Framing and Self-Framing in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

Introduction: Framing and Modernist Resistance

A frame affects how an object is viewed. It can provide a structure for that object, binding it within a particular time and space. In literature, a frame narrative allows the author to use a proxy storyteller — some character who tells the story through a certain framework, worldview, or point of view. Framing in literature serves many functions, including the potential for understanding characters and themes from within a unifying perspective. However common narrative framing is in literature, modernist writers like Virginia Woolf eschewed the frame narrative format. Instead, modernist writers like Woolf allowed the narration to frame itself by establishing ground rules embedded in the narrative. Tone, setting, and characters construct their own frames, and the reader contributes to the ongoing framing process.

In Mrs. Dalloway, there is no frame narrative to introduce readers to Clarissa, Septimus, or any of the other characters. Woolf may have mistrusted activist framing on the part of the author because such methods can impart "limitations and distortions" (Miller ix). Instead of directing the reader's attention to the underlying themes that guide Mrs. Dalloway and the characters within it, Woolf permits the narrative to become its own framework, thereby creating a narrative that possesses universal and timeless qualities.

One of the reasons Woolf and her contemporaries eschewed framing is that they felt "free" to construct their work, set down the disparate elements of the narrative even if they were disjointed, and allow the reader to impose his or her own framework onto the story (Woolf, "Modern Fiction," 162). Liberated from the conventions of form, language, tone, or theme, the modern author also understands that the reader is engaging with the text in new and liberated ways. Issues related to gender and social class — even ethnicity — take on new meaning as the author ceases to be didactic or pedantic. In the modernist context, a narrative does not need to be anchored in its geospatial reality. Of course, no novel floats homeless or exists without a context. All narratives are colored, framed, by their cultural milieu and historical epoch as well as by the biases and assumptions of the author. Readers, whenever they encounter the text, likewise apply their own worldviews to it.

Gender, Patriarchy, and Internal Framing

With Mrs. Dalloway, the framing happens immediately. Clarissa is the protagonist's name, as readers learn in the opening paragraph. Yet Woolf frames Clarissa through the eyes of the patriarchy. The opening line of the novel reads, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself" (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 3). Her name is Clarissa, and yet Woolf first speaks of her as Mrs. Dalloway — showing that her identity is secondary to that of her husband and possibly of all other men, and that she may need to fight for her own identity. The conscientious attempt to frame the narrative through patriarchy and resistance to patriarchy is apparent, yet the reader is still allowed to construct new frames because both "Clarissa" and "Mrs. Dalloway" are used as the protagonist's name in the opening paragraph.

In the grand scheme of the themes that permeate Woolf's work, Mrs. Dalloway is not expressly political. However, the treatment of gender issues is an obvious internal framing method that cannot be ignored. "The introduction of political elements will lead, not to an activation of the work, but to a formalization and neutralization of the political thematic" (Frow 27). A frame therefore has the authority to analyze the text while it is unfolding. When a frame is as political as a protest against patriarchy, it becomes an authoritative window through which the reader can better understand the characters and their motivations.

Works Cited

Bowlby, Rachel. "Who's Framing Virginia Woolf?" Diacritics, vol. 21, no. 2/3, pp. 3–10.

Frow, John. "The Literary Frame." The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 16, no. 2, 1982, pp. 25–30.

Miller, C. Ruth. Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life. London: Macmillan.

Woolf, Virginia. "Modern Fiction." The Common Reader. Mariner, 2002.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Richmond: Alma, 1925.