective and, in a sense, more personal interpretation of life experience, adopting this manner from Henry James, Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
In the works of these masters, the reality of time and perception formed the stream of consciousness, a concept that perhaps owes its origin to William James. Virginia Woolf lived and responded to a world where every experience is associated with difficult changes in knowledge, the civilized primitiveness of war and new morals and manners. She outlined her own, sensual poetic reality, without abandoning, however, the legacy of the literary culture in whose environment she grew up.
Virginia Woolf is the author of about 15 books, among which the last "A Writer's Diary" was published after the writer's death in 1953. "Mrs. Dalloway", "To the Lighthouse" and "Jacob's Room" (Jacob "s Room, 1922) make up the bulk of Virginia Woolf's literary heritage. The Voyage Out (1915) is her first novel, which brought her to critical attention. "Night and Day" (Night and Day, 1919) is a traditional work of methodology. The short stories from "Monday or Tuesday" (Monday or Tuesday, 1921) received critical acclaim in the press, but "In The Waves" (In The Waves, 1931) she masterfully applied the stream of consciousness technique. Among her experimental novels are Orlando (Orlando, 1928), The Years (The Years, 1937) and Between the Acts (1941). Virginia Woolf's struggle for women's rights was expressed in Three Guineas (Three Guineas, 1938) and some other works.
In this paper, the object of study is Wolfe W.'s novel "Mrs. Dalloway".
The subject of the study is the genre features of the novel "Mrs. Dalloway". The goal is to reveal the features of a modernist novel in the text. The work consists of an introduction, two main parts, a conclusion and a list of references.
Work on the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" began with a story called "on Bond Street": it was completed in October 1922, and in 1923 it was published in the American magazine Clockface. However, the finished story "didn't let go", and Woolf decided to rework it into a novel.
The original idea is only partly similar to what we know today under the name "Mrs. Dalloway" [Bradbury M.].
The book was supposed to have six or seven chapters describing the social life of London, one of the main characters was the Prime Minister; the storylines, as in the final version of the novel, "converged at one point during a reception with Mrs. Dalloway." It was assumed that the book would be quite cheerful - this can be seen from the surviving sketches. However, gloomy notes also intertwined in the narratives. As Wolfe explained in the preface, which appears in some editions, the main character, Clarissa Dalloway, was supposed to commit suicide or die during her party. Then the idea underwent a number of changes, but some obsession with death remained the same in the novel - another main character appeared in the book - shell-shocked during the war, Septimus Warren Smith: in the course of work, it was assumed that his death should be announced at the reception. Like the final draft, the interim ended with a description of a reception at Mrs. Dalloway's house.
Until the end of 1922, Woolf continued to work on the book, making more and more corrections. At first, Woolf wanted to call the new thing "The Clock" in order to underline the difference between the flow of "external" and "internal" time in the novel by the title itself. Although the idea seemed very attractive, the book was nevertheless difficult to write. The work on the book was subject to Woolf's mood swings - from ups and downs to despair - and demanded that the writer formulate her view of reality, art and life, which she expressed so fully in her critical works. Notes about "Mrs. Dalloway" in the diaries and notebooks of the writer are a living history of writing one of the most important novels for modern literature. It was carefully and thoughtfully planned, nevertheless it was written heavily and unevenly, periods of creative upsurge were replaced by painful doubts. Sometimes it seemed to Woolf that she wrote easily, quickly, brilliantly, and sometimes the work did not move from the dead point, giving the author a feeling of powerlessness and despair. The exhausting process lasted two years. As she herself noted, the book was worth “... the devil's struggle. Her plan eludes, but it is a masterful construction. I have to turn my whole self inside out all the time to be worthy of the text. And the cycle of creative fever and creative crisis, excitement and depression continued for another whole year, until October 1924. When the book was published in March 1925, most reviewers immediately called it a masterpiece.
The key phrase for the modernist novel is “stream of consciousness”.
The term "stream of consciousness" was borrowed by writers from the American psychologist William James. He became decisive for understanding the human character in the new novel and its entire narrative structure. This term successfully generalized a number of ideas of modern philosophy and psychology, which served as the basis for modernism as a system of artistic thinking.
Wolfe, following the examples of his teachers, deepens the Proustian “stream of consciousness”, trying to capture the very process of thinking of the characters in the novel, to reproduce all of them, even fleeting, sensations and thoughts [Zlatina E.].
The whole novel is a “stream of consciousness” of Mrs. Dalloway and Smith, their feelings and memories, broken into certain segments by the blows of Big Ben. This is a conversation of the soul with itself, a living flow of thoughts and feelings. The ringing of the bells of Big Ben, which strikes every hour, is heard by everyone, each from his place. A special role in the novel belongs to the clock, especially the main clock in London - Big Ben, associated with the Parliament building, power; the bronze hum of Big Ben marks each of the seventeen hours during which the novel [Bradbury M.] takes place. Pictures of the past emerge, appearing in Clarissa's memories. They rush in the stream of her consciousness, their contours are indicated in conversations, remarks. Flashing details and names that will never be clear to the reader. Time layers intersect, flow one on top of the other, in a single moment the past merges with the present. “Do you remember the lake?” Clarissa asks a friend of her youth, Peter Walsh, and her voice was cut off by a feeling that suddenly made her heart beat out of place, caught her throat and tightened her lips when she said “lake”. For - immediately - she, a girl, threw bread crumbs to ducks, standing next to her parents, and as an adult woman she walked along the shore towards them, she walked and walked and carried her life in her arms, and the closer to them, this life grew in her hands, swelled until did not become all life, and then she laid it at their feet and said: “This is what I made of it, here!” What did she do? Really, what? Sitting and sewing next to Peter today.” The noticed experiences of the characters often seem insignificant, but a careful fixation of all the states of their souls, what Woolf calls “moments of being” (moments of being), grows into an impressive mosaic, which is composed of many changing impressions, striving to elude observers - fragments of thoughts, random associations, fleeting impressions . For Woolf, what is elusive, inexpressible by nothing but sensations is valuable. The protocolless colorlessness of the author's speech is the background of the novel, creating the effect of immersing the reader in a chaotic world of feelings, thoughts, and observations.
Although outwardly the outline of the plot-plot narrative is respected, in reality the novel lacks precisely the traditional eventfulness. Actually, the events, as the poetics of the classical novel understood them, are not here at all [Genieva E.].
Narrative exists on two levels. The first, although not clearly eventful, is external, material. They buy flowers, sew up a dress, walk in the park, make hats, receive patients, discuss politics, wait for guests, throw themselves out of the window. Here, in an abundance of colors, smells, sensations, London arises, seen with amazing topographical accuracy at different times of the day, under different lighting conditions. Here the house freezes in the morning silence, preparing for the evening flurry of sounds. Here the clock of Big Ben is inexorable, measuring the time.
We really live with the heroes on a long June day in 1923 - but not only in real time. We are not only witnesses to the actions of the heroes, we are, first of all, "spies" who have penetrated "the holy of holies" - their soul, memory, their dreams. For the most part in this novel they are silent, and all real conversations, dialogues, monologues, disputes take place behind the veil of Silence - in memory, imagination. Memory is capricious, it does not obey the laws of logic, memory often rebels against order, chronology. And although the blows of Big Ben constantly remind us that time moves, it is not astronomical time that rules in this book, but internal, associative time. It is the secondary events that have no formal relation to the plot of the event that serve as the basis for the internal movements that take place in consciousness. In real life, only a few minutes separate one event from another in the novel. Here Clarissa took off her hat, put it on the bed, listened to some sound in the house. And suddenly - instantly - because of some trifle: either a smell, or a sound - the floodgates of memory opened, two realities merged - external and internal. I remembered, I saw childhood - but it did not flash in a quick, warm way in my mind, it came to life here, in the middle of London, in the room of an elderly woman, bloomed with colors, resounded with sounds, rang with voices. Such a pairing of reality with memory, moments over the years creates a special inner tension: the strongest psychological discharge slips, the flash of which highlights the character.
It describes just one day in August 1923 in the life of two main characters - the romantic secular London lady Clarissa Dalloway and the modest clerk Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War. The method of maximum consolidation of real time - to the instantaneous impression, to the isolation of one day - is characteristic of the modernist novel. He distinguishes it from the traditional contemporary address in the novel, on the basis of which, by the beginning of the 20th century, multi-volume family chronicles grow up, like the famous Forsyte Saga (1906–1922) by John Galsworthy. In the traditional realistic narrative, a person appears immersed in the flow of time; the technique of modernism is to give the length of time compressed in human experience.
Change of perspective is one of the favorite devices in the modernist novel. The stream of consciousness “flows” along banks much wider than the life of one person, it captures many, opening the way from the uniqueness of the impression to a more objective picture of the world, like an action on a stage, reproduced from several cameras [Shaitanov I.]. At the same time, the author himself prefers to remain behind the scenes, in the role of the director silently organizing the image. On a June morning, Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of an MP, leaves her house to buy flowers for an evening party she is hosting. The war is over, and people are still full of a sense of peace and tranquility that has come. Clarissa looks at her city with renewed joy. Her joy, her impressions are interrupted either by her own worries, or by unexpectedly wedged impressions and experiences of other people whom she does not even know, but whom she passes on the street. Unfamiliar faces will flash across the streets of London and voices will be heard that only once sounded in the novel. But three main motives are gradually gaining strength. The heroine of the first and main one is Mrs. Dalloway herself. Her mind constantly jumps from today (somehow the reception will work out, why Lady Brutn did not invite her to lunch) to what was once, twenty years ago, to memories.
The second motive is the arrival of Peter Walsh. In their youth, he and Clarissa were in love with each other. He proposed and was rejected. Too Peter was always wrong, frightening. And she is the embodiment of secularism and dignity. And then (although she knew that after several years spent in India, he should arrive today) Peter bursts into her living room without warning. He says that he is in love with a young woman, for whom he came to London to file his divorce. At this, Peter suddenly burst into tears, Clarissa began to reassure him: “... And it was surprisingly good and easy for her, and flashed: “If I went for him, this joy would always be mine” (translated by E. Surits). Memories involuntarily stir up the past, intrude into the present and color with sadness the feeling of a life already lived and a future one. Peter Walsh is the motif of a life that hasn't been lived.
And finally, the third motive. His hero is Septimus Warren-Smith. Plot he is not connected with Mrs. Dalloway and her circle. It passes along the same London street as an unnoticed reminder of the war.
Modernists sought to expand the scope of expressiveness. They forced words to compete with painting and music, to learn from them. Plot leitmotifs converge and diverge, like musical themes in a sonata. They overlap and complement each other.
Clarissa Dalloway has little in common with the traditional romantic heroine [Bradbury M.]. She is fifty-two years old, she has just been ill with the most severe flu, from which she still has not recovered. She is haunted by a feeling of emotional emptiness and a feeling that life is impoverishing. But she is an exemplary hostess, a part of the social elite of England, the wife of an important politician, a member of parliament from the Conservative Party, and she has a lot of secular duties that are not interesting and painful for her. Well, secular life then exists to give meaning to existence; and Clarissa “in her turn tried to warm and shine; she hosted a reception.” The whole novel is a story about her ability to “warm and illuminate” and respond to what warms and illuminates this world. Clarissa was given the gift of “instinctively comprehending people ... It was enough for her to be in the same space with someone for the first time - and she was ready to bristle or purr. Like a cat". This gift makes her vulnerable, she often wants to hide from everyone, as happens during her reception. Peter Walsh, who wanted to marry her thirty years ago and now reappeared in her house, has known this property of her for a very long time: “The ideal hostess, he called her (she sobbed because of this in the bedroom), she has the makings of an ideal hostess, he said” . In fact, one of the stories unfolding in the book is the story of Peter Walsh's discovery (or even recollection) of Clarissa's all-inclusive wholeness as he wandered around London. He rediscovers London - as London became after the war - wandering around the city day and night, absorbing images of its urban beauty: straight streets, illuminated windows, “a hidden feeling of joy”. During the reception, he feels inspiration, ecstasy and tries to understand what is the reason for this:
"This is Clarissa," he said.
And then he saw her.
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway
One perceptive critic discerned in Virginia Woolf's novel the fascination of the "metaphysical hostess", a woman who is endowed with the gift not only to arrange receptions, but also to cleanse the ties between domestic and ties between people in society from everything superficial, to reveal in them the intimately captured meaning of being, a wholeness that, as he says we have intuition inherent in reality - the ability to purify, making it the center of our existence.
Another feature is the acute sense that permeates the novel how much modernity has changed the world. Virginia Woolf attached great importance to secular life, honored "unshakable" foundations, was no stranger to snobbery; but she treated it differently than her male heroes, who devoted their lives to politics and power, busy signing international treaties and ruling India. Woolf, in all these “establishments,” saw a kind of metaphysical community. It was, to use her own words, a world seen from a woman's point of view, and for Woolf, as for Clarissa, it had a certain aesthetic unity, a beauty of its own. But besides that, it was also the post-war world: fragile, unsettled. The airplane over the city reminds in the novel about the past war and about the current merchants. The "power man's" car rushes into the narrative, announcing itself "with a bang like a pistol shot." This is a reminder to the crowd, the voice of power. Together with him, Septimus Smith enters the story, with his terrible visions - they break out to the surface like a tongue of flame that burns the story from the inside. The memory that the world war also began with a pistol shot lives on in the novel, surfacing again and again, primarily in connection with Septimus and his visions of the world as a battlefield that haunt him.
By introducing Septimus into the novel, Virginia Woolf managed to tell at once about two-part overlapping and intersecting worlds, but not with the help of traditional narrative technique, but weaving a web of mediated connections. She worried whether critics would see exactly how the themes were intertwined in the novel. And they intertwine in the stream of consciousness of the characters - this method turned out to be especially important for the modern novel, and Virginia Woolf was one of the great pioneers. The themes are intertwined by describing the life of a big city, where random intersections of heroes lined up in a single complex pattern. The imposition of topics also occurs because Septimus embodies the very spirit of the “other” London, destroyed by the war and plunged into oblivion. Like many heroes of post-war literature, he belongs to the "tragic generation", which is partly associated with the vulnerability and instability of modern life, and Woolf's novel is an attempt to understand this instability. Septimus is not a typical character for Woolf, although in the literature of the 20s we will find a great many heroes similar to him. The fragmentation of Septimus' consciousness is of a completely different kind than that of Clarissa. Septimus belongs to a world of brute strength, violence and defeat. The difference between this world and the world of Clarissa comes through in the final scenes of the novel: “The earth approached with a flash; rusty rods, tearing, crushing the body, passed through. He lay, and in consciousness it was heard: bang, bang, bang; then - the suffocation of darkness. So it appeared to her. But why did he do it? And the Bradshaws are talking about it here at her reception!”
What is the ending of the novel? In general, there is no final [Shaitanov I.]. There is only the final connection of all the motives that converged in the living room of Clarissa Dalloway. The novel ended with the reception and even a little earlier. In addition to the usual small talk and the exchange of political opinions, there were also memories here, because many years later people met who had once been in Clarissa's country house. Sir William Bradshaw, the medical luminary, also arrived, reporting that some poor fellow (he was brought to Sir William as well) had thrown himself out of a window (not named here by the name of Septimus Warren-Smith). Consequences of a military concussion. This should be taken into account in the new bill ...
Apiter Walsh kept waiting for the hostess to be free, to come up to him. A mutual friend of those early years recalled that Clarissa had always liked him, Peter, more than Richard Dalloway. Peter was about to leave, but suddenly he felt fear, bliss, confusion:
This is Clarissa, he thought to himself.
Jon saw her."
The last phrase of the novel, in which the events of one day contain the memory of a lived and unlived life; in which the main event of our time flashed through the fate of a minor character, however, awakening in the heart of the main character the fear of death so familiar to her.
An impressionistic novel, such as Mrs. Dalloway, is busy with momentary experiences, appreciates the accuracy of fleeting impressions, cannot get rid of memories, but, immersed in the stream of consciousness, this novel captures the rumble of the life stream, which so rapidly carries a person to the inevitable limit of being [ShaitanovI. ]. The thought of eternity makes it possible to experience the instantaneous life impressions more sharply.
With the release of "Mrs. Dalloway" and the novels that followed it, Virginia Woolf gained a reputation as perhaps the brightest modernist prose writer in English literature [Bradbury M.].
Wolfe W.'s novel "Mrs. Delloway" presents the characteristic features of an entire literary era, but, nevertheless, she managed to maintain her unique voice, and this is already the property of a great writer. Creatively developing, transforming, comprehending, modifying the artistic precepts of Lawrence Stern, Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, she gave the writers who followed her a whole arsenal of techniques, and most importantly - an angle of vision, without which it is impossible to imagine the image of the psychological and moral image of a person in a foreign prose of the 20th century.
Her novels are a very important part of the literature of modernism, and they are completely unique for their era. And they are much more intimate than most modern novels, they are built according to their own aesthetic laws - the laws of integrity. They have their own magic, which is not so much in modern literature ("Does she know that there is a fairy garden around them?" - Asks old Mrs. Hilbury at Clarissa's reception), they have the poetry of prose speech, which seemed to some modern writers discredited, although, as we see from her reviews, diaries, and some of the satirical scenes in Mrs. Dalloway, she knew how to be caustic and biting: sometimes out of pure snobbery, but more often out of loyalty to unvarnished moral truth.
As more and more of her works, not published during her lifetime, come out, we see how rich in shades her voice was, how comprehensive and sharp her attention to the world was. We see the scope of her powers and the great role she played in shaping the spirit of contemporary art.

References

1. Bradbury M. Virginia Woolf (translated by Nesterov A.) // Foreign Literature, 2002. No. 12. URL: magazines.russ.ru.
2. Genieva E. The truth of the fact and the truth of the vision.// Wolf V. Orlando. M., 2006. P. 5-29.
3. Foreign literature of the 20th century, ed. Andreeva L.G. M., 1996. S. 293-307.
4. Zlatina E. Virginia Woolf and her novel "Mrs. Dalloway" // http:// www. virginiawoolf.ru.
5. Nilin A. Appeal of talent to talent.// IL, 1989. No. 6.
6. Shaitanov I. Inter-Victorianism and Dystopia. English Literature of the First Third of the 20th Century. // "Literature", publishing house "First of September". 2004. No. 43.
7. Yanovskaya G. "Mrs. Dalloway" V. Wolfe: The problem of real communicative space.// Balt. philol. courier. Kaliningrad, 2000. No. 1.

In an effort to update fiction with a primary appeal to the inner world of man, the English writer, critic and literary critic Virginia Woolf (1882-1941 - the mystical-symbolic coincidence of dates of life and death with James Joyce) during her work on the experimental psychological novel Mrs. Dalloway, 1925 ( she also wrote the novels Jacob's Room, 1922, To the Lighthouse, 1927, etc.) noted in her diary that after reading "Ulysses" (1922) she has "a secret feeling that now, at this very time, Mr. Joyce is doing something does the same and does better.”

Belonging to the psychological school of the novel, headed by the English writer Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), Woolf applied the technique of "uninhibited consciousness" in her works; had a significant impact on psychological novels D. Richardson from the Pilgrimage cycle, in which the influence of the French writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922) clearly affected, whose aesthetic views are marked by the influence of intuitionism, ideas of subjective perception of space and time, and especially involuntary memory; the belief in the subjectivity of any knowledge, in the impossibility for a person to go beyond his own “I” and understand the essence of his own kind leads Proust to the idea of ​​human existence as “lost time” (cycle “In Search of Lost Time” by M. Proust).

Wolfe, following the examples of his teachers, deepens the Proustian “stream of consciousness”, trying to capture the very process of thinking of the characters in the novel, to reproduce all of them, even fleeting, sensations and thoughts. It is like a conversation of the soul with itself, a “report of sensations” (definition by N.V. Gogol). About the novel “Mrs. Dalloway”, the writer herself said: “I took up this book, hoping that I could express my attitude to creativity in it. One must write from the very depths of feeling.” Indeed, Woolf's novels are written in the manner of the cryptography of the soul, "speaking silence." Wolfe tries to follow the nuances of experience with extraordinary meticulousness.

Mastering the methods of mental analysis with Woolf went on as usual. Elements of the “stream of consciousness” as a means of psychological analysis increasingly penetrated into her work, becoming characteristic pictorial technique. The novels she created differed significantly in their technique from the traditional Victorian. Following the acquired aesthetic doctrine, she realized her creative tasks in practice. Real life is far from the one with which it is compared, - Woolf argued: “Consciousness perceives a myriad of impressions - simple, fantastic, fleeting ... They penetrate consciousness everywhere in an unceasing stream. The writer, relying in his work on feeling, and not on conventionality, describes everything that he chooses, and not what he must ... Life is not a series of symmetrically arranged lamps, but a luminous halo.”

For Woolf, of particular interest is “that” located in the subconscious, in the inaccessible depths of the human psyche, which is both conscious and unconscious; the psychic exists as a process - a living, extremely plastic, continuous, never completely set from the beginning. Woolf is attracted by thinking and perception, which are formed mainly unconsciously, unconsciously, she is primarily interested in the affective components of the mental act.

Woolf is not worried that psychological analysis in her fiction often turns into an end in itself, into the poetics of a “shifted word”, into a human “gesture”. She doesn’t care that the artistic study of the hero’s inner life is combined with the blurring of the boundaries of his character, that the work has no plot, no climax, no denouement, and, therefore, there is no strictly canonical plot in it, which is one of the most important means of embodying the content, plot as the main side of the form and style of the novel in their correspondence to the content, and not the content itself. This circumstance creates a feeling of some disharmony. Highly significant in its individual specificity, in terms of genre and style, the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" is difficult to analyze both its form (style, genre, composition, artistic speech, rhythm), and in particular its content (theme, plot, conflict, characters and circumstances, artistic idea, trend).

Of course, this is a consequence of the fact that the writer is not interested in real world, but only its refraction in the consciousness and in the subconscious. Renouncing real life with its problems, she goes into the world of experiences and feelings, rich associations and changing sensations, into the world of “imaginary life”. It encourages the reader to penetrate into the inner world of the hero, and not to study the reasons that aroused certain feelings in him. Hence the impressionistic manner of depiction and description: a stylistic phenomenon characterized by the absence of a clearly defined form and the desire to convey the subject in fragmentary strokes that instantly fix each impression, to lead the story through randomly grasped details. “Lateral” truth, unsteady innuendo, vague hints, as it were, open the “veil” over the play of unconscious elements in the lives of heroes.

The content of "Mrs. Dalloway" at first seems sparse: it describes only one day in August 1923 in the life of two main characters - a romantic socialite London lady Clarissa Dalloway, who goes early in the morning to buy flowers for her party; at the same time, the humble clerk Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, appears on the street. The woman and the man do not know each other, but live in the neighborhood.

The whole novel is a “stream of consciousness” of Mrs. Dalloway and Smith, their feelings and memories, broken into certain segments by the blows of Big Ben. This is a conversation of the soul with itself, a living flow of thoughts and feelings. The ringing of the bells of Big Ben, which chimes every hour, is heard by everyone, each from his own place (at first, Wolfe was going to name the book “Hours” (Hours). Perhaps this name better explains the subjective process of perception of being disintegrating into separate moments of being, thin “sketches” showing the loneliness of each and the common unhappy fate of all.The noticed experiences of the characters often seem insignificant, but a careful fixation of all the states of their souls, what Wolfe calls "moments of being" (moments of being), grows into an impressive mosaic, which is composed of many changing impressions, striving to elude observers - fragments of thoughts, random associations, fleeting impressions. For Woolf, what is valuable is that which is elusive, inexpressible in nothing but sensations. The writer completes the process of deintellectualization by superintellectual means, exposing the irrational depths of individual existence and forming a flow of thoughts, as it were, “intercepted halfway ". Protocol endless The sharpness of the author's speech is the background of the novel, creating the effect of immersing the reader in a chaotic world of feelings, thoughts, and observations. There are two opposite personality types in the novel: the extroverted Septimus Smith leads to the hero's alienation from himself. The introverted Clarissa Dalloway is characterized by a fixation of interests on the phenomena of her own inner peace a tendency to introspection.

…Shop window mirrors, street noise, birdsong, children's voices. We hear the internal monologues of the characters, immerse ourselves in their memories, secret thoughts and experiences. Mrs. Dalloway is unhappy, she did not take place as a person, but she only realizes this when she accidentally encounters Peter Welsh, her old admirer, who has just returned from India, where he married, - a hidden, crushed first love. And Peter, who lost his beloved woman Clarissa, ideals, perplexedly takes a step towards his beloved. Everything breaks off in mid-sentence.

Clarissa, as she prepares for the evening, thinks about the past, above all about Peter Welch, whom she rejected with contempt many years ago when she married Richard Dalloway. An interesting touch: Richard himself more than once tried to tell Clarissa that he loved her, but since he had not said this for too long, he did not dare to have such a conversation. History is repeating itself tonight. Peter can't resist coming to Clarissa's for the evening. He, like a mosquito, flies into the flame. The party ends, the guests disperse. Clarissa approaches Richard, who is in great agitation, but...

Many passionate words are spoken silently, but none aloud. Once Clarissa decided that she would never allow the “wolf” of need to her door, making a cardinal decision to seek and secure her financial situation. So she rejected Peter and married Richard. To act according to the call of her heart would mean dooming herself to lack of money, although life with Peter was drawn to her as romantic and meaningful, providing a genuine intimate rapprochement ... She lived for years as if with an arrow in her chest. Of course, she understands that intimacy with Peter would eventually be suffocated by need. Her choice of Richard in the context of the novel is perceived as a need for a personal fenced-off intellectual and emotional space. "Room" is a key word in Woolf's writings (see her novel Jacob's room, 1922). For Clarissa, the room is a personal protective shell. She always had the feeling that "it is very dangerous to live even one day." The world outside her "room" brings disorientation. This feeling influences the nature of the narrative in the novel, which moves on alternating waves of sensory observation and the heroine's excited thoughts. The echo of the war also had an effect - the psychological background of the work. In Woolf's feminist essays, we find an exhaustive interpretation of the concept of a personal “room”. However, in the novel “Mrs. Dalloway”, Clarissa’s former friend, once full of life and energy, a matron in her years, Sally Seton, laments: “Are we not all prisoners in a home prison?” She read these words in a play about a man who scraped them on the wall of his cell.

“Room” and flowers… The motto of the British Florist Association is: “Say it with flowers!” This is exactly what Wolfe does: the heroine enters a flower shop, and this “event” grows up right at some extreme moment, since from the point of view of “indoor” psychology, she, on the one hand, enters “hostile territory”, on the other hand, - being in an oasis of flowers, enters the limits of an alternative harbor. But even among the irises and roses, radiating a delicate aroma, Clarissa still feels the presence of outwardly dangerous world. Let Richard hate her. But he is the basis of her shell, her "room", her home, life, peace and tranquility, which she seemed to have found.

For Woolf, the "room" is also the ideal of a woman's personal solitude (privacy), her independence. For the heroine, despite the fact that she married woman and mother, "room" - a synonym for preserving one's virginity, purity - Clarisse in translation means "pure".

Flowers are a deep metaphor for the work. Much of it is expressed through the image of flowers. Flowers are both a sphere of tangible communication and a source of information. The young woman Peter meets on the street is wearing a floral dress with real flowers attached to it. She was crossing Trafalgar Square with a red carnation burning in her eyes and making her lips red. What was Peter thinking? Here is his inner monologue: “These floral details indicate that she is unmarried; she is not tempted, like Clarissa, by the blessings of life; although she is not rich like Clarissa.”

Gardens are also a metaphor. They are the result of the hybridization of two motifs - a fenced-off garden and the chastity of a natural-spatial territory. Thus, the garden is a garden of strife. By the end of the novel, the two gardens represent the two central female character- Clarissa and Sally. Both have gardens to match their own. Flowers are a kind of status for the characters in the novel. In Borton's garden, where Clarissa and Peter are having an explanation near his fountain, Clarissa sees Sally plucking flower heads. Clarissa thinks she's wicked if she treats flowers like that.

For Clarissa, flowers represent psychological cleansing and upliftment. She tries to find harmony between colors and people. This stubborn relationship of the main character with flowers, gaining symbolic and psychological depth, develops in the novel into a leitmotif, into an ideological and emotional tone. This is a moment of constant characterization of actors, experiences and situations.

Meanwhile, in the novel there is another person who, as we noted earlier, is wandering the streets of London at the same time - this is Septimus Warren-Smith, married to an Italian woman who loves him, Lucrezia. Smith, too, is haunted by memories. They taste tragic. He remembers his friend and commander Evans (an echo of the war!), who was killed just before the end of the war. The hero is tormented, haunted by the image of the dead Evans, talking aloud to him. This is where depression comes in. Walking in the park, Septimus comes to the idea of ​​​​the advantage of suicide over the experiences that torment his soul. Indeed, Septimus remembers his past well. He was reputed sensitive person. He wanted to be a poet, he loved Shakespeare. When the war broke out, he went to fight out of romantic feelings and considerations. Now he considers his former romantic motives and motivations to be idiotic. Desperate veteran Septimus, committed to a psychiatric hospital, throws himself out of a window and dies.

...Meanwhile, Clarissa returns home with flowers. It's time for the reception. And again - a string of small, scattered sketches. In the midst of the reception, Sir William Bradshaw arrives with his wife, a fashionable psychiatrist. He explains the reason for the couple's delay by saying that one of his patients, a war veteran, had just committed suicide. Clarissa, hearing the explanation of the guest's lateness, suddenly begins to feel like a desperate veteran, although she never knew him. Extrapolating the suicide of a loser to her fate, she at some point realizes that her life has also collapsed.

To say that the presentation of the events of the novel is its plot or content can, of course, only conditionally. In the book, as noted, there is neither "Forgeshichte" nor "Zvishengeshikhte", but there is a generalizing thought and a single conflict, consisting of the sum of moods contained in each episode.

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