Research methods are to a scientist what a hammer is to a carpenter (Hewitt 2001).

It is the main
instrument by which we perform our profession

Mrs. Dalloway is a literary work by Virginia Woolf published in 1923. The story takes place
in a single day; this is her fourth novel wherein she takes more cognizance upon use of her
thought, feeling and sensation through her characters.

Mrs. Dalloway, a middle-aged London socialite, is about to give a summer party. As she
prepares, her thoughts turn to those she once loved or thought she loved. Mrs. Dalloway's
inner conflicts are mirrored in the character of Septimus, who is possessed by demons that
have been haunting him since his horrific experiences in World War I. Septimus and Mrs.
Dalloway never meet, but their interior stories are like concentric circles. At the end, the
circles come close as Septimus' suicide casts a momentary cloud over Mrs. Dalloway's party.

Stream of consciousness is used right from the beginning through the use of time from the
past to the present till the near future, this time is a psychological time that deals with the
internal and the external subjectivity of each character's thought and emotions in order to
represent the flow of consciousness also that is interrupted by the clock

Modernist literature is a literature of trauma. Virginia Woolf's characterization of Septimus Smith in

Mrs. Dalloway illustrates not only the psychological injuries suffered by victims of severe trauma such
as war but also the need for them to give meaning to their suffering in order to recover from the
trauma. Septimus's death is the result of his inability to communicate his experiences to others and
thereby give those experiences meaning and purpose.

Virginia Woolf is the most "inward" of all modern British writers. Even critics who emphasize the
socio-political vision of Woolf 's writing, such as Alex Zwerdling, read the character of Mrs. Dalloway
in terms of her "private," in contradistinction to her "public," self. This essay seeks to question this
"private" / "public" split, and argues that Woolf 's text evinces a privileging of intersubjectivity - the
consciousness of other consciousnesses - over subjectivity - an individual's "private" world as defined
apart from any other subjects. First tracing how Woolf rewrites Mrs. Dalloway from short story to
novel in order to foreground the deeply intersubjective nature of her central character, I will proceed
by analyzing how Mrs. Dalloway narrativizes the other minds she encounters - by imposing the form
of a story onto her recounting of events - in order to illustrate why she is indeed the model for
ethico-affective response in the novel.

will use a cognitive narratological5 framework her "tunnelling process" London street-scenes filled
with "social minds in action" As a stylistic strategy, public/private dialectic manifests itself in Virginia
Woolf's use of narrative voice, more specifically in her extensive use of indirect interior monologue.
An important component of indirect interior monologue is the distinction between public and private
voices. works towards a "progressive depersonalization

Woolf's "resolve to represent the world from the point of view of incertitude"making strange" the
implied reader's expectation of direct access to a character's thoughts and feelings from an internal
perspective

Forster sets up a contradistinction between the people we encounter during the course of our daily
lives and the "people," or characters, we encounter in fiction. In real life, Forster maintains, "we
cannot understand each other" and "perfect knowledge is an illusion," "but in the novel [readers] can
know people perfectly" because the author "knows everything about [her characters]" and thus
passes on this "illusion of perspicacity and power"

Throughout the day, she comes in and out of focus (for herself as well as the reader), dissolves and
materializes, lapses into dull conventionality and bursts into exquisite originality" (Kiely 142). In the
final analysis, Clarissa's interiority has not been completely revealed to us. On the contrary, she
continues to elude us, even as her very presence provokes our affective narrativizations.

Trauma inevitably damages the victim's faith in the assumptions he has held in the past about
himself and the world and leaves him struggling to find new, more reliable ideologies to give order
and meaning to his post-traumatic life. Her narrative form preserves the psychological chaos caused
by trauma instead of reordering it as more traditional narratives do. She destabilizes the audience

Woolf's stream-of-consciousness narrative form also corresponds to the trauma survivor's

perception of time. The survivor's traumatized mind apprehends the traumatic event as ever-
present, and his memories of the event often exist in the present consciousness as encapsulated
images and fragments of thought that are juxtaposed against other nontraumatic memories but do
not meaningfully relate to them sequentially or chronologically. because, as Joseph Frank observes,
the meaning of the text does not emerge from temporal relationships but rather from spatial ones
(10).

One technique Woolf uses to structure her narratives spatially is repetition. Consequently, all other
events derive meaning from their relationship and association with the traumatic event. The survivor
is unable to escape the entropy created by the continuous repetition; caught in his own set piece, he
is unable to create forward movement toward recovery.

A lack of commitment to change and a dissociation from the reality of experience plagued the
modernist literary movement itself, and, in discussing the work of the writers in the 1930s, Jean-Paul
Sartre attributes the change in the new generation to its realization of the gap between "literary
myth and historical reality" the eccentricity and idiosyncrasy of the avant-garde artist's works
alienated him from contemporary society and, consequently, rendered him powerless to instigate
change in that society.

Woolf's distinction between moments of being and non-being, like her distinction between poetry
and prose, demonstrates her awareness that the modern novel cannot represent only heightened
moments of self-consciousness, but must be made up of more mundane moments that occupy our
lives.

If Mrs. Dalloway explores how people respond to change - the shift from war to peace, the pressures
within the class system, and the realizations wrought by a family's growing older - then we might
understand Woolf's focus on ordinary events as showing how her characters normalize these
changes. In a novel where nothing happens twice, but much that happens presumably has happened
before (Clarissa's walk through London, Lady Bruton's luncheon, Elizabeth's omnibus ride), Woolf
suggests that no event is the same event, even if it appears everyday. in that the ordinary always
exists in a new moment of time. Repetition is only possible in the abstract.
At the beginning of the 20th century, writers such as Virginia Woolf and thinkers such as Sigmund
Freud, William James and Henri Bergson were trying to give a novel account of our inner and
psychological life. The aim of this article is to compare Woolf's metaphorical recreation of the
workings of the human mind by means of a rhetorical pattern articulated around the notions of
container and content, surface and depth, fluidity and unboundedness with Freud's dynamic and
topographical representation of psychological life, where streams of thought flow across the
superficial and the deep layers with James's definition of consciousness as a 'stream of thought' and
with Bergson's conception of psychological time as 'durée', an endlessly flowing process,
apprehended by 'l'intuition'.

o the dissolution of the boundaries between the objective and the subjective, and to the rejection of
the single and omniscient narrator and of fixed narrative points of view.

To explicate Mrs. Dalloway’s obsession with imagery and visuality, many critics have dwelled on the
novel’s interest in the relationship between seeing and being seen; on Septimus Smith’s visions; on
Peter Walsh’s dream; on its many examples of ekphrastic language; on floods of detail that saturate
many passages

of the contrast between the external, quantitative time and the inner, qualitative time. Attention to
Woolf's careful interweaving of time and place leads to fuller understanding of Mrs. Dalloway and of
the London in its pages. As narration is reflected in the mind of one character or another, it is often
dreamlike and fragmented. There is no narrator to tell a coherent and organized story and the
narration sounds very close to the actual thought process taking place in an individual's head. I