Throughout Emma and Mrs. Dalloway, private time is at odds with public time. This is most apparent in Mrs. Dalloway. Throughout the day’s events, the characters stop and note when Big Ben strikes the hour. Since the concept of public time is still relatively new in the early 20th century, “one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night… an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.” The interesting wording here lies in ‘irrevocable’, as it makes a second appearance in the text; “Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.” This suggests finality; the last opportunity the character has to wallow in that particular hour. The text also hints at this wallowing by describing the sound of Big Ben as if it were a scent, wafting through the Westminster: “It was precisely twelve o’clock; twelve by Big Ben; whose stroke was wafted over the northern part of London; blent with that of other clocks, mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and wisps of smoke, and died up there among the seagulls”. The finality of every hour implies a lack of time; a dwindling away of a finite amount of time. Perhaps this is the dwindling away of the hours leading up to the party, or perhaps the lingering time left in Clarissa’s life.
The strikes of Big Ben play another role in the text. They sit in the text, similar to road signage, marking the forward progression of time, despite the segmented recollection of events. Throughout the narration of the story, various characters often find their idle thoughts drifting towards the past, but Big Ben, as well as other clocks both public and private, play their role in “shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing” the events of the day into distinctive segments. The episodic recollections of the past are punctuated by the clocks of the present, suggesting public time takes precedence over each character’s private time. Despite these forays into the past, time is still flowing linearly; marching relentlessly towards the beginning of the dinner party. This has a rather odd effect on the character’s private time, which seems to expand well beyond the boundaries of each hour or half hour, as every journey into the past is accompanied by vivid detail.
As stated earlier, despite the characters often daydreaming on a park bench or contemplating party arrangements, public time continuously advances. This struggle between both private and public time can be seen with Clarissa’s growing worries about her party’s success, and the clocks only serve to heighten these fears with every passing hour. It’s quite easy to see the vital role time plays in the story, be it time spent regretting the past, or time spent preparing for the future. Perhaps Woolf should have stuck with the original title of her story: The Hours.
You note Big Ben's role in Mrs. Dalloway as a way of adding tension and stress. Do you think that the book would have the same effect if Mrs.Dalloway had a setting of multiple days?
ReplyDeleteNice observation. I think the fact that the whole book only encompasses one day gives an air and tone of urgency and that the constant mention of the time keeps building on a tension that could not be achieved if the book was drawn out.
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