A Car, a Plane, and a Tower: Interrogating Public Images in Mrs. Dalloway

To explicate Mrs. Dalloway’s obsession with imagery and visuality, many critics have dwelled on the novel’s interest in the relationship between seeing and being seen; on Septimus Smith’s visions; on Peter Walsh’s dream; on its many examples of ekphrastic language; on floods of detail that saturate many passages, such as Clarissa’s visit to the flower shop; and on the subjectivities that serve as the spring (i.e. the habitat, source, and propulsive force) of the novel’s images and pictures. In short, Mrs. Dalloway’s dense imbrication of narrative and image maps a territory too complex, too large for a single study. This paper targets only a corner of this territory, focusing on three specific images: (1) the motor car and (2) the aeroplane—both found in the novel’s second section—as well as (3) Big Ben, the clock tower that chimes the passing of a fictional Wednesday in the middle of June 1923. These three images make up a collection of public objects viewed through a collective of private eyes. Rather than analyze the function(s) this collection performs for the novel, the focus of much Woolfian criticism, this paper poses a simple question, borrowed from visual theorist W.J.T. Mitchell: What do these pictures want?

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“I’m not saying a picture is just a text, or vice versa. There are deep and fundamental differences between the verbal and visual arts. But there are also inescapable zones of transaction between them, especially when it comes to questions such as the ‘life of the image’ and the ‘desire of the picture.’”

—W.J.T. Mitchell¹

Much of the Woolfian criticism regarding the visual imagery of Mrs. Dalloway focuses on the technical, that is, on how its images help establish a new, modernist realism, particularly in developing a narrative sense of simultaneity. Susan Dick, in an essay from The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, explains that the “careful description of the flight of the plane over London functions, like the journey of the official car, as a structural device enabling [Woolf] to present scenes which are happening simultaneously.” Big Ben also plays a key role for Dick here; its chimes indicate the progression of time, even as “the narrative . . . pauses and loops back.”² In attempting to find an explanation for Big Ben that deviates from “primarily technical explanations,” Jörg Hasler, in an earlier article, writes, “[Big Ben] constantly reminds us of the contrast between the external, quantitative time and the inner, qualitative time. The hours of the day are far from equal in length[;] they have [an] elasticity ascribed [elsewhere in Woolf’s work] to ‘time in the mind.’”³ Despite his professed deviation, however, Hasler’s approach to Big Ben merely looks at a different “technical explanation.” Critiques like Susan Dick’s examine how such images make possible the spatial elasticity of a moment within a novel (i.e., the presentation of many people doing different things at the same time) while Hasler explicates a temporal elasticity (i.e., the presentation of the individual remembering the past while remaining corporeally present). Far from disagreeing with these technical interpretations, this paper co-opts Hasler’s initial motivation to look beyond the technical, to make sense of the car, the plane, and the clock tower as sites/sights of convergence for many subjective gazes, objects-turned-image that certainly do, but also want.

The relationship between painting and Virginia Woolf’s fiction has also served many critics as a vehicle into understanding the stylistic implications of her imagery. Sue Roe’s essay “The Impact of Post-Impressionism” traces the influence of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury group on Woolf’s fiction, yet her analysis remains quite similar to Hasler and Dick’s: in order to “show the shifting uncertainties within the human psyche”—a goal of post-impressionists, according to Roe—Woolf sees that “she must somehow look, in writing, for solutions to the problem of simultanism.”⁴ Likewise, in her recent article “Geometries of Space and Time,” Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta...