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Sunday, April 5, 2020


Reading Mrs. Dalloway with sound files, images, and time on my mind.


I started reading Mrs. Dalloway and this time I was looking for images and sounds or anything I came upon me that helped me to "see" or "hear" or otherwise experience this novel.

So I came up with sound files for hinges for page 1. I am posting the whole site link because I don't want to pay to download the files. But you'll get the idea.


This squeaking of the French window hinges is a memory that Clarissa heard as a young woman in the Bourton countryside. We hear these hinges too and we too are immediately--with just a quick change in tense to "so it had always seemed to her" (1)-- thrown into her past with Clarissa.

Photo credit




--and we have to follow her back to when she was a young woman of 18 years old and Peter Walsh says something to her about vegetables and cauliflowers.



Since Tesco is the British "Safeway" I included this photo of cauliflowers. And I also chose them because they look like flowers, which is really how this whole moment of reverie begins for Clarissa--with flowers.

And then I had to post Big Ben because this moment "before Big Ben strikes" (p.1)  seems to me so apt. Myself, I have this same feeling when I have woken up before an alarm clock and yet expecting it to ring. But of course, Big Ben is different--it's an alarm clock for an entire city, and so that anticipation must be felt so much more communally, or at least that's what this moment make me think of.
Here's a really good recording of it--including that "moment before Big Ben strikes": 

Time of course is a theme of interest throughout the whole novel, and the way that consciousness seems to overfill time, how only seconds--the strike of a clock--pass and we have already had memories and thoughts and joy and sorrow and worried about dinner parties and the past....this is what Woolf seems to capture in her words and which I only want to scratch the surface of here with these examples.