Mrs. Dalloway

ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 Mrs. Dalloway David Dowling. Mrs Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. xiv+150pp. Cloth $20.95 Paper $9.95 Woolf's Mrs Dalloway has become such a classic of British high modernism that it seems difficult to remember a time when one had not read it. The work has been canonized as a monumental opus inaugurating Woolf's multi-personal stream-of-consciousness technique. How, then, can one summon sufficient hermeneutical and propedeutic humility to introduce this revered text to undergraduates encountering it, with bafflement and wonder, for the first time? The title of David Dowling's Mrs Dalloway: Mapping Streams of Consciousness is actually a bit misleading. Maps there are, as well as close textual readings of stream-of-consciousness passages. But cartography , either real or metaphorical, seems fairly peripheral to the project. Dowling begins with the larger socio-historical picture when he briefly frames the book's "Literary and Historical Context." In a chapter devoted to "Bloomsbury, War, and Modernism," he outlines the background and generally presents Woolf's novel as a "condition of England" text reflecting the outward calm and inner chaos of the postwar period. There are some useful associations between Woolf and Katherine Mansfield that highlight themes ostensibly borrowed from "The Garden Party." The allusions, however, are relatively schematic, as is Dowling's rapid assessment of the "Importance of the Work." One can only assume that Twayne Publishers imposed a rather dreary and inflexible format that bound the author in a critical straitjacket. David Dowling's primary source for his chapter on "Critical Reception " seems to have been Harold Bloom's Chelsea House collection on Mrs Dalloway. Seven of the eighteen notes cite Bloom's anthology of reprints rather than original sources. The ploy appears injudicious at best. Why not send students to primary sources rather than encouraging them to ingest Bloom's biases? Dowling's chapter largely recapitulates a Bloomian stance, though it neatly categorizes essays about the novel in terms of several approaches—the "stylistic, the sociopsychological, and the feminist." Are those the only three valorized perspectives? Students might well inquire about the validity of such arbitrary categories . One is reminded, oddly enough, of Woolf 's own satirical references to nuggets of wisdom at the beginning of A Room of One's Own. It is not until his chapter on "Composition" that Dowling truly goes 384 BOOK REVIEWS astray. Should one write, with authority, on textual composition if one has not taken the trouble to consult the texts—or even scholarly remarks about the texts? I have in mind, in particular, Dowling's assertions about the manuscript of "The Prime Minister," which is presently housed in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Dowling tells us, for instance, that H. Z. Prentice is a "middle-class radical and prototype for Septimus"; whereas, in fact, Prentice is a prototype for Peter Walsh. An earlier, more lunatic Septimus serves as prototype for the lyrically-buffered and shellshocked soldier portrayed in the novel's final version. It strikes me as seriously problematic for a critic to offer the world a scholarly work on Virginia Woolf that fails to take into account important textual revelations that have emerged over the past decade. How, for instance, can one profitably describe James Joyce's influence on Woolf without allusion to Virginia's Ulysses notebook ("Modern Novels [Joyce]"), now published for the first time in Bonnie Kime Scott's anthology, The Gender of Modernism? Admittedly, Dowling could not have had direct access to this particular text without a trip to the New York Public Library. But he could certainly have known of its existence and contents from Brenda Silver's catalogue of Woolf's reading notebooks , as well as from my own 1986 article in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, edited by Beja, Herring, Harmond and Norris. This latter piece makes the same connection between Mrs Dalloway and "The Dead" that Dowling draws in his chapter on influences. I do agree that a primer for Woolf students could conceivably be a valuable pedagogical tool; but Dowling's text is not one that I would recommend...