Examples Of Juxtaposition In Mrs Dalloway

Clarissa’s memories of life at Bourton with its secret kiss from her friend, Sally, therefore subvert a world that is dominated by a standardised, authoritarian time. By depicting the rich subjective consciousness of her protagonist, Woolf reveals a freer life for Clarissa; it is one which can only occur in a subjective temporal, rather than in an objective spatial, plane.

In Orlando, Woolf discusses the temporal synthesis, or the knitting together, of past and present time within consciousness through the ‘capriciousness’ of memory:

Our experience of time is therefore not one where there is a linear narrative development from past to present to future, and where each time period is distinct and separate. Instead, our conscious experience

This view, however, ignores the collective consciousness between Clarissa and Septimus. Towards the end of the novel, we are told that Clarissa ‘felt somehow very like [Septimus] – the young man who had killed himself’. And the repetition of a line from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline by them both underlines this connection (both utter the lines ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ throughout the narrative). Woolf uses Shakespeare as a motif to reveal the intersubjective connection between a wealthy upper-class socialite and a poorer working-class man suffering form shellshock. This connection likely exemplifies Woolf’s interest in the French unanimism school of writing of the early 1900s which is based on the idea of a collective consciousness where individuals think something simultaneously. In a diary entry from when Woolf was writing Mrs Dalloway, she discussed this metaphysical relationship between her characters:

Tellingly, this link between the conscious minds of Clarissa and Septimus is ruptured by chronological time. When Clarissa makes her final ‘Fear no more’ utterance whilst contemplating Septimus’ suicide before returning to her party guests the striking of a clock interrupts her