Time In Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Time is an important theme in Woolf s novels.In contrast to the traditional way of handling time which emphasizes physical time while neglecting inner time, Woolf s novels tend to explore the inner truth of human lives within the framework of psychological time. She highly emphasizes that reality lies in inner time, which is a flux of life composed of a series of moments of elasticity exerting different influences upon human lives.Time flows in uninterrupted succession, and the individual carried along by time can use memory to travel back and exist in the past before entering into the future.Woolf's exploration of time runs throughout her first well-known novel Mrs. Dalloway, in which time has not only structural meanings, but also important thematic functions. The novel is characterized by its temporal non-plot structure and disjointed character development. All the events narrated in Mrs. Dalloway take place in a single day in mid-June, yet Woolf s unique time treatment in this novel enables it to reveal the inner experience of the entire life of the main characters, such as Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith and Peter Walsh, etc.,as well as the novel's deep reflections about the meaning of life.This thesis aims to study time in Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. First, through a comparative study of the traditional and modern treatment of time, Woolf s special time perception is presented. Besides, a detailed textual analysis of time in Mrs. Dalloway is carried out, and it's found that there are four kinds of time frameworks in the novel, namely clock time, inner time, historical time and cosmic time, serving not only to construct a special and innovative plot structure, but also to reveal the main themes of Mrs. Dalloway, including the novel's reflection about death, freedom, war and love. Hopefully, the research in this thesis can fill the gap between the studies on time and studies on the main themes of Mrs. Dalloway, and thus contribute to a better understanding of Woolf s ideas as a writer and a thinker.