At 100 years old, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway is a must-read for all of us
living in today’s technological world, according to New York Times critic A.O. Scott.
In “100 Years Ago, Fictional Londoners Looked Up. They Saw Our Present Day,” published yesterday in the Times, Scott focuses on an early scene in the novel to make his point. He features the airplane that captures the attention of a cross-section of Londoners as Clarissa walks to “buy the flowers [for her party] herself.”
Scott writes: “Near the beginning of “Mrs. Dalloway,” an ordinary day is disrupted by a technological intrusion. More than a century later, we might relate to this kind of thing, even if we’re more likely to be distracted by the pings and chirps of our portable screens. A sky-writing airplane, quaint as it may seem at first glance, brings us news of our current situation — about how we think, how we interact and how we experience reality.”
It is a timely column and worth a read. Plus, the animated airplane graphics are clever and fun to watch.
Return to the novel
But Scott’s focus on technology as a distraction — while interesting — is narrow. It leaves out other approaches, such as one noted in a comment by Scott Paradis from Flint, Michigan:
“Skywriting as an advertising medium began in the UK in 1922. A few years before, Londoners were watching the sky for bombers–Zeppelins by night and Gothas by day–despite air raid warnings to take shelter. In this scene they’re marking the change from mortal danger to commercial trivia.”
Scott’s approach also fails to mention the context surrounding the airplane sighting, a context that actually would have added support to his argument — and something I was happy to note when his article prompted me to reread the first 25 pages of Woolf’s text.
Just before the skywriting airplane appears (MD 20), Woolf describes everything coming to a standstill when a motor car erupts in a “violent explosion” that sounds like “a pistol shot” (13-14).
The sound causes passers-by to stop and stare. Rumors then circulate about the passenger in the car, someone with “a face of the very greatest importance,” prompting everyone to “look at the motor car” (14-15). The crowd speculates: Was it the prime minister? Was it the Prince of Wales’? Was it the Queen?
The motor car and its possibly royal passenger captures Clarissa’s attention, as well as
her imagination. She muses:”It is probably the Queen . . . The Queen going to some hospital; the Queen opening some bazaar” (17).
As the car glides across Piccadilly, it continues to attract the attention of everyone from men of means “with their hands behind the tails of their coats” to “[s]hawled Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement” to a crowd of poor people gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace (18-19).
The shift
But when the people in the crowd hear the sound of the airplane, their attention shifts from the car and its supposedly royal passenger to the airplane “letting out white smoke from behind . . . making letters in the sky!” (20).
I find this change of focus interesting. Londoners, who moments before were focused on a car on the street in front of them that they guessed was carrying royalty, suddenly shift their attention from the monarchy to the airplane above their heads. They then speculate about what commercial message it is writing in the sky.
Thus, they move their focus from traditional royalty, something with which they are familiar, to commercialized technology, something rather new to them. Both, however, keep them guessing. No one knows for sure who is in the car or what is written in the sky.
Scott and I — and the more than 160 readers who have already commented on his article — have only grazed the surface of these few pages of Mrs. Dalloway. As always in Woolf’s writing, there is much more to uncover by close reading.
You can read Scott’s entire piece in the NYT digital version. I recommend it.
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