Hours to Spare

In Andelys Wood’s “Walking the Web in the Lost London of Mrs. Dalloway,” the author discusses the time distortion that is associated with Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus’ walks in London, and how they amount of distance covered is not possible in the time allotted by Woolf (Wood). She cites this quote form Woolf’s Orlando:

An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. (61)

 and goes on to say “Woolf had already started that investigation in Mrs. Dalloway” (Wood).  The relationship between timepiece and the mind is not one-to-one, but there are some important timepiece times noted in Mrs. Dalloway.

In reading Wood’s piece, I was reminded that time is an arbitrary, man-made concept. The timepiece, clock, or watch could be argued to be man’s attempt to control time. But in Mrs. Dalloway, we are also reminded that nature will follow its own time schedule.

When Clarissa is in the florist shop -- named Mulberry’s, which Wood points out is an “apparently invented name” – she is reminded of her youth in the country and the flowers associated with it. Clarissa remembers the evening primrose. This flower opens its bloom in approximately one minute, which can create a sort of time distortion for the watcher. (It is also known as a “colonizer,” which speaks to other themes in the novel.)

During this reflection, Clarissa is also thinking of the “moment between six and seven when every flower--roses, carnations, irises, lilac--glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds” (Woolf 13). Later in the novel, the reader finds out that Septimus commits suicide at approximately six in the evening, and the reader might be reminded of the flowers that glowed, and the way their colors represent  death and violence (red, deep orange) and the loss of innocence (white, violet). Connecting Septimus’ suicide with the horrors he experienced in World War I, these flowers and colors attached to a certain time in the evening presents a foreshadowing of his death.

The fact that Peter hears the ambulance on its way to recover Septimus’ body and he thinks of it as a “triumph of civilization” (Woolf 147), may also lead the reader to think of what else is a “triumph of civilization.” Since Septimus’ identity throughout this novel is connected to World War I, we might think of war as, if not a triumph, at least a consequence of civilization. Following this train of thought, another important time in the novel is 11:00 am. This is when Peter and Clarissa reunite, argue, and seem to settle things in the drawing room. As their relationship was often tumultuous, it could be compared to a war. Knowing that at the same time – 11:00 am – World War I was officially declared on July 18, 1914, and officially ended on November 11, 1918, the reader can see a parallel drawn between Peter and Clarissa’s relationship and the Great War that Woolf so often included in her writing.