Narrativizing Characters in Mrs. Dalloway

According to critical consensus, Virginia Woolf is the most “inward” of all modern British writers. Even critics who emphasize the socio-political vision of Woolf’s writing, such as Alex Zwerdling, read the character of Mrs. Dalloway in terms of her “private,” in contradistinction to her “public,” self. This essay seeks to question this “private” / “public” split, and argues that Woolf’s text evinces a privileging of intersubjectivity — the consciousness of other consciousnesses — over subjectivity — an individual’s “private” world as defined apart from any other subjects. First tracing how Woolf rewrites Mrs. Dalloway from short story to novel in order to foreground the deeply intersubjective nature of her central character, I will proceed by analyzing how Mrs. Dalloway narrativizes the other minds she encounters — by imposing the form of a story onto her recounting of events — in order to illustrate why she is indeed the model for ethico-affective response in the novel.