Musings on "Mrs. Dalloway on Bond Street."

Virginia Woolf was an amazing writer.  I have to lead off with such a bold statement because it deserves front  point in this blog post.  I’ve just finished reading Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street, and having never being really exposed to stream of consciousness work except in short bursts ( I have a tendency to select genre fiction in lieu of anything else, but I’m trying to work on it),  it was a revelatory experience. The story is deceptively simple, as the elevator pitch would be “The reader follows a lady as she tries to buy gloves one day.”, but since we the reader are inhabiting the titular character’s mind, we are also treated to that constantly running commentary that is consciousness.   Mrs Dalloway passes judgement on the things she sees before her, reminisces about the past, and thinks about the future in a stunningly real fashion.   In fact, I interpret this story as the reader coming into the story in media res, seeing as the first statement is a declaration: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself.”  

To me, this sounds like Mrs. Dalloway has just decisively settled an issue of gloves, and asserting her own autonomy, an important point due to the fact that this story is set in  post-WW1 London, in a time of societal upheaval.  Te fact that it is over something as seemingly simple as a set of gloves is in fact quite important, owing to the societal position we can infer that Mrs. Dalloway occupies due to some of the text.  Working class folk don’t attend parties at embassies or have lunch with the Queen, not in this day and age, and most certainly not then, societal upheaval or no.  In those circles, fashion and dress are signifiers of power and status.   Mrs.  Dalloway could be buying these gloves as a sort of statement.  “I know my tastes better than any sort of gift giver could!”  Which is a state I find quite empowering and refreshing, even nearly a century after this story was written.

Now, I mentioned previously that this story is set post-WW1.   The fact that Mrs Dalloway and most of the other people she interacts with during the course of the plot survived what was termed “The War to End All Wars” colors all the interactions and events that are remarked upon.  During that embassy party I mentioned earlier in my post, Mrs. Dalloway has this thought upon seeing a landed acquaintance: “how they suffered, she thought, thinking of Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night decked with jewels, eating her heart out, because that nice boy was dead, and now the old Manor House (Durtnall's van passed) must go to a cousin.”

Obviously someone close to Lady Foxcroft had died in the war, and due to the way inheritance worked, someone distant would now get the lands and titles the Lady would pass on after her death.  Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street  has a deeply lyrical and haunting quality that blends sadness and happiness in a way that reflects reality, the way that we never feel just one thing at one time, but experience shades of emotion, colored by our past and our present.   This is the sort of stuff Woolf conveys in just a hair over 3,000 words.   Stunning, really.  I’ll end this post be reworking my opening statement: Virginia Woolf is an amazing writer, and I am enriched for having read her work.