‘London is illimitable’

How Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway represents the city by superseding its bounds

Note: This analytical close reading was originally written in 2021 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for my Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature: Literature Past and Present at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. It is reproduced here in full to share my thoughts and analysis with the general public.

The notion of the illimitability of London — or any city, for that matter — is one that necessitates a look at that which is illegible in order to be understood. What is not written in stone, or on signboards, but that generates thought or significance, necessarily informs the character of the city. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the limits of London are stretched and squeezed between the physical and non-physical realms. Further, the secondary life a city gains through a psychogeographical understanding of it plays a part in how the city’s limits are superseded, but does not work alone as a tool in Mrs Dalloway. This essay seeks to explore illimitability itself as something that represents the nature of a city, in the way it captures memories and deploys them absent of the conscious desire of the person experiencing it. The text removes the geographical settings of the streets from locations on a map, turning them into textual cues for thoughts and wellsprings for memory, being then in turn influenced by memory in how they are experienced. Then, limits are further superseded by the memories of those outside the city who, through those that remember them, make up the experiential fabric of the city. Finally, a city is represented in its sounds, which cannot be captured or made legible. In sum, the city has a language of its own that speaks beyond the printed word, and the opening pages’ descriptions of Mrs Dalloway’s London give us glimpses of some of that language.

Cities, by their very nature, are defined by geographical limits. However, cities are also places built on inputs and outputs both physical and non-physical, effectively removing those limits, and making cities therefore — paradoxically — also transit points. Consider the city of my residence, Madrid. The Ciudad Lineal ring road marks the region where city becomes province. The mix of modern planning and older wending ways tells its own story of the limitations of space. Yet, such stringent demarcations cannot determine the true character of the neighbourhoods that give Madrid life, nor themselves define the “constant currents, fixed points and vortexes” of the dérive (Debord, 1965) that truly create the space of the city. Who could define La Latina by the intersection where the Metro station of the same name stands, for example, without considering the ambling crossroads where the old uncles sit outside the sheesha bar speaking in Arabic, or the scent of freshly imported fruits picked up by a lady served by a man whose accent turns his Spanish to a lilting melody? This is a notion of psychogeography, the unconscious nudging of the city, and implies a secondary life to the cityscape that exists beyond predetermined boundaries or experiences. Combined with semiotics, this secondary life is the elusive illimitability — extending beyond the confines of the city itself through thoughts and signs.

The unconscious nudging is indeed a factor that moves Clarissa, our narrator, in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, with the illimitability the city finds through human thought expertly brought to the fore by Woolf’s deployment of stream of consciousness. Though not quite psychogeographical wandering, it draws upon similar notions. Clarissa in the opening of Mrs Dalloway straddles the realms of walking with an agenda and moving through London for the sheer “love” of being there, her intentions often changing as the things she views triggers thoughts — not quite a flâneur, but not quite a person whose geography is unmoved by her psychology, either. She herself states that “what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab” (Woolf, 1925, p.28). Pursuant to that, her experience of the city necessarily responds to her inner landscape, and is not limited by the city’s own structures. A segment of Clarissa’s first steps into Bond Street concern themselves with her annoyance that “it was silly to have other reasons for doing things”; that is to say, having the aforementioned agenda when walking the city becomes, to Clarissa, a way to not enjoy the experience of London that she simply enjoys in and of itself — her love of the moment and the situation experienced.

Illimitability thus regularly manifests in this way — bringing together the engaged wandering with the mind’s own subtly influential wanderings — and is best shown where Woolf remarks on the waypoints that Clarissa passes. These cues prompt thoughts and actions that strain the city’s geographical boundaries. Such cues are often accompanied by something legible — Bond Street, for example, near which she encounters the “Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities”, the “Soapy Sponge” and “Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs” (Woolf, 1925, p.29) inscribed on the pages of books. For six paragraphs prior, Clarissa has been in the Park, having met Hugh and learned of Evelyn being poorly; her further ruminations on the characters of Peter and Hugh and on her own mortality accompany her steps and drive her towards Bond Street. Her very direction, her change of course — as evidenced by her later walking “back towards Bond Street” (Woolf, 1925, p.29) — are demonstrations of her being prompted by subconscious notions that live outside of the city’s legible texts. Any notion that the city’s physical realm could be bounded by space and time is made moot because those who pass through it, who make up its social fabric, are themselves constantly traversing space and time.

Another instance is that of the road crossings. Two of these occasions occur in the opening. In the first, Clarissa “stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass” (Woolf, 1925, p.25), and in an interesting instance of ‘head hopping’ between perspectives, we are given an insight into the thoughts of Scrope Purvis for two sentences. Purvis speaks of “knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster” and that she bears about her “a touch of the bird…of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness” (Woolf, 1925, p.25). This exchange is interesting for two reasons. First, it plays out on one of the hard boundaries or limits of the city, even if the text is illegible — the kerb. This marks the boundary between the pedestrian realm and the vehicular realm, to be breached only at certain locations (road crossings) or at certain times (when a car is not hurtling towards oneself). But the exchange is not confined to the crossing, and not to the moment either. Purvis’s reflection brings Westminster out of this morning moment and into years already passed, along with all their associated shifts and changes. His own observation of her demeanour does this as well, by giving us an outside perspective on something we only otherwise see through the eyes of Clarissa herself — the lives that inhabit the city. The city is Purvis and his observations, driving by in the van that Clarissa must wait to pass; the city is Clarissa Dalloway, perched on the edge of the kerb, conjuring images of birds and memories of past illness to her neighbour. The city loses its limits because it is not limited to one perspective, one singular point in the neighbourhood, one specific moment in time.

The second instance is after Clarissa pauses before the bookshop, to consider what she would buy for Evelyn Whitbread. Having paused before the physical boundary of a shop window, she is compelled — as Purvis was, by seeing her pause on the edge of the kerb — to consider more deeply what she is seeing, and what she sees supersedes that boundary. It makes her consider why she stands before the shopfront, rendering her “annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things” (Woolf, 1925, p.29), and turns her back from to Bond Street. She then waits to cross, thinking of “people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas…half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves” (Woolf, 1925, p.29). Here, having bounced from one physical boundary to another matches her shifting thought with her movement through the city. The cues of the policeman holding up his hand, and of her having crossed and stepped onto the pavement, are punctuated by her acknowledging “the perfect idiocy” of making people “think this or that” and then a moment of even deeper reflection as she laments on “if she could have had her life over again” (Woolf, 1925, p.29). The city is possibility — limitless possibility — and Clarissa becomes acutely aware of this in this moment. Such a moments, and especially the ruminations on doing things for the sake of doing them versus for the sake of others, bear an interestingly similar spirit to the dérive — experiencing the city, this place of interest and engagement for Clarissa, for its own sake rather than for the sake of others and their purposes. Her reflections therefore engage with the city’s illegible boundaries and in doing so supersede them, while the very principle of their engagement, as she reflects, ought to change, and ought to have a purpose more suited to her interests and her own sense of self rather than any others. These boundary-crossings are transformational, internal and external. They strain the notion of limits.

The next key way that Mrs Dalloway represents the illimitability of the city is through its lost voices. The city is still invariably touched by those who have left the city, because the memory of them continues to influence the actions and reactions of those that remain in this particular point of geography. This is most palpable through the intrusion of the First World War. First there is “Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed” (Woolf, 1925, p.26). This is an observation, grounded in place — but Mrs Foxcroft is not, and neither are her memories. London lives on in the nice boy that was killed, far from the city’s boundaries; and even with that, the wordless gorging of Mrs. Foxcroft in her grief pays tribute to that from within the confines of the city. Her own thoughts in the present desert the city, too — her troubles over “the old Manor House”, for example. Without knowing whether or not the house is located within London city’s boundaries or beyond it, it still transverses her current location (the Embassy), bringing another into it in her own really. Thus, Mrs Foxcroft’s actions and thoughts comprise the city, but are not composed entirely of it. The same can be said of Lady Bexborough, “who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed” (Woolf, 1925, p.26). This moment is additionally interesting because of the implication of legible text, within the telegram — something that by its very nature is designed to break geographical boundaries of communication. The words and emotions that live in Lady Bexborough’s opening of the bazaar are affected by memories of someone beyond the city, conveyed to her by something that has entered the city from beyond its geographical confines. Thus, those who breathe and have breathed its air form the fabric of the cityscape — they have left its bounds, they have crossed limits of both space and time. Here, the city is represented as more than the some of its parts; and as those parts can grow and ripple exponentially, the city — London — cannot be considered to have limits in the true sense of the word.

We receive a further notion of this through Clarissa herself. As she walks towards Bond Street, she has a rather existential moment, asking, “Did it matter then…that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?” (Woolf, 1925, p.28), followed by an enunciation of the very fact that cities capture more than just the moment they exist in, and that despite being a fixed position, they travel through time — or time travels through them. Clarissa describes how “somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best[…]” (Woolf, 1925, p.28). Clarissa has, in this moment, become herself become aware of the way a city is temporally illimitable, and the way it captures the voices of all who pass through it. The “ebb and flow” is reminiscent of Debord’s notion of the city as comprised of currents, something continuous and flowing. People “lived in each other” (Woolf, 1925, p.28), as the nice boy did in Mrs Foxcroft, or John in Lady Bexborough, and as Peter does in Clarissa, constantly being reawakened by encounters in the city as after she speaks to Hugh in the Park. Clarissa questions with a sense of temporal or spatial displacement that, it can be argued appear when considering the “placefulness” of a space and one’s place within that — “[w]hat was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover?” (Woolf, 1925, p.28). Almost paradoxically, this moment of recognition of her transient nature in the city rubs against the spirit of dérive, as Clarissa is now seeking to find. The city, presented in its illimitable nature, throws up one of it physical boundaries (the shop window, again) and directly confronts her with her own limits — limits of mortality, limits of personal understanding, limits of intention. It is an apt contrast that highlights both the similarities and the differences between a person and the space they inhabit and engage with.

The final key aspect of representing the city’s illimitability is that of sound, which plays just as important a role in Clarissa’s musings as any other. Sounds by their very nature defy the concept of being limited, as they cannot be trapped or inscribed onto any surface except by some proxy form of communication (as the word on the page represents spoken thought, or the score represents music). They are limited by the moment in which they sound — but as they are transmitted, from hearing to memory, they lose that limitation. Given Clarissa’s later fixation on mortality, it is notable that one of the first instances of sound that is heard and then deliberated is that of Big Ben striking the hour — “[f]irst a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air” (Woolf, 1925, p.25). The clock keeps the pulse of a city, and the steadfast icon of the city warns and then extolls the passage of time, and the passage of each individual’s lifetime spent along its streets and within its buildings. Essentially, the clock ticks on, outlasting each moment even as it marks it. The sound ends, “dissolves”, but its meaning lingers. Represented through sound, the city’s limits are taken out of the equation. Sound lives beyond limits. It is not contained. Nevertheless, an argument can be made that Big Ben itself is also only a capture of a specific moment in the city. The clock was not always there, and neither will it be there for always, as each “age of the world’s experience” (Woolf, 1925, p.29) trundles on. Still, like Clarissa, the clock tower and the sounds it makes are something that comprises the fabric of the city and is to be remembered even beyond it by those who have heard it.

It is notable how much of Clarissa’s experience in the city relies on that which can be quantified, whether it be sound or feeling. Indeed, she speaks of the day in the city as feeling “in the midst of traffic” and of experiencing the “particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause” (Woolf, 1925, p.25) upon awakening in the night. She contrasts the raucous day time to the hush — again, a sonic quality — of night. The city can almost be said to be breathing; but as the ebb and flow never ceases, neither does the city. These sounds are, once again, temporal markers, shouting into the silence or living in it. They are seemingly bound by time in this way, and yet they are not, as they cannot be tacked up like a storefront sign, nor painted into the tarmac like a zebra crossing. These observations of time carry on through Clarissa’s musings and experiences. There is the “triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead” that comprise “what she loved; life; London; this moment in June”. Clarissa, for her part, hears these sounds as extant and of this moment, which is true. She notes that “everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats” (Woolf, 1925, p.26). These more concrete notions of sound, like that of Big Ben, tie the uncatchable sounds to animate objects at a moment in time — people wielding crick bats, galloping ponies, even using the evocative word “beating” as though speaking of a heart. Yet once again, all these objects — being animate — defy the concepts of a city having limits as well. Clarissa hears an auditory capture of a moment in June, but these sounds are not themselves exclusive to that moment, even if they are entirely integral to it. People can enter and leave the city, as can their thoughts, and the same can be said of the ponies. They are in the city but can never be entirely of it. Thus the sounds that comprise London, that give it its character, are London when they are within London, and may continue to be London when they leave London; a Clarissa Dalloway in the country, for example, were she to hear the high hum of an aeroplane, may be in her mind cast back to this moment, or to a time beyond a specific moment, but that would irrevocably be London.

When Clarissa enters St. James’s Park, she notes “the silence; the mist; the hum” (Woolf, 1925, p.26). This vacuum in sound presents another interesting concept — that although the park is within the city and is an integral part of its fabric, the city speaks most where it is touched by humans, and where it becomes the province of other things — “the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling” (Woolf, 1925, p.26) the sounds change. They create a new map. Being part of the city, however, means it can still be intruded upon by humans. Clarissa may enter it, Hugh may enter it, and she later brings Peter into the Park as well, speaking of how “some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning” (Woolf, 1925, p.27). Thus, the Park is part of her memories, her memories of Peter, and her memories of London. While there are no legible signs within the Park, and while it exists outside the constructed city, it is still itself constructed — by the boundaries set that make it a park and not a meadow or moor, by the human intrusions upon it. And yet, it has the capacity to be different to the rest of the city, whether at daytime or not, through its silence. London breaches its limits by creating and interacting with the Park, which is merely a stage for the drama of the city — represented by Clarissa — to play out upon.

In conclusion, London is illimitable. Mrs Dalloway’s opening pages prove that. The city’s geography, its streets and crossings and pavements and storefronts, are continually undermined by the thoughts and associations of ideas that are displayed within the inner world of the narrator. Furthermore, the lives that pass through the city do not by default belong to the city; and indeed, life being transient, leave marks not just in the geographical sphere but more importantly in the psychological sphere, and therefore live on through the actions, interactions, and thoughts of others. Finally, sound transcends the concept of limitation as well, as something that cannot be captured as well as something that marks distinctions in the city both spatially and temporally. Distinctions that, through the organic interplay of animate and inanimate, are often blurred and stepped over, removing their limits, thereby making the city illimitable.

Works Cited

Debord, G. (1956) “Theory of the Dérive”. Situationist International Online. Accessed 29 Mar 2021. Available at: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
Woolf, V. (1925). Mrs Dalloway. Reprint, eBook: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2013. Accessed 15 March 2021. Available at: https://www.vlebooks.com/Vleweb/Product/Index/509233?page=0