Mrs. Dalloway, Clocks And Sounds
Very Insightfull Essay on Clock symbolism and importance of sound in Mrs. Dalloway
The beautiful and complex narrative of Mrs. Dalloway seems to defy readers powers of description. David Dowlings Mapping Streams of Consciousness exemplifies a sense one must “reconstruct the text in order to understand it. In a section entitled “A Reading, Dowling dissects the novel into neat structural packages so the reader can easily study its anatomy. He includes maps of London showing various characters movements and intersections, an hourly chronology of the day of Clarissas party, character sketches condensed from details scattered in the text, and, in the appendix, a kind of “miniature concordance that provides counts for some 32 words (“India appears 25 times).
Other studies of Mrs. Dalloway are less detailed but serve as well to illustrate the difficulties of describing its narrative patterns. In “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ideology: Language and Perception in Mrs. Dalloway,: Teresa L. Ebert discusses binary structures–“counterpointing…visions (Ebert 152)–in the novels language. Building on Nancy Topping Bazins Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, she explores how female and male polarities in the text are resolved in images of androgyny. Instead of metaphor and metonymy, Caroline Webb examines
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