Re-listening to Virginia Woolf: Sound Transduction and Private Listening in Mrs. Dalloway

Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them; there would be something weak about art if it couldn't deal with this new content.

—Ezra Pound¹

In the 1940 essay "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid," Virginia Woolf notes the associative power of sound. The loud aircraft buzzing overhead—or "hornets"—should "compel one to think about peace."² Woolf designates a "hornet" as an aural stimulus and a "mind-hornet" as an internal re-sounding of a memory or ingrained principle that the stimulus provokes: "the hornet in the sky rouses another hornet in the mind."³ Woolf demonstrates this distinction in her passage about the young British airman, who, she writes, should recall the voices of his past when hearing prowar propaganda broadcasts: "The young airman up in the sky is driven not only by the voices of the loudspeakers; he is driven by voices in himself—ancient instincts, instincts fostered and cherished by education and tradition."⁴ A loud stimulus, in other words, should evoke an equally loud inner moral voice. Woolf frequently records such responses to sonicity in her fiction, and while the "mind-hornets" are not always the response of inner moral voices, they are always intimate and subjective. In Mrs. Dalloway, in particular, readers often learn about characters' histories, thought patterns, and current mental states by reading the ways they respond to various "sound events," a term the environmental musicologist R. Murray Schafer uses to define the analysis of "individual sounds in order to consider their associative meanings as signals, symbols, keynotes, or soundmarks."⁵ The characters in Woolf's London listen collectively at times, but they hear and interpret individually, perhaps answering Sally Seton's penetrating question near the end of the novel: "for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day?"⁶ As Woolf suggests in Mrs. Dalloway, never as much as we might think.

In this essay, I examine how characters in Mrs. Dalloway listen in different and private ways. The way Woolf writes about aurality and listening is original, I argue, preceded not by any literary work but by hearing techniques that developed with the increasing public consumption of audio recordings. That is, a fascinating parallel to Woolf's narrative method is evident in early twentieth-century phonograph listening methods. As Jonathan Sterne writes, "'Hearing tubes' were a common alternative to horns on early phonographs. They provided a way of increasing the volume of relatively quiet mechanical instruments and also a means of private listening." This listening style, which developed in public phonograph booths where several people heard the same recording through individual tubes, encouraged listeners to "construct an individuated, localized sound space."⁷ As I will show, Woolf creates a similar "sound space" for her characters, who process aural events according to their internal logic. Further, as Sterne has pointed out, all sound reproduction technology employs "transducers" to function. Transducers "turn sound into something else and that something else back into sound."⁸ In Mrs. Dalloway, it is useful to view the characters themselves as transducers that process all resonance through the internal "noise" of consciousness, as Septimus Warren Smith does when he believes an advertising airplane is signaling to him alone or as Mrs. Dalloway does when she recounts hearing a violin and thinks of loving a woman, "so strange is the power of sounds at certain moments" (32). As Angela Frattarola has shown, the modern novel is "saturated with sound—both in content and form."⁹ Yet Woolf is unique among other modernists for the way she records and then traces sonic events—the prompt ringing out of Big Ben, the backfiring of the car, the whir of an ambulance siren—as they enter the ears of her characters and reverberate through each individual consciousness. A substantial part of the novel's innovation lies in its persistent relay between external events and internal reflections on those events. Both city and domestic soundscapes become a key narrative device for illustrating this flow, giving...