Chapter 9. Dismantling narrative modes
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Violeta Sotirova
Abstract
This study examines Virginia Woolf ’s authorial revisions of the opening of Mrs Dalloway and their implications for narrative theory. I compare passages from the short story ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and the early drafts of ‘The Hours’ with the published novel and show that there is a consistent pattern of revision which complicates the representation of character consciousness. This complexity lies in the dismantling of narrative modes used for the representation of consciousness, most typically by conflating them into the syntactic boundaries of a single sentence. From a stylistic standpoint, the dissolution of the syntactic boundaries between narrative modes challenges most standard accounts of speech and thought presentation which posit narrative modes as discrete syntactic units. From a narratological standpoint, this syntactic and semantic dismantling of narrative modes reflects an attempt at representing distinct facets of consciousness as simultaneous phenomena of experience. Thus, Woolf ’s revised text captures the simultaneity of, for instance, a character’s less conscious perception of the narrative world and the more consciously executed reflective thought, or of a character’s internal state and direct speech, grafting them into the text as narrative modes that are syntactically and semantically interdependent.
Abstract
This study examines Virginia Woolf ’s authorial revisions of the opening of Mrs Dalloway and their implications for narrative theory. I compare passages from the short story ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ and the early drafts of ‘The Hours’ with the published novel and show that there is a consistent pattern of revision which complicates the representation of character consciousness. This complexity lies in the dismantling of narrative modes used for the representation of consciousness, most typically by conflating them into the syntactic boundaries of a single sentence. From a stylistic standpoint, the dissolution of the syntactic boundaries between narrative modes challenges most standard accounts of speech and thought presentation which posit narrative modes as discrete syntactic units. From a narratological standpoint, this syntactic and semantic dismantling of narrative modes reflects an attempt at representing distinct facets of consciousness as simultaneous phenomena of experience. Thus, Woolf ’s revised text captures the simultaneity of, for instance, a character’s less conscious perception of the narrative world and the more consciously executed reflective thought, or of a character’s internal state and direct speech, grafting them into the text as narrative modes that are syntactically and semantically interdependent.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Chapter 1. Enregistering the North 13
- Chapter 2. The origin and development of the iffy-an(d) conjunction 31
- Chapter 3. From ornament to armament 49
- Chapter 4. Borrowing and copy 71
- Chapter 5. Decoding the parentheses in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus 87
- Chapter 6. The first person in fiction of the 1790s 111
- Chapter 7. “Worth a moment’s notice” 129
- Chapter 8. Jane Austen and the prescriptivists 151
- Chapter 9. Dismantling narrative modes 171
- Chapter 10. Stylistics and “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by W.B. Yeats 195
- Index 213
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Chapter 1. Enregistering the North 13
- Chapter 2. The origin and development of the iffy-an(d) conjunction 31
- Chapter 3. From ornament to armament 49
- Chapter 4. Borrowing and copy 71
- Chapter 5. Decoding the parentheses in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus 87
- Chapter 6. The first person in fiction of the 1790s 111
- Chapter 7. “Worth a moment’s notice” 129
- Chapter 8. Jane Austen and the prescriptivists 151
- Chapter 9. Dismantling narrative modes 171
- Chapter 10. Stylistics and “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by W.B. Yeats 195
- Index 213
