Mrs Dalloway

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a sense one must ``reconstruct'' the text in order to understand it. In a section entitled ``A Reading,'' Dowling dissects the novel into neat structural packages so the reader can easily study its anatomy. He includes maps of London showing various characters' movements and intersections, an hourly chronology of the day of Clarissa's party, character sketches condensed from details scattered in the text, and, in the appendix, a kind of ``miniature concordance'' that provides counts for some 32 words (``India'' appears 25 times).
Other studies of Mrs. Dalloway are less detailed but serve as well to illustrate the difficulties of describing its narrative patterns. In ``Metaphor, Metonymy, and Ideology: Language and Perception in Mrs. Dalloway,'': Teresa L. Ebert discusses binary structures--``counterpointing...visions'' (Ebert 152)--in the novel's language. Building on Nancy Topping Bazin's Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, she explores how female and male ...

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mind: ``I think I grow more & more poetic'' (Diary 2.304).
Undoubtedly, poetry does inform Woolf's work, and Dodd's argument to that effect is convincing. While the sentences in Mrs. Dalloway are metrical, however, ``poetic'' alone does not encompass the full rhythmic force of the narrative. Ebert's term ``counterpoint'' and Stockton's metaphor of ``turbulence'' both evoke kinds of rhythmic structures as well, but in very different contexts. Indeed, Woolf consciously draws influence across diverse media in her quest to ``[throw] away the method...in use at the moment'' (Woolf, ``Character in Fiction'' 432). Robin Gail Schulze points to Woolf's use of tonal music to show how she ...

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