MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
567
If the novel succeeds in documenting the isolation and the fragmentariness
of existence, at the same time it does not embrace them in an affecting, sub–
stantial form . An important new direction which helped Woolf
to
break
free from the confines within which she had been
working,jacob 's Room
is
finally a sterile form, one not capable of the resonance of her mature work.
But Woolf learned her lessons well and her next effort,
Mrs. Dalloway,
achieves a formal coherence and power altogether absem from
jacob 's Room.
In place of the flaccid chronological organization covering all ofJacob's life,
Mrs. Dal/oway
effectively focuses on the events of one day in the lives of
Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. Digging "caves and tunnels"
beneath her characters, Woolf creates a densely structured texture in which a
June day in London is constantly informed by pressures and vestiges of the
past. The novel is complexly organized both spatially and temporally. Physi–
cal meetings of characters in the street-and finally in Clarissa's home–
merge with a web of intersecting memories and reveries to create a form that
succeeds brilliantly in conveying Woolfs sense of the isolation , ironies, and
ecstasies of life . Implacably tolling out the passage of time throughout the
book, Big Ben punctuates the reflection of individual characters with its
unyielding insistence on the passage of time. In addition
to
the mundane
purpose of announcing a shift of narrative focus from one character to
another, the gonging serves to emphasize the restricted framework of a
single day which Woolfs imagination exploited continually during her
career for her best work. It is significant that Woolfs four most distin–
guished novels-Mrs.
Dal/oway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves,
and
Be–
tween the Acts-essentially
take place, either metaphorically or actually,
within a twenty-four hour period.
Mrs. Dal/oway
and
Between the Acts,
of
course, do so explicitly. Although ten years elapse between part One and
Three of
To The Lighthouse,
the novel imagistically follows the movement
of an entire day from the late afternoon of the first part, through the dark
night of the second, to the early morning which opens the third section .
And the nine poetic interludes of
The Waves,
describing the progression of
the sun across the sky, clearly set the different dramatic soliloquies within
the natural rhythm of a single day. However varied in form they are , the fact
that all four play variations on the basic structure of a day indicates the
degree to which Woolfs imagination flourished within the security of strict
limitations. When she deserts those confines, as the difficulties of
jacob 's
Room
and
The Years
reveal, her work loses considerably in power.
Woolfs feelings about
Mrs. Dal/oway,
as expressed in her diary while
she was still completing the novel in 1924- " if this book proves anything,
it proves that I can only write along those lines [of
jacob 's Room
1
and shall
never desert them, but explore further and further and shall , heaven be
