Setting

I'm not sure how Virginia Woolf feels about setting quite yet; I haven't read enough of her book. What I can see from the assigned reading is that she approaches the form of her writing as it relates to the setting of her story in a much different way than Leonard Woolf and Sherwood Anderson.

In the opening scene on the busy streets of London, Woolf shifts perspective quickly and without warning. The narrator allows the reader to both gaze at the action in the streets and to hear the thoughts of the individuals within view. The free indirect discourse mirrors the chaos of the city street, and what seems like a random shifting of perspective may actually be something like a stream of consciousness, but one that is passed between characters with time being relative to each voice. Brandon is right to say that in Mrs. Dalloway "we have an uninhibited access to mind as setting, where mood, memory, and space all interact within the subconscious, evoking interplay between past and present, time and place." However, the interplay between these elements of "past and present, time and place" seem to be more intimate. It seems that with her sentences Woolf is demonstrating a union and inseparability between these traditionally separate elements in literature. Woolf seems to be constructing her sentences, her paragraphs, and her plot in such a way that time and space, and form and content, cannot exist separately.

The setting of the busy street is much different, then, than the scene in Clarissa's bedroom. The intimacy and quiet of the room make it possible for the reader to more clearly understand Clarissa's thoughts. The setting of her home is calm and peaceful, and so Woolf's prose is calm and peaceful. When Peter enters the room the prose shifts again and reflects the interplay between Clarissa and Peter on a verbal, and almost telepathic, level. As the discussion intensifies so does the prose, thus demonstrating that mood affects form as much as setting.