Is ‘Mrs Dalloway’ By Virginia Woolf A Piece Of War Poetry?
Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway is a text that takes place over the course of one day and intercuts between the lives of a group of middle-class people in 1920's London. Although broadly linear it has an unconventional narrative that jumps from character to character and back again. Despite this, at first glance the suggestion that Mrs Dalloway may in fact be more poem than novel might not seem legitimate and yet the text does offer us some interesting evidence too back this theory.
The most prominent indicator of this is the form of the text. There are no chapters and it is not divided into parts in any way. It could be argued that the text does not resemble a poem, sectioned into parts by lines and stanzas, either. What the form of Mrs Dalloway suggests, though, is that it is designed to be read it one sitting much like a piece of poetry. There are no obvious breaks in the text, no 'stopping places' that are a conventional element of most novels.
The unconventional, stream of consciousness style might also be a consideration. There is much descriptive text and minute detail that uses very poetic language. Descriptive passages on the city streets or the interior of a flower shop could, by simply rearranging the way they look on the page, read much more like poetry than a paragraph from a novel.
If Mrs Dalloway is to be considered a poem we might ask what kind of poem that is. The shadow of the first world war hangs over the text in may ways. There is the reference to Miss Kilmans, the texts most unsympathetic character interestingly, name change. War is a great innovator of technology and there are several references to motor vehicles and aircraft. There is, of course, Septimus Warren Smith. The shell shocked Smith, unable to feel or empathize since his experiences in the trenches, is the texts most direct reference to the war. The passages describing Smith's inability to emotionally connect with his wife or anyone else and especially his memory of the death of his friend Evans in the trenches is very reminiscent of much poetry of World War One. Septimus' story has only tenuous links to Mrs Dalloways herself. It might be argued that, although we can ask whether such a stylistically innovative text could have been written without the huge social and political changes that the war was a part of, it is only the sections concerned with Septimus that could lay claim to being World War One poetry.
Time is also a major theme of Mrs Dalloway. From references to clocks and the fact that the events take place over the period of a day we are constantly reminded that time is slipping away. For Septimus, though, time stands still. He is still living in the trenches and his madness is a direct result of his experience. In a sense, despite the passing of time, he is as much a casualty of the war as Evans was. The technique employed in Mrs Dalloway to create a snapshot of a time and place might be more a poetic method than one found in novels.
These connections to the poetry of World War One do not make Mrs Dalloway a poem itself even if it owes more to them that it does to the novel form. Rather, it could be argued that, it is a text which is informed by, and borrows from, poetry. The careful construction which seems to have been employed to compose the text make each line resonate in much the way a poem would. Much of the texts power to affect its reader might be drawn from these close connections to the rawer emotions of poetry and help to make Mrs Dalloway a unique novel, but a novel all the same.