Pausing, Waiting, Repeating: Urban Temporality in Mrs. Dalloway and The Years

Summary

First, my epigraph: a passage from Mrs. Dalloway (1925):

She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.

For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty, —one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. (MD 4)

I begin with a passage that will likely be familiar to everyone here. These are the first lines that explicitly narrate Clarissa's walk outdoors in London; they follow her plunge into memories of Bourton and precede the sound of Big Ben, and Clarissa's famous meditation on what she loves about London: “Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh” (4). I want to use this passage as an anchor for the first part of my talk, for it prefigures the dazzling sequence a few pages later in the novel that links characters by the figure first of the mysterious motor car and then the skywriting airplane. This sequence, as critics have pointed out, shows Woolf asking what, if anything, might unify postwar London— is it an idea of empire? The pleasures of modern consumer culture? The lingering terror of war? Or is it the powers of a mobile narrator? Should we look on the possibility of any such unification with hope or with suspicion? My epigraph also suggests the particular version of urban time explored in this early sequence, as it sets out a temporality—of pausing, of waiting—central to the novel's interest in the problem of defining character and defining the network of connections that constitutes London.