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Walter
Pater, an astute observer of contemporary currents, observes
that the defining trait of modern thought is, "its cultivation
of the relative spirit in place of absolutes" (1987,
p. 66). With the emergence of radicals and free thinkers,
the principle of relativity has been widely accepted by Victorian
intelligentsia and modernists. As a result of this intellectual
reconstruction, contemporary thinkers have begun to develop
anti-absolutistic premise of no absolute code of morality,
philosophy or religion. Woolf, too, identifies herself with
the principle that there is no universal scale of values.
By doing so, she is not only focusing on the radical character
of her own novelistic experiment, which is truly modern, but
is also instrumental in revising the fundamental moral behavior
of her society, including homosexuality.
In
the light of this historical matrix, understanding Virginia
Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway is necessary, as she highlights
the relativistic fictional technique, displaying in it a number
of important themes, namely, the conflict between conventionality
and unconventionality, communication and privacy, loneliness
and love, the progression and regression of time, the menace
of authoritarianism and the ideology of purification, violence,
and the use of stream of consciousness to connect the thoughts
of individuals in a way that transcends their alienation.
The rich and complex themes suggested and amplified throughout
the novel are balanced by the density of the other images
and patterns. Mrs. Dalloway is rather untraditional—the
thematic tension and design is a device to tear away the existing
system. Woolf's project of renovating or making fiction anew
is a broad assent of "simultaneity, juxtaposition, or
montage, paradox, ambiguity and inter-determinacy" (Pykett,
2004, p. 163). It is, in fact, a "set of multiple revolts
against traditional realism and romanticism" (Ibid.,
2004). |
