Character Building

     Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, we are often carried between the minds of different characters. For example, during the scene where we follow Peter into Regent's Park after he leaves Clarissa's house, we are given a look into how the other characters there see him. Peter watches a child run into Lucrezia's legs, which moves us into her mind. We get to hear about her and Septimus's relationship from her point of view, then quickly move to his thoughts and the fact that he imagines Evans walking towards him - who turns out to actually be Peter. That brings us right back to Peter, and we see him envisioning that the couple he sees before him, Septimus and Lucrezia, is just having a lovers quarrel. These circular transitions between everyone in a particular scene are pretty unique. In the books I've seen which use multiple viewpoints, the shifts are more rigid. Usually after one character finishes a particular thought or a scene is completed, the view completely flips to someone else's. This method of fluidly transitioning between different views builds up the scene more, since we see what a moment looks like to multiple different characters.

    Once we get to the party, it seems like these transitions between the minds of different characters are sped up. We quickly jump around from one to another, getting a fuller picture of the scene however also moments where we're not completely clear on who's point of view we are in at that instant. This could be a way of representing the clash of all these different characters in this one place, and the need to get all their viewpoints within a very short span of time, or just the chaotic nature of the party.

    This is also interesting in contrast to the Mezzanine. Both books are set over a very short time span - a single escalator ride in the Mezzanine and one summer day in Mrs. Dalloway. Both books are also built on flashbacks to the characters past, for example to Howie discovering how to tie his shoes or to Clarissa rejecting Peter. Still there are a lot of major differences, and one of the biggest is that we spend all our time in the Mezzanine within Howie's thoughts, ideas, and past. In Mrs. Dalloway, we hop between different characters, learning more deeply about them than the superficial ways in which other characters see them. I think the ways that Woolf and Baker use these different styles says something about what they feel most importantly describes a character. Baker wanted to create an experimental novel about a single persons experience during a lunch break, and the only thing he uses to flesh out Howie's character are Howie's own thoughts and opinions. Within Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses a web of other characters to describe Mrs. Dalloway's character, with the way they superficially see her or judge her character, how her own thoughts function, and also how she reacts to the actions of these other characters. For example I think Woolf introduces Septimus's storyline not only to give an idea of his character, but also to give insights into Clarissa's once she reacts to his death at her party. Woolf chooses to focus on Mrs. Dalloway's relationships with other characters, whether it's her husband or just some stranger on the street seeing her for the first time, in order to explain her life within the frame of a single day in June. At the same time I'm not sure whether Woolf even meant to mainly express Clarissa's life since she doesn't seem to be the main character throughout the novel. She could have easily instead been aiming to express the relationships between a variety characters rather than the life of a single character. If this was her goal, she could simply be using Clarissa as a way to orient the reader among all these different relationships and personalities.