A Virginia Woolf/Gertrude Stein Connection

From the very beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf presents an out-of-the-ordinary approach to diction and grammatical construction. Punctuation is also askew (rampant and questionable semi-colon use) and very uncertain antecedents in many lengthy sections. As with “The Mark on the Wall,” one could describe much of it as stream-of-consciousness where the raw material of the mind spills out onto the page in the same way as happenstance thoughts flood the brain and run their course unedited. In the instances where this is pronounced in Mrs Dalloway, her writing becomes a lot like that of Gertrude Stein in her middle period. Everyone is familiar with “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Researching the time when the poem “Sacred Emily” (of which it is a part) appeared, I find that, while written in 1913, it did not appear in a book until 1922. Mrs. Dalloway appeared in 1925. Can one safely assume that Woolf read Stein? While there is enough of a plot line to contain Mrs. Dalloway’s circuitous meanderings in and out and through the thoughts of its characters, individual pages break free of any sort of narrative continuity to give an almost three-dimensional view of a scene, an object, a person. The first, and most pronounced place where this happens in the early section f the novel is where Clarissa goes to Mulberry’s (the florist.) The paragraph that begins with “There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac . . . .” For a full, long paragraph we wind in an out among the repeated names of flowers as if we too are looking and retracing our steps to make our selection, to experience them all—each side and center and stem, savoring each name again and again. This section certainly mirrors cubism as well (but that is another paper!)