Stream of Consciousness

Definition:
In literature, stream of consciousness is a method of narration that describes
happenings in the flow of thoughts in the minds of the characters.
Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of
a character's extended thought process, often by incorporating sensory impressions, incomplete
ideas, unusual syntax, and rough grammar.
Stream of consciousness, from a psychological perspective, describes metaphorically the
phenomenon the continuous and contiguous flow of sensations, impressions, images, memories
and thoughts experienced by each person, at all levels of consciousness, and which is generally
associated with each person’s subjectivity, or sense of self.

Interpretation
The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ as a literary technique was first used by William James
and become widely adopted as a term of art in literary criticism during the twentieth century,
especially of the novels of Virginia Woolf Dorothy Richardson, or James Joyce, among others.
Many of the literary experiments of the early twentieth century sought to represent consciousness
as a private affair of a person, experienced from within. In these work of arts, the inner life of the
characters are illustrated by the writer as a combination of their sensations, memories, thoughts,
feelings and emotional conditions.
This double quality of life is detailed by Woolf in her critical essay, Modern Fiction, where she
argues that the task of a modern writer is to capture the “essential thing” which she describes as
an “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit.” This technique relied upon the mimetic representation
of the mind of a character and dramatized the full range of the character’s consciousness by
direct and apparently unmediated quotation of such mental processes as memories, thoughts,
impressions, and sensations.
William James is one of the original creators of the science of psychology and is famous for the
perspicacious account presented on the stream of consciousness in his masterwork The Principles
of Psychology. The following is from James’s Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students
on Some of Life’s Ideals and encapsulates his concept of the stream of consciousness:
Now the immediate fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to study is also the most
general fact. It is the fact that in each of us, when awake, some kind of consciousness is always
going on. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields, of knowledge, of feeling,
of desire, of deliberation etc. That constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
A stream of consciousness consists of momentary states of consciousness one after another in a
series that subjectively seems tightly adjacent. Inner awareness does not detect any interruption
in the flow of consciousness however long or brief it may be. Such a stoppage must subsequently
be inferred to have taken place if it is to be known of at all. Some of James’s remarks suggest
that the stream of consciousness is continuous in the sense of expanding in the dimension of time
through internal growth rather than by a series of external accretions.
This stream is very similar to interior monologue and used interchangeably by some. It tends to
be less ordered then monologue Consciousness has no beginning and no end, thoughts fill quite
randomly from one thing to another.

Reference to the Novel

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf’s MRS. DALLOWAY has a unique narrative style, salient for its shifts in a
point of view to occur within one same paragraph, accentuating the psychological and analytical
nature of the narrative. To achieve the quick transition, Woolf uses a literary technique called
free indirect speech. MRS.DALLOWAY refers to a story that captures a character’s thoughts
and uses them to tell a story. The novel addresses Clarissa a Dalloway’s preparations for a party
she will host that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in Burton and makes her
wonder about the choice of her husband-Richard over Peter or Sally Seton. It also talks about
Septimus Smith, a World War I veteran suffering from traumatic stress, who commits suicide.
Clarissa’s party is a slow success and she hears about the death of this veteran who is in fact a
stranger to her. But this death affects her and she considers his suicide an act to preserve the
purity of his happiness.
The novel follows no conventional plot or tragedy or love interest or catastrophe. For example:
Septimus’ death is casually reported in the party. The emphasis is laid on the manipulation of
words and not on the organization of the story. According to the mechanical time of the Big Ben,
the action of the novel is limited to a single day. But, going by the psychological time, the
characters’ disorganized experience of the past which has an impression on their mind makes
them be in the present through the past and contemplate about the future. We move in Mrs.
Dalloway’s mind from London to her girlhood days in Bourton through the air enveloping her in
a fine London morning. This helps us to be very close to Mrs. Dalloway’s mind as she is
thinking about the myriad things around her. This technique of the stream of consciousness helps
a person in the novel to move back and forth in time again and again. The past and the present
are thus involved with each other as we see Clarissa remembering Peter’s remarks about the
vegetables, he playing with a pocket knife, which he still does. Similarly, Peter’s thoughts about
Clarissa, how she rejected him for a rich man in the past and his comment about her being the
‘perfect hostess’, outline Mrs. Dalloway’s present character which is materialistic and cares a lot
about her freedom. We get to know about Peter’s possessiveness and Clarissa’s sense of freedom
when they both think about themselves and about each other.
“By featuring their internal feelings, Woolf allows her Characters’ thoughts to travel back and
forth in time, reflecting and refracting their emotional experiences “This characteristic is
illustrated right from the be Ginning of the novel. Clarissa Dalloway aged fifty suffers a
flashback from the time when she was 18, which was caused by the sound of the hinges:
 With a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the
French windows and plunged at Burton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller
than this ofcourse, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a
wave; chill and sharp and yet solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open
window.
Something similar happens when she is mending the dress for her party, as just the movement of
the needle makes Clarissa’s deepest emotions arise: drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle
pause, collected the green fold together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a
summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems
to be saying ‘that is all’ more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies
in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart.
Looking at Clarissa’s summers in Bourton, Peter Walsh was one of her dearest friends, and most
importantly, her old suitor. He arrives in London from India, and goes right away to see Clarissa.
After solong, it is impossible to deny the feelings that their chat is able to evoke. Focusing on
Peter, despite havingmarried with an Indian woman, he still has feelings for Clarissa and
remembers when she rejected him:
It almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like
a moonlooked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more
unhappy than I’ve ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the
terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them
it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.
On the other side of the coin, Septimus Warren Smith was a World War I solider. He is also very
attuned to life’s deep meaning and has intense reactions, like those triggered by the noise from
the tyres, expressed by means of interior monologue:
 And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a
tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre
before his eyes, as if some horrow had come almost to the surface and was about to burst
into flames, terrified him. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought.
In the novel the fresh morning breeze reminds Mrs. Dalloway of Peter Walsh and the mental
journey that she takes into her past reveals to the reader the essential aspect of his characters
later. It has been found that he was a felted lover, the looser, the unsuccessful man in life. Later
on, Peter indulges in self-revelatory monologue and broods over his relationship with Clarissa
Dalloway, contrasting with her, the major's wife whom he proposes to marry, as also the
prospects of this married life with the shape of thing that would have been there if Clarissa had
married him.
So, it can be seen that stream of consciousness is used in the novel by Woolf through the
beginning itself. This was shown by the help of time from the past to the present till the near
future. This is called a psychological time which deals with the internal and the external
subjectivity of each character's thought and emotions in order to represent the flow of
consciousness, which is interrupted by the clock.
"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Woolf uses stream-of-consciousness
technique by the use of free indirect style which means a style of third person narration which
uses some of the characteristics of third person along with the essence of first person direct
speech. In whole novel, Woolf focuses more on expressing her inner thoughts and feelings
through her characters especially when she moves deeply into the narrative of the mind of the
character without using the intrusive authorial tag such as in 'Mrs. Dalloway reflected' especially
through Clarissa's thought, and Woolf said that,
"For Lucy had her work cut out of her"
In a novel it has been found that she moves into the analysis of Mrs. Dalloway's emotion which a
questioning and exclamation way as an interior monologue in:
"What a lark! What a plunge!”
As the whole novel has two connected stories or it can be said that Mrs. Dalloway is a story of
two different but connected stories. First of upper class woman named Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway
who lives in the post world war London, In the whole novel, she is preparing herself for a party
which is going to be thrown that evening only and the reason behind is, to meet people and
friends from different social classes.
 "Those ruffians, the Gods, shan'nt have it all their own way her nation being that the
Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting thwarting and spoiling human lives were
seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after
Sylvia’s death – that horrible affair".
The above lines again witness the stream of consciousness by the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway.
She was looking in the mirror and motivating her to be happy and get satisfied in her life which
she was not in actuality. Clarissa witnessed her own sister being cursed by a tree that was an
accident, apparently her father’s fault like Septimus’s reaction to the loss of his best friend Evans
in World War I, Clarissa is trying to convince her to be happy by saying to herself that ‘behave
like a lady’. This shows that as always she is fluctuating from past to present and present to past
in the stream of her conscious thoughts.
 "She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out far out to sea
and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very-very dangerous to live even one
day."
Again Woolf goes in her consciousness while crossing the road for shopping expedition for
buying the flowers, she pauses for a moment to look at the omnibuses in Picadilly, emphasizes
the two sides is busyness of public life and the quiet privacy of the soul.
While walking she feels how lonely she was, she has no one to share her talks with, she still
remember the kiss she had with her former suitor peter Walsh, she loved him when she was
young before she married her present husband. Although she has always loved him in fact still
loves him. She has ample memories regarding her love life with Peter. All these memories keep
coming to her mind all through the novel. Still she rejected her love and married to Richard
Dalloway. The reason because she feels that Peter's love is quite suffocating, she believes that he
is very possessive.
Virginia, moves from past to present sometimes regretting for her love, sometimes for her
decision to marry Richard Dalloway (her present husband). She is confused and asks herself
whether she has taken a correct step to marry Richard which has only given her a salutation of
'Mrs. Dalloway'. She feels that now she is aged and became invisible. Now every charm of life
has gone, she is neither 'Clarissa' nor 'Clarissa Dalloway' people know her only as 'Mrs.
Dalloway' wife of Richard Dalloway nothing else. There was a psychoanalytical concept as well
of stream of consciousness in Septimus mind.
So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signaling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is he
could not read the language yet, but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and
tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words of languishing and melting in the sky and
bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another
of unimaginable beauty and signaling their intention to provide him, for nothing, forever, for
looking merely with beauty, more beauty! Tears run down his cheeks.

Conclusion:
Through our data visualization, we have analyzed multiple flashbacks including Clarissa’s
flashback to rejecting Peter, Clarissa’s flashback to Peter, Clarissa’s flashback to Sally, Peter’s
flashback to his love for Clarissa, Peter’s flashback and talk about wisdom, and finally Septimus’
story. Putting these flashbacks and passages throughout the novel into Wordle allowed us to
determine what was important throughout the novel. The character’s had a sense of nostalgia and
truly missed their past. Words such as “old”, “always”, and “feeling” let us into the character’s
want for the past and helped us better understand their personalities and stories. In conclusion,
the Mrs. Dalloway novel gives an evidence of patriarchal societies which treats women as
nobodies. Also, women are denied a chance to express their ideas and feelings towards different
issues in their society.
Virginia Woolf has used the stream of consciousness amazingly in this novel. In my opinion, if
someone wants to go through stream of consciousness briefly then he should study Mrs.
Dalloway as this is beautifully demonstrated and the symbolic exposition of this technique which
explored the inner life of the characters, expose their follies, frustrations and their complexities.